Homesick my own story critical essays

David Hull, the brother of Jean's best friend Andrea, is an adopted child with an overwhelming desire to find out about his real parents. His embitterment and dissatisfaction teach Jean that the search for roots is really a search for oneself.

By the 1920s, when Homesicktakes place, two major factions—the Kuomintang and the Communists—had joined forces to reunify China and end the rule of the warlords. By 1927 troops reached Hankow, where Jean lived with her parents. But the delicate union between the Kuomintang and the Communists fell apart, and bloody civil war erupted again.

Jean Fritz’s Homesick: My Own Storyfollows the author’s experiences as the ten-year-old Jean Guttery, from her childhood in Hankow, China, to her arrival two years later in the place that her parents always referred to as “Washington, P.A.”

Homesick: My Own Story falls somewhere between autobiography and fiction. Many of the book's details, characters, and places are real, but Fritz compresses her thirteen-year experience in China into a two-year account, weaving the narrative recollections together with fictional threads.