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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Claire Nicholls here, and on the book show today, let's start at sunset on a beach in Japan with Susan Choi and Flashlight.
Louisa and her father are making their way down the breakwater, each careful step on the heaved granite blocks, one step farther from shore. Her mother is not even on the shore, for example, seated smiling on the sand. Her mother is shut inside the small, almost waterfront house they're renting, most likely in bed.
All summer, Louisa has played in the waves by herself because her mother isn't well, and her father is unvaryingly dressed in a jacket and slacks. But tonight, he has finally agreed to walk the breakwater with her. She's asked every day since they first arrived. Spray from the waves, sometimes lands on the rocks, and so he has carefully rolled up the cuffs of his slacks.
He still wears his hard polished shoes. In one hand, he holds a flashlight, which is not necessary. In the other hand, he holds Louisa's hand, which is also not necessary. She tolerates this out of kindness.
That is the first page of Flashlight, the Booker shortlisted novel by the American writer Susan Choi. The book follows Louisa and her parents, her Korean dad, Cirque, her American mother, Anne, before and after this night on the beach when everything changes. I met Susan Choi on Wadundi Land in WA at the Margaret River Readers and Writers Festival.
Thank you.
That's great. Where are Louisa and Cirque? They're going for this walk.
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Chapter 2: What inspired Susan Choi to write about her father in Flashlight?
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.
After this moment, Louisa is unconscious and Cirque is gone. Is gone. What happened? That's the question of the story. Where did this scene come from?
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.
And clearly she did. Cirque is a Japanese-born Korean. So at the end of World War II, in 1945, my research says there are about two million ethnic Koreans living in Japan. Can you explain why there were so many Koreans in Japan and what they were doing there?
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. that Korea became a colony of Japan, lost its sovereignty.
And so that was the case until the end of the Second World War when Japan is defeated and has to give up all its colonies. And this is the point at which modern Korea, that story begins. But meanwhile, while Japan is holding Korea as a colony, many, many Koreans ended up
in Japan, either against their will, there were a lot of awful ways in which they were brought to Japan by force, or in some cases, large circumstances forced them, like mostly poverty. So a lot of Koreans migrated to the archipelago in search of a better life because they were, as Koreans, they were now sort of subjects, not citizens, it wasn't great, but they were subjects of Japan.
So this character's parents do the same thing. They're very poor. And they migrated to Japan in hopes of being able to feed the kids basically.
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Chapter 3: How does Susan Choi describe the setting of Flashlight?
a pastime or like a way of playing that from really early on, like I would sit at my mom's typewriter and get it all messed up and get her keys stuck together. But I would make little, you know, stories or I'd like create little books. And it was so big a part of my life. I would sometimes actually send my little stories off to the little children's magazine.
I had a very exciting story about a spider that was awarded first place. Readers five to eight years old, I think. If I'm being precise. So I loved writing, but by the time I was a teenager and a college student, I think I almost had like a sort of a dismissive attitude toward it. Like, oh, that's just a hobby. Or, oh, that's, I don't know.
I don't think I consciously dismissed it, but I did have this dismissive attitude. And it wasn't until I graduated from college with like no skills at all. But I started writing again kind of seriously and thought like, oh, is this a thing people could actually do full time? And I went back to it. What had you studied at college? Oh, God.
I mean, I was really, I barely graduated because I kept changing my course of study. I majored in everything. And in the end, yeah, really, no, it's really true. And I try to tell this story a lot to my own students because I think there is this sense of like, you should have it all figured out.
And I'm like, I'm a really good example of someone who did not have it all figured out and still maybe does not have quite a lot figured out. But in college, I think I was an American Studies major. an art major, but I couldn't draw, so that didn't last. I considered being a theater studies major. I might have considered being a French major, but I was really bad at French.
I ruled out being an English major because there's too much reading. And I ended up something called a literature major, which is such a questionable program of study because it was only literary theory and not actual literature that I think that they have phased it out as kind of an embarrassment to the university. But that's what I did.
Okay. Susan Choi, you took a trip to Japan when you were a kid. Why did you go, first of all?
