Photography by Maria Spann<\/p>\n
Novelist Susan Choi, 56, was born in Indiana to a Korean father and Russian-Jewish mother. After working as a fact-checker at The New Yorker, she made her debut with The Foreign Student (1998), going on to win America\u2019s National Book Award for Trust Exercise (2019), a slippery narrative about sexual abuse in a drama class. \ufeffShe lives in Brooklyn and her new book,\u00a0Flashlight, \ufeffbegins when an academic vanishes from a Japanese beach in 1978.<\/p>\n
What led you to write a novel exploring the shared history between the US, Japan and the Koreas?<\/p>\n
It came out of my sense that I\u2019d never really delved sufficiently into the decades leading up to the Korean war \u2013 the event that precipitated my father\u2019s immigration to the US. That war was at the centre of my first book, which I wrote in my 20s; by that time, I\u2019d been an adult long enough to share some beers with my dad and get him talking in a\u00a0way he\u2019d never spoken to me before. But I felt my own relationship with history was being distorted by my preoccupation with understanding him better. I\u2019d done all this research yet understood the war\u2019s origins and consequences \ufeffonly\ufeff in terms of the second world war and the cold war. Flashlight is a result of realising how superficial that was. To really understand my father involved going deeper into history.<\/p>\n
Did you have a model for the book?<\/p>\n
Jenny Erpenbeck\u2019s brilliant novella, Visitation, which captures enormous events of 20th-century Germany in extremely fragmentary chunks of narration that challenge the reader to orient themselves. I had in mind a short book like that, but it became completely different and very long!<\/p>\n
What brought about that change?<\/p>\n
I had set up an enormous contradiction for myself. What\u2019s so amazing about Visitation is that Erpenbeck makes the Holocaust feel\u00a0like something you\u2019ve never read about before. But the average reader likely knows that its background is the Holocaust, whereas the historical events I wanted to draw on are very little known [in the US]. That doesn\u2019t mean they\u2019re unknown. I did an event with the writer Viet Thanh Nguyen and I said: \u201cMaybe we can try to avoid giving away the [story\u2019s] big reveal.\u201d He said: \u201cWhat reveal? I knew right away what happened.\u201d I said: \u201cWell, I know you did, because your grasp of east Asian history is pretty complete! But that\u2019s not typical of the American reader.\u201d<\/p>\n
As well as geopolitics, the novel lingers on intimate details of day-to-day life, from sex to illness.<\/p>\n
As a reader, I\u2019m always drawn to that. I often think of Middlemarch, one of my favourite books, as an exemplar of how to write about historical forces. Eliot\u2019s attention is all-encompassing \u2013 she has this\u00a0higher structural sense but keeps you in the warm embers of\u00a0the everyday.<\/p>\n
Flashlight has three main characters. Which was the hardest to write?<\/p>\n
Definitely Serk [the academic], who emerged from my interest in my father\u2019s life, although he\u2019s almost the inverse of him. One of the things that fascinated me about my father\u2019s experience was that his consciousness of his own identity had been disrupted as a little boy. He was a Korean in Korea, but Korea had been made a Japanese colony [1910\u20131945], so he answered to a\u00a0Japanese name and was taught in Japanese and sang Japanese songs. Around the age of six, he was made to realise that he wasn\u2019t Japanese \u2013 it wasn\u2019t clear [to him] what he was. He couldn\u2019t be induced to talk about this very much, but I observed in him a tumultuous ambivalence about his origins all his life\ufeff. \ufeffRaising me, he was insistent that I shouldn\u2019t be exposed to Korean culture or language, as if it were a pathogen. That really prompted my interest in this corner of history.<\/p>\n
What was the last great novel that you\u00a0read?<\/p>\n
Fifteen Dogs by the Canadian writer Andr\u00e9 Alexis, a huge discovery for me. I found it enthralling and totally unexpected. I don\u2019t even want to describe it\ufeff because I think readers should just pick it up.<\/p>\n
You\u2019re a professor of creative writing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Is there a\u00a0particular book you return to in your\u00a0teaching?<\/p>\n
Although I\u2019ve crashingly failed with Flashlight, I still dream hilariously of writing a novella someday. I just love short narratives \u2013 to be able to do so much in so little space is much harder than doing a lot in a lot of space. I\u2019ve taught a novella class many times. Very often Visitation is included, as is Muriel Spark\u2019s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie\ufeff \u2013 another of my favourite books. In the US, there\u2019s this idea that characters should be relatable, which usually means likable. The great thing about Spark, especially in Jean Brodie, is that she frees you from that infantile desire to affirm your own goodness by identifying with characters who are good. There\u2019s no moral centre. The girls are awful. The men are awful. Jean Brodie is terrible. And the\u00a0writing is terrific.<\/p>\n
What kind of reader were you as a\u00a0child?<\/p>\n
I was extremely unathletic and I\u00a0was an only child, so I read a lot: Roald Dahl, CS Lewis, Susan Cooper, Mary Norton\u2026 my childhood reading was exceedingly British! I remember reading The Borrowers and tossing it aside to write my own stories about tiny people. My people were smaller\ufeff. I thought that was originality, to take\u00a0the idea but size down the people even more.<\/p>\n
Where do you \ufeffprefer to write?<\/p>\n
The dining table I\u2019m sitting at right now. I always work here \u2013 we can never eat because it always has paper\u00a0strewn all over it. I even had a\u00a0whole cabinet built in this room to\u00a0put the paper into, and the paper is still on the table.<\/p>\n