In 2020, Susan Choi published a short story about Louisa, a ten-year-old girl who clashes with her ailing mother following a traumatic series of events in Japan when the child almost drowned and her beloved father disappeared.
After writing the story, however, Choi realized that the premise involving Louisa and her parents, Anne and Serk, could offer her a way in to exploring two separate stories that had fascinated her. The first was about the experience of Koreans living under Japanese rule from 1910-1945, and the second was North Korea’s long-running, unchecked secret campaign to abduct people from the coast of Japan and relocate them against their will inside the communist nation.
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“I get really fixated on things and then I’m dying to put them into novels,” Choi, whose previous novel, “Trust Exercise,” won the National Book Award, said in a recent video interview. “So in a funny way, I backed into this book.”
The novel starts with the original short story but then flashes back to the younger days of the parents, describing Serk’s World War II-era childhood as a Korean in Japan and Anne’s rootless life in America. Spanning decades, the book explores the way this couple copes (or doesn’t) with their individual dislocations and emotional rootlessness and how it impacts their daughter while weaving in the political background that so compelled Choi.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Each character has communication issues and seems dislocated from themselves and their origins. Were you striving for that?
That definitely falls under the heading of intuition more than premeditation. I’m always surprised myself by the way certain things come together thematically without me having thought about them ahead of time.
It seems logical when you pick it apart – who would marry a guy like Serk, but someone else coming from an analogous situation where they don’t have much of a family surrounding them either. I didn’t think all of that stuff through in advance, but the characters did end up evolving, so they’re all estranged from something really critical. Anne is not equipped to learn more about Serk than he’s willing to share, and he’s not willing to share very much.
And such parents end up producing a child like Louisa, who feels more motivated to study French and pass herself off as a sophisticated New Yorker than to figure out who her actual relatives might have been.
A certain amount of this comes out of personal experiences, though it’s exaggerated and it’s very different. Unlike Louisa, I am obsessed by my origins and have spent a lot of time doing research into my father’s and grandfather’s life and family in Korea.
Q. How does that fascination tie in here?
My Korean grandfather was a successful writer and a public intellectual, but he propagated the idea that Korea was better off under Japanese domination and that Koreans should stop trying to fight for their own separate identity and history. Later, he was branded a traitor and a collaborator.
One reason I’m fascinated is that my father never wanted to talk about my grandfather. It was a devastating experience for my father and he never wanted to discuss it. He wanted to come to this country and be completely brand-new, like Serk. So, I am really motivated by this idea of secrecy and shame and people who suffer bad luck when the tides of geopolitics turn.
Q. You write about Louisa’s inability to understand silence as a kid. That silence is a reflection of her parents’ dislocation. Would it be better if they were less good at it?
Maybe it’s my bias, as an American or as a writer or maybe just as someone with my personality, but I’m always for openness in communication and sharing.
I’m personally provoked by that idea of silence from when I was a child and my father would be evasive or dismissive, saying, “You don’t need to know about that.” Now I think there’s also a way in which I think that people are entitled to their silence. I haven’t really thought about it a lot. But your question is thought-provoking.
Q. In Japan, Louisa and Serk go see “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Did you choose that because of the themes about feeling alien or about abductions or about obsessing about the unknown or because you liked that movie as a kid?
That scene in a completely overcrowded Japanese theater is a childhood memory of mine and one of my most visceral memories from being in Japan. I just wanted to use that memory but again, sometimes you choose something and then it turns out the subconscious writer’s brain was directing you toward the thing that’s going to really resonate. After I wrote it, I realized it works really well symbolically. Usually, it’s in the revision stage I see that but there’s an equal number of times I look at something and say, “Oh, this doesn’t work at all.”
Q. The chapter when Louisa is in college and traveling through Europe, where a terrible experience turns into a life-altering one. What did you hope it would convey?
My full, rough first draft included none of that, and my agent said that we never got to see Louisa living her life away from her parents. The instant she said that I wanted to write about Louisa in college, a time period that’s so transformative. I thought of that section as ‘Louisa Down and Out in Paris and London’ because Orwell’s book is a favorite of mine, there’s such a sense of adventure and fearlessness underlying his difficult experiences. I wrote that entire section very quickly, which I think captures how I felt about Louisa finally getting away from her family, frightening as it is for her – and I’m glad the reader can feel that momentum in the pacing.
Q. There is a jump forward and we see she’s married with a baby. The book is filled with such leaps and gaps. What does it say about what we know and don’t know about the lives of our friends and family?
I loved the idea that as a young woman Louisa makes exactly the same mistake her mother made, but since she’d never want to admit this, the developmental process of that mistake is elided in her narrative – it’s just, boom, suddenly she’s a college dropout with a baby.
I love when writers make enormous time jumps and trust the reader to reorient and keep going. It always thrills me. I also dislike over-explanation, and the sense that the author is trying to account for everything – every event, every causal relationship. But I also like leaping over big chunks of time for the way it captures the experience of life, the feeling I often have in my own life, that intervening time has fallen away and I’ve found myself in some totally different situation than I expected.
We don’t experience our lives as these smoothly developing narratives and we also don’t experience the people to whom we’re closest with anything like total understanding – to us they’re also these assemblages of chunks of information, sometimes not at all connected. And this book is a lot about gaps, darkness, things misunderstood or never known.
Susan Choi presents “Flashlight” with Viet Thanh Nguyen
When: 7 p.m., June 6
Where: Skylight Books, 1818 N Vermont Ave
Information: www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-susan-choi-presents-flashlight-w-viet-thanh-nguyen
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