At once a domestic novel and a spy thriller, Susan Choi’s Flashlight (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30) spans the second half of the twentieth century, at least, and takes us to Japan, North Korea, and the United States. When Anne and Serk, the couple at the center of the book, meet in the mid 1960s, they seem to have little in common aside from a physical compatibility that initially awes them. Daughter of a failed inventor, the neglected youngest in a brood of seven, raised somewhere in Middle America, Anne is a former teen mom and a degreeless autodidact; Serk, or Seok, is a Japanese-born Korean whose family was scammed into leaving Japan for the “socialist paradise” in North Korea, and now he’s an academic based in the US. But they are both on quests to erase their past selves. They try to, anyway. Flashlight is a novel in which the past will not be past. When the couple’s daughter, Louisa, the novel’s main character, is ten years old, she and Anne suffer the loss of Serk. I cannot say what happens to Serk without giving too much away—even saying this is pushing it. Choi and I spoke about research, fathers with heavy baggage, and the forceful “riptides” of history that sweep up her characters, who, as it happens, won’t go down without a fight.
ANGELO HERNANDEZ SIAS: Your new novel is steeped in the history of Japan’s colonization of Korea from 1910 to 1945 and its aftermath. What made you want to write about the Japan–Korea relationship?
SUSAN CHOI: It reared its head in earlier work of mine, but I think it’s becoming a larger preoccupation for me because there’s so much to know and understand, and so much that resists understanding. The Japan–Korea relationship is so complex—I probably won’t get out of the region anytime soon. I think the novel came out of a longtime interest that I was born into. I spent time in Japan as a child—in the book the fact of a trip to Japan, if not the details, is taken straight from my own biography, and my father emigrated to this country from Korea out of a very complex political legacy in his own family that I’ve always been fascinated by.
The Japanese empire colonized Korea very early in the twentieth century, and my paternal grandfather was an outspoken apologist for the colonizers. So when Japan was defeated in World War II, lost its colonies, and the Japanese empire came to an end, my grandfather, as you can imagine, was in a very bad spot. Of course, this idea of collaboration with an unjust regime, and questions about the extent to which people should be held accountable—these are suddenly relevant issues to us right now. These are debates I’m engaging in regarding institutions that I’m affiliated with. It’s incredible that we’ve found ourselves in this situation today in the US. I used to think, Oh, long ago and far away in darker times, my Korean family had to face extraordinary choices. Did they make the right choices, did they make the wrong choices, did they do greater harm? How might they have done greater good? Et cetera. All the choices we’re now immediately facing in our own country.
When we seek to understand history, we all have a self-centered tendency to start with ourselves. I started with myself, moved onto my father, and then to the stories he was willing to share, which were quite limited but all revolved around the Korean War. For years, it was almost as if history began in my mind in 1950, because that year my father was a student living in Seoul on the morning that the DPRK crossed the 38th parallel. My father’s life was blown to pieces. He escaped with his life, and it was this formative experience that began his journey to this country and set the stage for me to exist. The historical forces he was subjected to had an enormous unarticulated influence on me as I was growing up, and I’ve been trying to understand them ever since.
This is a big, ambitious novel, spanning seven decades and following multiple characters’ perspectives and timelines. How did you manage the information of the manuscript? What were your strategies as you composed?
I don’t really have strategies, that’s my problem. Last night at a celebration hosted by a friend of mine, I was in conversation with Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor of The New Yorker, which published a story called “Flashlight” in 2020 that was the germ of this book. And Deborah reminded me that when we published that story, it was carved out from a lot of related material I was generating at the time and didn’t know what to do with. The book came into existence in this really gradual, disorderly way. At every stage of the process, it’s been kind of out of control. My process for every book is different, and this one was different from all the others. I wrote it in chunks over a long period of time, most of the time not understanding what the structure would be or losing track of an entire character—at one point, there were large sections in the book from the point of view of Serk’s sister Soonja that later got cut.
I tried so many ways of getting my mind around the book so that I could figure out what it should be. Each of those efforts felt very ad hoc, very messy, and very blindfolded. Which is funny metaphorically, given the topic of the book and the idea of a flashlight. I always felt as if I was groping around in the dark. I would forget what I’d already written, or I’d forget where I’d put it. I was constantly generating yet another Word document. Louisa Strawberry Picking First Version, Second Version From Her Point of View, Louisa’s Strawberry Picking Experience Only From Anne’s Point of View, you know—New Version CLEAN. And then another like, NO THIS IS THE CLEAN ONE.
