Susan Choi’s Flashlight opens with a mystery. A 10-year-old Louisa is walking with her father at night on a breakwater in Japan. The next thing that anyone knows is that the girl is found barely alive on the beach. The father has apparently washed out to sea. Was there a sudden weather event? An active disappearing? Was a third party involved?
Seok / Serk Kang is a beloved child, even as his parents strive to provide as second-class citizens in Japan during wartime (WWII). The family is Korean, and their otherness renders them unable to access particular help in society. Serk is not so aware of the family’s struggles as a child:
“The things he does see her do, her eternal kneeling to a little handful of vegetables or a little water in a pot or a lapful of fabric, are so permanent a part of his experience he does not recognize his mother as productive, he does not recognize that everything that comes in contact with his body, or that makes its way inside, has been somehow created from just short of nothing by her.”
As a precocious student, he is lauded by his sensei, but various academic paths are closed to him in the insular society of Japan, which is smarting after their losses in the second world war. The family can only ever be Permanent Resident Aliens, at least for the next while. He is dazzled by a map his teacher shares. He looks at Jeju Island (what his teacher calls Saishū Island) and is curious about geography and the world. He is six years old in the spring of 1945.
His Japanese name is “Hiroshi.” His siblings are Soonja, Seung, Yeonja, and Jeong. His mother asks Seok to help write a letter in English to the U.S. military authority to request learning opportunities for the Korean children. The letter is addressed to the Honored Commanding General of the Great US Forces!:
“I am a Korean schoolchild who lives in Japan. I beg you permission for my revered teachers to freely teach me Korean subjects in my own language, inasmuch as it was your Great Army that liberated me from ruthless Japanese oppression!”
The letter is supposedly from his six-year-old sibling. They know how to engage strategic messaging to work the system. He is 9 at this time.
Through the Organization, a Communist front for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), his parents are recruited to return to rebuild North Korea. Their bet is on the DPRK to reunite the peninsula, to unify the Korean people. They see the DPRK as “the standard-bearer for eventual reunification.” There are promises of apartments with plumbing and an indoor gas range, medical care, and pensions. Serk has a sophisticated logic for a child:
“That his parents were in raptures about indoor plumbing to him said it all. Yes, Japan denied its resident Koreans access to every kind of privilege that existed–but the privileges existed, was the difference. Would they not rather keep fighting for access to them than venture someplace where those privileges might not exist at all?”
The allure of a “homeland” as a concept changes their respective fates for generations. There are repatriation incentives for the Koreans in Japan, too. Serk takes a different path.
As a stellar high school student, and a high scorer in the college entrance exam, he only has a technical college open to him. He is rejected by the big universities of Japan. He changes his name back to Seok from Hiroshi. So he chooses to study abroad in the U.S., where he earns a doctorate and makes a career in academia. It is during a teaching stint in Japan that he disappears.
Anne is Louisa’s American mother. She is beautiful and passive by personality. An affair at 19 has left her with Tobias, Louisa’s half-brother, who has been adopted by her married lover and his wife. She later married Serk, the man who has disappeared.
The various main characters are prickly. Serk has a sharp temper. He is not satisfied in many ways with the life he has. Anne, too, has so much potential, but as the youngest of seven children, she was not given much in the way of support and does not expect much of herself.
What unfolds in the next decades in the six-part novel is how their lives evolve and change. Theirs are peripatetic lives, blown like leaves in the wind to various continents and various experiences. They are emigrants and immigrants. They do not necessarily commit to a particular path, but happenstance and spurts of will inform their lives. While Louisa is perhaps the main character, the novel brings different personalities to the fore in the different chapters. Each personality is unique and richly evoked.
Anne realizes her attraction to men who are bright and who also take her out of her comfort zone:
“The surprise was that she—who had never mastered a second language and at this point almost surely never would; who hid indoors in foreign countries with the money types of soap she’d brought from home for fear of having to use something different; who was a hopeless homebody who missed her Singer sewing machine—persistently attached herself to men who spoke many languages and hauled her into unknown territories and seemed to be comfortable nowhere, so that they inflicted on her a discomfort she could have avoided.”
Anne and Louisa have a strained relationship, with their clash of personalities. Louisa is a product of a demanding and frustrated father and a passive mother. There is something of an epigenetic influence in her life. Tobias is a wanderer who drops in and out of Anne’s and Louisa’s lives.
They are each engaged in each other’s lives only occasionally and fleetingly. Decisions lead to forever-outcomes that they may not be aware of in the moment. No one knows the last moments they have to share with their loved ones. People are always caught up in the larger forces around them.
Flashlight alludes to perhaps the limited range of its illumination and a concomitant limited sense of human self-awareness, much less the directions of their lives. The writing is lux and well-timed in terms of revelations. The respective characters are deeply developed and authentic across the generations. The geopolitical realities evoked in this novel are memorable and original in literature.
Susan Choi is the author of Trust Exercise, The Foreign Student, American Woman, A Person of Interest, and My Education. She is the winner of the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She teaches English at Yale University, where she has taught since 2015. She also teaches at The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Prior, she taught at New York University and Princeton University
Susan Choi discusses her novel with John Whittier Treat on Saturday, June 7, 2025 at 7:30pm at Townhall Seattle’s Wyncote NW Forum at 1119-8th Ave. 206-652-4255.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
