‘Ferociously smart and full of surprises, Flashlight is thrilling to the last’ ELEANOR CATTON
Flashlight Susan Choi
Flashlight
Also by Susan Choi
Also by Susan Choi
Trust Exercise
My Education
A Person of Interest
American Woman
The Foreign Student
Flashlight
SUSAN CHOI
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First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 2025
First published in the United States of America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2025
Copyright © Susan Choi 2025
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For Dexter and Elliot
and her father
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 are 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 has 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.
“One thing I will always owe your mother is she taught you to swim. Because swimming is important to know how to do, for your safety. But when she gave you lessons, I thought it was too dangerous. I was very unfair.”
“I hate swimming.”
They both know the opposite is true. Perhaps her father recognizes her comment for what it partly is, a declaration of loyalty to him, as well as for what it mostly is, a declaration by a ten-year-old child who is contentious by reflex. Far over the water, far beyond where the breakwater joins with a thin spit of sand, the sunset has lost all its warmth and is only a paleness against the horizon. They’ll turn back soon.
Louisa
“I never learned to swim,” her father reveals.
“I don’t believe you,” she scoffs. Everybody can swim. Though it’s true he always makes a big deal when she wants to get in or even get near the water.
“It’s true. I grew up a poor boy. I had no YMCA.”
“The YMCA is disgusting. I hate going there.”
“Someday, you’ll feel thankful to your mother. But I want you to act thankful now.”
These are the last words he ever says to her.
(Or are they the last words that she can remember? Did he say something more? There is no one to ask.)
* * *
Louisa lay awake staring into the dark. The ceiling showed itself in a narrow stripe of light, first sharp like a blade and then more and more soft, that crossed the ceiling from the doorframe. The door was very slightly cracked open because Louisa was afraid of the dark. This didn’t use to be the case. Every night with maddening slowness her mother would retreat from the room, clumsily bumping her wheels, to a point that Louisa would want to scream at her. When her mother was finally out in the hall, she hesitated, one hand on the doorknob, the door almost but not fully shut.
“Close it all the way, please,” Louisa would say in a sharp, grown-up tone.
The first time she’d said this, it was because she couldn’t stand another second of her mother being there, peering in through the crack. Then she said it every subsequent night the same way, having realized that it was, without being a wrong thing to say, satisfyingly hurtful. There would be another brief hesitation, which Louisa didn’t mind, because it showed that her mother was indeed satisfyingly hurt. Apparently her mother would have liked for Louisa to ask for a story, or a kiss, as if Louisa were still five years old. Her mother never expressed this desire but it was nakedly clear. Such naked wanting to be wanted made Louisa’s mother even more repellent. The door would click into its frame heavily; it was that kind of American door that
Louisa had almost forgotten existed in the year she had lived someplace else. A door meant for closing. Louisa would lie in the dark, her unsparing mind tracking her mother’s wheelchair down the hall and imagining hidden trapdoors hinging open beneath it. Meanwhile the dark slid itself onto her chest like a snake, organizing its weight into neatly stacked coils that might go on forever and bury her, crush her, if she didn’t leap out of bed just in time and, with deft skill, reopen the door. Louisa was a master at handling the knob. She wasn’t clumsy, like her mother, or thoughtless, like her aunt. No sound escaped as the light was let back in, the darkness destroyed. Back to bed, to gaze up at the stripe.
Tonight sound was coming in also. She couldn’t make out the words but she knew they were talking about her. This morning, instead of going to school on time, she’d been taken by her aunt to a building downtown to be examined by a child psychologist. No one had used these words, “child psychologist.” They had called it an appointment about her grade level, which at least at the start she believed. She had been halfway through the fourth grade when she and her parents had left the US for Japan, and during their year in Japan she had finished the fourth grade, all the workbooks and readings and tests they had brought, and she’d finished the Japanese fourth grade as well—she had done fourth grade twice, in two countries, but was being made to do it over again, had been put back as if she had failed.
The appointment had been in a brick office building with a half flight of stairs at the entrance, and as they climbed her aunt had said, “This is why your mom couldn’t come with us, because of these stairs. I called ahead to ask if there were stairs at the entrance and sure enough they told me there were. Your poor mama.”
“She’s not sick,” Louisa said.
“What’s that, honey?”
Louisa was silent.
“I didn’t hear you, honey.”
Now Louisa could pretend she hadn’t heard. This was effective. No one was ever listening closely—even the people who especially claimed to be listening were not really listening.
It was this way with the man at the appointment. “My name is Dr. Brickner,” he said, making a show of bending down to shake her hand. He had already made a show of leaving her aunt in the waiting room, and another show of reassuring Louisa that her aunt would be right there waiting for her, as if Louisa were in any fear her aunt might disappear. Louisa’s aunt was like a bright light Louisa couldn’t turn off. On the nights Louisa’s mother wasn’t up to it, it was her aunt who tucked Louisa into bed and then lingered too long in the doorway. Louisa’s aunt broadcast her kind disposition by constantly tilting her head to one side, crinkling her eyes, and compressing her mouth, as if to savor all the good-tasting mirth trapped inside. Sometimes, performing this face for Louisa, Louisa’s aunt added reminiscent comments about her two grown-up sons, and how precious it was to be reminded of them by Louisa’s presence in her home. Louisa doubted her aunt felt this way. Until she and her mother had moved here, Louisa had never heard of this aunt, or this uncle—her mother’s actual brother, apparently, whom Louisa was now supposed to pretend she’d known about her whole life. Her whole ten years of life when she had never heard their names, or seen their photos, or received a card or gift from them on her birthday, or answered the telephone and heard either one of them ask for her mother or father. Now she lived in their house and drank orange juice with them staring at her. They behaved toward her the way all adults did since her father had died, with a combination of hearty attention and squeamish discomfort.