But also—and this may sound like self-justification—but I do think there is something to this. Each time I tried to wrangle the book anew, I saw it slightly differently, and that’s part of the revision. It’s almost like pre-revision.
That process seems to me maybe the only way to arrive at the kind of book that you’ve written. It has an intuitive structure—it captures the textures of memory and association. And your losing track of a character or a particular thread also seems apt considering what’s going on in the narrative. Some characters can’t quite remember the way something happened, or something resurfaces in a new and surprising way. There’s a big twist and I don’t want to give too much away, but I’m curious if you could speak to how you think about memory itself in the novel. How do you write and rewrite and revisit memories that are oftentimes conflicting or partial?
Everything you said is so astute. You could say that the book is an exercise in memory. There are huge ellipses in this book, which was definitely part of the design. From the outset I knew that I wanted to write something that had a lot of blank space or white space between events, that collapses some periods of time and then enhances or blows up other events in outsize detail. In my own life, I think a lot about how our lives appear to us in retrospect, the ways we experience our life histories. It’s never an orderly progression of events with everything taking up the same amount of space. I was interested in working with the disorienting feeling of almost being gaslit when having a memory of childhood. There have been times when I’ve asked either of my parents about a memory of mine, and they’re like, What? Not at all. How on earth did you get that impression?
If we compare our experience of a certain span of time with that of someone else’s who also experienced that time, there’s often very little overlap. There are these strange mismatches that, to me, make things feel almost like dream logic. The characters in this book experience their lives in very dreamlike ways. There’s this huge rupture in the book, and there is a kind of dream logic to the ways characters reassemble themselves afterward. With the passage of time, the characters experience intrusions or moments when something triggers a suppressed or forgotten memory. They realize that their own version of their history is a very flawed assemblage.
One of the striking things about the novel is how it lingers in that rupture, and how different characters’ accounts unfold as the story moves on. The conflicting versions often aren’t resolved after that rupture. Can you tell me more about your father’s story?
My father’s family were highly educated and quite privileged Koreans. I never met my grandfather, but he’s a major figure in my consciousness because he was conveyed that way by my father. Ever since I can remember, my father was someone who brought a lot of baggage and shadows and silence and avoidance with him into our family. In that way, he really inspired the father in this novel, Serk, who was born in Japan to Korean parents. My father’s baggage is completely different from Serk’s, but this idea of the father with baggage. . . . Unlike Serk, my father came from a very prominent family. He came from landowners and attained a lot of education—really the opposite of Louisa’s father. But the crosscurrents that tore my father’s family asunder also have to do with the relationship between Korea and imperial Japan.
And what about Serk’s baggage?
It’s all wrapped up in that Japan–Korea relationship, but more broadly all the things that are encapsulated within it, colonial power, exploitation, these questions of national and racial and ethnic identity. The colonial scenario in East Asia was different from the colonial model of the British in India, or the French in Africa. Serk, a Korean raised in Japan, lives in a colonial situation in which he’s marked not by his race so much as by his class and the extent to which his family has been systematically deprived of social standing. Learning about the Koreans living in Japan at this time in my armchair explorations of the imperial period was the beginning of this novel taking shape. I was thinking, I want to make a character who comes out of this milieu and is subjected to all the riptides of history we see throughout the middle and late twentieth century in that corner of the world.
I’m curious how you think about character. When you’re creating a character and pushing them toward complexity, what goes into that for you?
Edmund White, who was a former colleague of mine, just a delightful, brilliant person, once said that one of the great pleasures of fiction is that you can indulge in both invention and imitation when you’re building characters. With this cast of characters, I was almost always beginning with some aspect of a person I’ve known or experienced. I’ll want to know how someone—someone from my life, someone I’ve observed, someone I’ve known only glancingly, or some aspect of them—how would that person respond in that situation? That’s often the way things begin.
The book itself is sort of a large-scale example of that idle speculation that I’m always engaging in. It was like, How would my family, me and my parents, have responded if we had lived through these periods of turmoil?
What results is very organic—every moment feels lived in.
I’m always more interested in writing my way into a scene or a situation than in doing a lot of preliminary planning. I find that I figure out characters by just starting to write them. So much of character emerges through the writing, in the process. I end up discovering things I never would have planned on.
Could you share an example? Something unexpected that came out in the writing?
