On the eve of the 2016 American election, Lee Zhou-a disillusioned Chinese American musician busking on the margins of Brooklyn-collapses from an overdose, only to wake in the brutal winter of 1960. He comes to realize he is trapped inside the body of his grandfather, Zhou Ge Yun, a dissident writer undergoing reeducation in Maoist China. Concurrently, the patriarch awakens in a terrifyingly unfamiliar future: modern America on the precipice of a new political era, housed in the flesh of a grandson he has never known, unable to speak the language and bewildered by the neon-lit future. As both men navigate their inverted exiles-one enduring the starvation and intellectual erasure of a famine-ravaged revolutionary reeducation camp, the other wandering a hostile metropolis gripped by an escalating immigrant crackdown-their consciousnesses begin to blur. To survive, they must learn to decipher their mirrored lives, embarking on a kaleidoscopic journey to find a way home and reconcile a fractured family line. A striking reclamation of historical memory, Soulwaking is a devastating exploration of the inherited traumas that bind families across oceans and eras. With multiculti, humor, and scifi aspects evoking the speculative gravity of Octavia Butler's Kindred alongside a visceral historical realism, this genre-bending masterpiece exposes the chillingly familiar architecture of authoritarianism echoing across generations, ultimately asking: When the state demands everything, what survives of the human spirit? or at least, depending on your level¿What is your spirit's net-residual value?.