SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Susan Choi's new novel opens in mystery and tragedy. Louisa, a 10-year-old girl and her father, Serk, walk along a beach in Japan. He carries a flashlight. We next see Louisa when she is washed up by the tide struggling to breathe. Her father is gone. He couldn't swim. What happened? What will unfold next for the family? And what might we miss in our own life stories? "Flashlight" is Susan Choi's novel. And Susan Choi, a National Book Award winner, who has taught creative writing at Yale, joins us from New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
SUSAN CHOI: Thanks so much for having me.
SIMON: Help us understand all that weighs on Louisa, to awake to be alive but also to have suffered a profound loss and a persisting question.
CHOI: Well, she doesn't know even the biggest part of what's happened to her. We meet her at the beginning of the book after these events that you've just described. She and her mother are left to their own after something really terrible, and it does not bring them closer together, at least not for a very long time.
SIMON: When she is speaking to a psychiatrist, at one point, she says I don't want friends. I don't like people asking me questions.
CHOI: She does her best to fend off this child psychiatrist. She's very unreceptive to him. But at the same time, she kind of can't help engaging with him, even as she's sort of trying to fend him off. I hope the reader realizes that she's going to so much trouble to fend off this guy because she's actually terribly lonely. She does want to talk to somebody, and she does end up talking to him, saying more to him than she ever meant to. She kind of can't help it.
SIMON: This is a family - I think we might put it this way these days - with many strands. Serk, her father, for example, is an ethnic Korean, born and raised in Japan.
CHOI: Serk's born of this fascination that I actually had with all of the tensions that exist between Korea and Japan historically, which I've written about before. I've been fascinated by, you know, my own father and grandfather come out of this history of Japan making Korea a colony and then having to give up the Korean colony with the end of World War II. I was so interested in what was going on with ethnic Koreans who kind of got washed up in Japan at the end of World War II. They were second-class citizens under this Japanese empire, but then, there is no Japanese empire, and they're citizens of nothing. And my interest in, you know, what was that like kind of led to my inventing this character who grows up in this situation where he really doesn't have a country.
SIMON: In interviews, in fact, you've called Louisa's family, I think - I marked this down - your phrase is an alternate-universe family for your own, right?
CHOI: Very alternate. My own family spent some time in Japan when I was young. I was Louisa's age. I was interested both in that experience that I had when I went to Japan, as this confused - I'd grown up in the Midwest, and no one ever looked like me. My dad's Korean, and my mom isn't. So we went to Japan, and I was sort of expecting to, like, fit in brilliantly and - I don't know - be received with glory, you know? At last, here you are, a person who looks like us. And, of course, I didn't look like anybody there either. Japan cast a dark shadow, and I think that Korea-Japan relationship was something I wanted to explore in this slightly different way.
SIMON: Such a vast historical expanse over this novel of almost a century, you know, and for that matter, the hereafter. I've got an intensely practical question. How do you keep so many characters and their stories going in your mind? How do you keep them straight?
CHOI: I began this novel with the intention of writing something very short, and I feel like the novel kind of wrote itself like a snail shell. It just kept spiraling outward in both directions. I had a hard time keeping track of it, to be honest. And at some point, I had this revelation, which I'm going to share now with your listening audience as an amazing tip. I decided to put the events in chronological order.
SIMON: Wow, that's like - that's Tolstoyan.
CHOI: I know. It's a major narrative discovery. When you put the events in order, it's easier to keep track of what happened. I offer this free of charge.
SIMON: Well, thank you. Boy, you wind up with complicated feelings for Louisa. I mean, she almost blows up a college trip that veers from comedy to near disaster.
CHOI: She is only slightly less difficult as a young adult than she is as a child. I think there's a lot of me in Louisa, admittedly. It's a hard thing to admit because she's a character that is so committed to fending off love. But it was so important to me that she find love and some kind of peace. And that's why we end up following her for many, many decades and many, many pages. But I think she gets there. I hope she gets there.
SIMON: There is a line that I have savored. Love is perhaps the sensation of expertise that erupts out of nowhere and as time goes on, accumulates enough soil at its feet as to be standing on something.
CHOI: I'm glad you singled out that line. It's funny. I remember where I was sitting when I wrote that. I was sitting in this wonderful library in Seattle, looking out at the water, and I was trying to figure out how to talk about that love and that sensation of recognizing someone that you really actually don't know at all. And I guess this is sort of about the flashlight again and what we can see and what we can't see. I think sometimes the experience of falling in love is this experience of believing that we know everything about someone that, actually, we've only just met, and our conviction that they belong to us and that we belong to them binds us to them. And if we do that successfully, we end up learning things.
SIMON: Susan Choi's new novel, "Flashlight." Thank you so much for being with us.
CHOI: Thank you so much for having me and for your wonderful reading. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