There’s a character in this book who is partly imitation, mostly invention. I was thinking, He’s going to be a modern-day wanderer, a seeker, a self-created exile. I feel like I encounter these people in every corner of the world, people who’ve taken themselves as far as possible from where they started and created a life for themselves. You know, an emigrant. Not an emigrant like my father, leaving a war-torn country and hoping to find a place to achieve some financial stability. I imagined this character was emigrating due to an almost spiritual discomfort. When I thought about him, I always imagined him being alone. But as the writing went on, he fell in love and ended up partnered. That kind of thing happens in the writing all the time. You’ll have a somewhat rigid idea of a character because you’re thinking about them in the abstract. And then in the writing you realize that no one is that rigid. We just aren’t. If you tried to describe yourself to me, you’d probably end up describing a version of yourself that is much more limited than you really are. As we go through life, we all end up doing things we don’t expect to do. That’s what happens with characters too.
Even your minor characters, like Anne’s first husband, are vivid. You mentioned that you cut Soonja’s perspective. She’s not exactly a minor character, but she doesn’t have a ton of screen time, so to speak. But when she reappears even for a moment, we know her right away.
That’s so nice to hear. It’s probably because originally there was so much more material for her. I’m a big fan of cutting things. I derive a perverse thrill from slashing things out. But I do have a bit of lingering sadness about Soonja, about the scenes of hers that didn’t make it into the book, mostly because they ended up being redundant plot-wise. Now that they’re gone, I remember non-plot-related things that happened in those scenes, things that were solely about her and how she lived—and I miss them.
But I don’t regret that. I like pining for the unpublished parts of a book. I like the idea that there’s a living scrap of this book that no one is ever going to see.
Yeah, and that way what’s on the page is like the tip of the iceberg. We can sense that there’s so much more going on below.
Exactly. That rule is true across so many things. I often tell my students when they’re struggling with dialogue to just overwrite it, write a ton of dialogue and then cut as much as you can. What’s left often resonates in a more authentic way. I really believe in that iceberg rule: make more than you need, and then edit very judiciously. The offstage stuff is still going to infuse whatever it is that the reader does see.
That’s really felt. I’m thinking of a moment when one of the characters has overstayed her welcome, and she’s being kicked out of another character’s home. That other character has, like, two lines of dialogue: “Don’t eat the salad if you don’t want it. I have already had the pleasure of feeding you every meal for two weeks.” And then her bags are at the door. When I read that, my jaw hit the floor. I was horrified.
I don’t mean to say I’m happy that you were horrified, but that’s great.
It’s a pleasure. It’s a good horror. In your acknowledgments you thank one of your colleagues for not just the information that they provided or pointed you to, but also for the approach to information. What was that approach?
Oh, that’s very wonky, actually. My research assistant Andy set me up with an online tool called Logseq that was incredibly helpful not only in managing research materials so that I remembered what I had—which is always my problem with research, things can sort of slide out of view—but it also helps you create visual connections between aspects of the research. It builds a constellation of research items, and you start to literally see connections and connect the dots. You start to notice hubs and spokes that shift around and reveal things you might not have even thought of.
That was helpful for me in terms of trying to reconstruct aspects of the book that took place in historical contexts I’m completely unfamiliar with. For example, I was doing a lot of research into 1930s and ’40s Japan for Serk’s story.
The novel spans a huge amount of time, from the ’30s to sometime in the very recent past, maybe in the mid-2000s or the late 2000s. . . .
It’s funny you say that in a tone of uncertainty because I am not completely sure myself when the book ends. My timelines of what’s happening in the story and in the world were very rigorous in the earlier decades. After the events of the novel cross over into our century things get vague for me, too. It’s, like, how old is Louisa now? I want to say the novel is coming to an end around 2008 or 2010, something like that.
That sounds right. The book also gets into Cold War politics, and it’s impossible to read about that era without seeing a host of resonances with current geopolitics, which in many ways still feels like the aftermath.
We are absolutely living in an ongoing aftermath. One of the other great pleasures of this book was digging into the relationship between Japan and Korea pre–Korean War. Of course I was aware of the relationship between WWII and the Korean War. But the historian Kornel Chang just wrote an amazing book about the period immediately after the Japanese getting thrown out of Korea in 1945. It’s a handful of years in which the craziest sequence of things, at least to my mind, takes place. The Americans are occupying defeated Japan, they’re sharing the Korean peninsula with the Soviets, all sorts of deals are being cut every which way. And the world that we now occupy is very much shaped by this compressed period of time. That was just one of the many rabbit holes I went down in this book. I hadn’t previously understood how volatile and changeable, and how consequential, this period was. Where essentially the two great superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, were dusting themselves off after WWII and setting up what would become the conflict that we’re really still living through today.
Angelo Hernandez Sias is at work on a novel.