After the Kuomintang was defeated by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, about 1.5 million people followed the Nationalist government to Taiwan. This marked the beginning of four decades of social separation across the Taiwan Strait, in a political standoff that lasts to this day. Over the years, civil war exiles in Taiwan produced much nostalgic writing. This essay examines the evolution of these texts from the 1950s to the 2010s, exploring the authors’ narratives of China in relation to the concept of ‘homeland’.