KCU Pitchfest Showcase 2025 (Top 50)

The Homing Heart

Dou Dou is a shy and insecure 10-year-old girl with large glasses living in Taiwan. Like many immigrant families at the time, her family decided to move to California temporarily for two years while her father stayed behind for work. However, this temporary setup is becoming a permanent one. Luckily, Dou Dou finds out she is hardly the first immigrant in the family.

This story weaves together the migratory threads of three generations of women in the family; from revolutionary China, to occupied Taiwan, and finally the turn of the millennium of the US. As Dou Dou adjusts to life in California, her mother and grandmother’s stories give her the fuel and fire she needs to create a new understanding of “home”.

My Why:

When my grandmother passed away in 2018, I started to document the stories of her journey as a child war-refugee, migrating from China to Taiwan. During which, I realized how much these stories helped me through the same challenges I faced as a child immigrant. When my family moved to the US without my father, I struggled deeply with the drastic changes of the new life and new reality. Fortunately, my grandmother’s and my mother’s memories have shown me that I am the product of my roots and my future, and I am more than the sum of the two. With this novel, I hope to share the same stories. It isn’t always about fitting in and finding the right identity, but also embracing and being proud of who you are and the journey that you are on.