So our reasons for going were not that dissimilar to reasons that I ended up giving to the characters in the book, but much less cloak and daggery. My father was a mathematics professor, and his university had a sister school relationship to university.
In Japan, my father had a complicated relationship to Japan, you know, as mentioned, because he was born in Korea during the period of the Japanese Empire, was like a colonized subject of this empire.
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Chapter 4: What historical context is important for understanding the characters in Flashlight?
That tendency to be hyper protective to the point of almost insanity is something that I remember really clearly. And my mother would have her stories to tell. I mean, you know, my father would just freak out if, I think I wasn't allowed to play with glitter, maybe until like the age of six or seven, because my father was convinced I would eat it as if I was some kind of idiot.
And then, you know, that it would prove toxic, which I think glitter is not really that. It's not, obviously you shouldn't make it part of your regular diet, but I think it's not gonna kill you. But he was like that, he was really fearful. And I don't know where it came from. And my mother, I think, was quite mystified by it too. And it was touching, you know.
And even to adulthood, you know, he would call me and he would want to know about my life. And if I mentioned anything involving a car trip, he would always say, oh, honey, drive carefully. He was always so worried.
Must be a hard way to live, being worried all the time.
Yeah, I think it was very hard.
I'm thinking about Louisa being the child of these two very poorly matched parents. Like, what does that mean for a kid? What kind of kid comes from that kind of very volatile couple?
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think with Louisa, because the circumstances of the book, again, are much more, you know, complicated and glamorous than the circumstances of my life, speaking of her, I thought that as a kid, she would have an instinct that her parents were both secretive, but of course she's not gonna know what the secrets are. But I felt like kids can feel that.
I really think they can sense that. With my own kids, I always knew like you can't hide anything. They might not know exactly what you're hiding, but they know you're hiding something. So I felt that Louisa would know both of her parents are hiding something from her, from each other, and it makes her quite obstreperous.
But I think it must have been, again, for Louisa, this fictional character, but I think it must be lonely, quite lonely.
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Chapter 5: How does Susan Choi's personal heritage influence her writing?
I want to write about that childhood experience I had in Japan and try to write about these other swirling issues that are interesting to me. The book was a novella. of 150 pages called Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck that's about 20th century German history and the most beautiful book. And I read that book and I was just electrified.
And I thought, oh, this is what I'm going to do is I'm going to write this beautiful 150 page novella about other things. And so I literally envisioned this book as a novella. And it's the longest book I've ever published. So the opposite of a novella in just about every way.
And I think it's hard to say exactly when I really did know that it was going to be that long, but at some point I started working with my wonderful, wonderful US editor who really made this book what it is. And it was very long then. I think it was longer, but also very different. It was longer with different stuff.
And she read it and we sat down together and I don't know how this happened, but in talking together, and I got very excited because we'd never worked together before, but I understood right away, like in the way that when you meet someone that understands you, you know, and she understood the book and I thought, She understands the book better than I do. So we were talking excitedly.
And at some point we both began using this metaphor of brushing a dog that's too fluffy. And we kept saying like, well, we just have to brush it out and get all the fluff away. Like the way you would groom a dog and then it'll be perfect. So that was the first thing we did was we brushed the dog. But it turned out that she then also wanted me to add things. Then the dog became large.
Once it had a glossy coat, it then got fed up and became even bigger.
I mean, it's such a fantastic novel and that was recognised with you making the Booker shortlist in 2025. I know from talking to other shortlisted writers over the years that that week, is really intense, the week of the announcement. What's your strongest memory of that time in the UK and the Booker announcement?
I think it's possible that my strongest memory is so, My son, my younger son, who's 18 years old, is in school in Germany right now and finishing up. Actually, he's finishing up in a mere matter of days. But in last November, he was in Germany and I had called him to tell him about this exciting event. And I said, do you want to come to London for the Booker Prizes? And he was like,
Sure, if you're paying for the ticket. And so I said, well, what's your class schedule? And he said, well, you know, I'm in intensive German Monday through Friday. And I, you know, do you want to cut a class? And he said, yeah, I'll cut Friday German. The Booker Prize ceremony was Monday night.
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