Susan Choi

Well, he's an extremely, extremely overprotective father who's always expecting something horrible to happen.

He's probably the kind of father who doesn't let Louisa have a hot dog at a friend's birthday party because of the preservatives.

That's not in the book, but I'm actually thinking that would be like him.

So he's very, very cautious.

He's very overprotective of her.

He is, you know, white knuckling it when she herself swims in the water.

So he's always being very, very watchful.

I knew that I wanted to write a book about a family to whom an awful thing happens.

And so this scene came to me really early, actually, in the writing of the book, even before I totally reconciled myself to the plot that I was dancing around it myself, thinking like, oh, can you really do this?

I felt unsure I could get away with it.

Yeah.

Japan, the empire of Japan, had been very aggressively expanding its reach.

And Japan had a war with Russia.

They expanded into China.

Like those of you who are...

knowledgeable about the Second World War, especially in the Pacific, will probably have like a certain amount of familiarity with a lot of this history.

And one of the things that happened is that Japan seized Korea as a colony in 1910.

Japan had already been really kind of like interfering a lot with Korea.

And it's a long, complex history.

But in 1910, it kind of became official.