Susan Choi on Korea

Acclaimed fiction writer Susan Choi joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss her new novel, Flashlight. Choi talks about the opening incident, in which a girl goes for a walk on the beach in Japan with her father only for him to disappear, presumably drowned. Choi explains the novel’s relationship to a short story she published in The New Yorker in 2020 and how the father’s past emerged as she worked on the book. She reflects on his childhood as an ethnic Korean raised in Japan in the 1940s, the difficult choices Koreans in Japan faced as Japanese occupation ended and Korea split into North and South after World War II, and the state of affairs today, as South Korea transitions to new leadership. She reads from Flashlight. 

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Selected Readings:

Susan Choi

Flashlight • “Flashlight,” by Susan Choi | The New Yorker • Trust Exercise • My Education • A Person of Interest • American Woman • The Foreign Student

Others

Susan Choi Is Still Outlandishly Talented | Vulture  

EXCERPT FROM A CONVERSATION WITH SUSAN CHOI

V.V. Ganeshananthan: So, Susan, Flashlight begins with a child named Louisa who goes for a walk on the beach in Japan with her father, and his name is Serk. He grew up mostly in Japan before emigrating to the US. But the walk ends with only Louisa, because Serk disappears and is presumably drowned, and all that remains is his flashlight, which drops noiselessly to the sand. That event first appeared in a short story in The New Yorker all the way back in 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. Can you talk a little bit about the inciting incident for the short story itself, and the relationship of the incident and the short story to the longer novel?

Susan Choi: Yeah, it’s funny, because that incident that you just described is something that I had it in mind for a really long time. I knew what it was that had taken place, and what I really wanted to do in the writing was explore the consequences of that. And I just was so stuck in the work that I couldn’t figure out how and I had ended up writing this thing. I don’t even really remember if I wrote the story in the order in which the scenes appear, or if I just sort of had these different scenes and in desperation, stuck them together, but I couldn’t quite enter into the situation that I was determined to write about, and I ended up diving more deeply into the consequences instead, because it took me so long, and I was just going in circles thinking, like, Could it really happen? No, no, I can’t. I don’t know. Oh my god. Like, readers are never gonna buy this. And this is— I didn’t mean literally “buy” but I mean, just believe.

And so the thing that I ended up latching onto was the aftermath. And that story which, like you said, came out four and a half, almost five years ago, mostly takes place in the office of a child psychologist who is trying to talk to Louisa, who has become one of those kids who can’t sit in a classroom and keeps getting sent to the principal. Then at the beginning of that story, there is this scene that you just described, which cuts off and the stuff in the middle, the dark sandwich meat of that situation, was what I was circling creatively for so long that the story ended up being my —- I almost thought of it as a cheat, where I was like, well, I’ll just write on either side of the thing and not write about the thing itself. And so the thing itself was what the book ends up diving into, finally.

Whitney Terrell: Right after that opening session that you’re talking about, the novel flashes back to take us into the childhood of the father, Serk. As a kid, he’s known as Hiroshi, and he experiences Japan’s surrender at the end of World War Two. So I wondered if you could read to us a section from that part of the book.

SC: So Hiroshi is an ethnic Korean child. His parents are Korean migrants. Korea, at this time, historically, is a colony of Japan. It’s been a colony of Japan since 1910, before Hiroshi was born. He doesn’t know all this, he’s just a kid. He is a kid growing up in a not very nice neighborhood with parents who are struggling in pretty serious poverty. But he is a great student. He loves going to school. He isn’t aware of these larger political forces, and Japan loses World War Two, and there’s a lot going on in the street. So one day, Hiroshi is grabbed by the scruff of the neck by one of the aunties, one of the other women in the community, who’s like, get your mom. And he gets his mom, and they run out to the street, and there’s this parade, and the larger part of the parade is this enormous flag, and his mother and the auntie are astonished to see this flag and these banners going alongside it.

[Reading]

WT: Thank you very much. I was thinking a lot during this section, and some later sections with Serk— who has, as that passage points out, two different names and then a third, because he changes his name to Serk— about the simplicity with which I, as an American growing up in the Midwest, understood the Second World War, and the real complexity of it. It made me think about also the way that we’re doing immigration, the way we think about immigration, talk about immigration now, compared to then. The Americans who talk to Hiroshi are mostly worried about whether or not he’s a communist. And it’s like, no, but I’m all these other things that are so complex I cannot even possibly explain them to you. So I just found that the inadequacy of American bureaucratic language and of imaginative language to think about a character like this is one of the reasons I think this book is important.

There’s a sentence in a Vulture review of the book “Serk can vanish so easily because he’s effectively stateless, neither fully American nor Japanese nor Korean.” Just for listeners who aren’t familiar with exactly what happened during this period of time, could you just tell us the key events about the relationship between colonized Korea and Japan?

SC: Oh, my God, sure. I’ll just do that in ninety seconds.

WT: Welcome to Wednesday morning!

SC: I mean, the key events are—- I feel like, wow, this should be a TED talk. First of all, let me just say, even having done a ton of reading about this period and having been fascinated by it because this is— my father had a completely different life and trajectory from this character. He was born in Seoul into enormous privilege. But my father’s life took place at roughly the same time— he’d be a little older than Serk— as this character. So this is a milieu that I’ve been reading about a lot all through my career, because my first book was about my father’s experience, fictionalized. Even having done piles of reading for my first novel, which was about the Korean War, I had no idea of any of the key events that took place between the end of World War Two and the beginning of the Korean War, which is a half decade that was unbelievably eventful in terms of laying down what we’re still experiencing as the Cold War, even now. It’s because of our American viewpoint on history, where we’re like, okay, the big things: World War Two ends in 1945, Korean War starts in 1950, in between those two time periods, I guess the people hung out and did some things. That time period is actually extraordinarily important.

To back up, as far as I can figure it out, because it’s very complicated, Japan colonizes Korea early in the 20th century, along with many other parts of East Asia, which it holds as part of its empire. Japan goes to war on the side of the Nazis. As we all know, they lose, happily. At the end of World War Two, Japan has to relinquish all of its colonial holdings, including Korea. So in 1945 Korea is quote, unquote “liberated.” What that actually functionally means is that the US and the USSR, allies in World War Two, move into the Korean peninsula and are like, what do we do with this thing? Famously, they cut it in half, and we get North and South Korea. We all know how that winds up, and that brings us to the present day in Korea.

Korean migrants like Serk’s family in my book went to Japan for work because they’re just second class citizens of an empire, right? So, they’re going to go to the archipelago to find a job as easily as they’re going to stay on the peninsula— not easily, let me back up. It’s very difficult. But it makes sense for them to seek economic opportunity there, because they’re under the thumb of the empire wherever they are, so they go where the work is. When World War two ends, those Korean people actually ended up with no status at all in Japan. Japan was like, you were second class citizens of the empire, but now you’re foreign residents of our country. We don’t really want to give you any of the rights that we have.

Those Korean people end up in this crazy legal limbo for quite a long time. The Americans come in and are like, oh, let’s give the Koreans this and that and the other. But there’s constant flux. When I was doing my research, it was— I mean now we can understand it because we’re living through it in our country— but it was like living through a bureaucratic storm where every single day, the rules are different. You are allowed to open a school. You’re not allowed to open a school. You can have a business. No, you can’t.

It was a nightmare for these people. And that’s the milieu that this character is growing up through.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Rebecca Kilroy. Photograph of Susan Choi by Paul Myers.