“Brickner, like this ugly brick building we’re in,” the man had gone on heartily. “That’s how you can remember! But my first name is Jerry, and I’d like you to just call me that. Can I call you Louisa?”
“So I don’t need to remember,” she said.
“What’s that?” He pointed his grin at her. “What did you say?”
“I said I don’t need to remember ‘Brickner,’ like this ugly brick building, because you said I should just call you ‘Jerry.’ ”
The man reared back and raised his eyebrows. “Let me guess: you’re a very smart girl.”
“At least enough to be in fifth grade.”
“Oh, I’ll bet. Oh, I’m sure there’s no doubt about that,” “Jerry”
blathered, not listening, which was when she knew the appointment was not about grade level.
The room was full of admittedly interesting things: art supplies and those faceless wooden figures meant for posing, as well as actual dolls of different sorts, ranging from the sloppy-floppy Raggedy Ann style to the “realistic infant” style with a hard plastic head, hands, and feet and queasily soft trunk, arms, and legs meant to be hidden beneath frilly clothes; wild-haired Barbies and those soldier-Barbies for boys, the G.I. Joes. There was an off-kilter dollhouse, the kind meant to be played with and not just admired, with cluttered furnishings in slightly different sizes, as if there had been disagreement about which scale to use. Louisa knew about scale, about one foot = one inch. Her father had made her a dollhouse the year she turned eight. That had been the year of her passion for a store at the mall called It’s a Small World, which sold shrunken elaborate gingerbread homes into which she would gaze, mesmerized, with the peculiar sensation of leaving her body and slipping amid those wee wonderful things, things she lacked words for and so had to learn one by one, fireplace irons and grandfather clocks and hat racks and claw-footed armoires. The young heroines of the books she most liked lived in houses like these, full of little wooden knobs and dust ruffles and embroidery, each stitch of which was as small as those tiny black seeds that are lofted by dandelion fluff. Their every visit to the mall, her mother gave her twenty minutes to browse in the store as a matter of policy, placidly ignoring her pleas that they actually buy something. Her father, by contrast, only needed to hear her plead once. Off they had stormed to the mall, her father lambasting her mother’s cheapness the entire drive there. Into the store and then immediately out he had stormed, once he’d seen the first dollhouse price tag.
“I can make that,” he’d said.
The tiny nails tacking the thin walls of hobby plywood together made the walls split and splinter, their front edges exposed and unsanded. The roof had been “shingled” with strips of a rough rubber matting found in the basement. Wallpaper scraps were cut down to size for the walls and the floor. He’d even built much of the furniture, sitting at the kitchen
table night after night in his undershirt, with a glass of beer near at hand and his pipe clamped between his rear teeth, cutting and gluing strips of balsa to form the crude shape of a canopy bed.
Her father’s labor awed and grieved her. Louisa had been horrified by the clumsy, indelicate house, though her horror was silent. He was toiling to make something ugly she didn’t desire. Yet, over time, she’d realized that this, too, held the charm of the small. Her mother sewed tiny pillows and bedspreads and the bed canopy, showed Louisa that postage stamps could be put into brown cardboard frames to make art for the walls, that a length of embroidery yarn could be wound in a tight ball the size of a pea, and pierced through with two straight pins in an X, to look just like someone’s miniature knitting.
Then she’d spent hours on the floor, gazing into her strange handmade house. The very few items within it that were consolatory gifts her parents bought her from It’s a Small World—the grand piano with its blue velvet cushion, the four spindly chairs—looked out of place. Wrong.
“Louisa?”
She was startled to find Dr. Brickner just over one shoulder. She turned away from the dollhouse, stepping neatly around him, and dropped into a chair. Moments before, the thing to do had been to shirk his eye contact and look at the things in the room that weren’t him. Now he’d caught her interested in something, and the thing to do was shirk that something. They were alone together, and no one had told her how long it would last. But let it last forever: she wouldn’t give him anything.
“You can play with the dollhouse,” he said, and she was pleased to hear a tinge of supplication. “That’s what it’s there for.”
“That’s okay.”
“Would you like to draw? I have terrific drawing stuff.”
“That’s okay. I don’t really enjoy drawing.” Right away she regretted this offering. Sure enough, he caught on. Perhaps he was actually listening.
“What kinds of things do you enjoy?”
Certain adults could do this, Louisa had noticed. Instead of oooh-
ing or saying You sound so grown-up when you talk, these adults deftly plucked your own words from the air and then flicked them back at you, with a straight face, as if they thought you might somehow not notice and become hypnotized. It was a game, and not a playful type of game but a competitive, scorekeeping game, the quick-witted adult snatching one bit of you after another.
“What’s that flashlight for?” Louisa asked him, and his mind had to spring to “flashlight” and pretend the question was one he’d expected.
The flashlight stood on the windowsill, bulb end pointing down. The windows in the room were very large and high with very deep sills, and the deep sills were very cluttered, as every surface in the room was cluttered. There were potted plants set close together and in the bits of space between them ugly “artworks” made from balls and tubes of clay incompetently stuck together, and other knickknacky arts-andcrafts garbage Louisa supposed other children had made during appointments. The flashlight hardly stood out. Dr. Brickner had to crane his neck around in awkward almost-panic to find what she was talking about.
“It’s to see in the dark!” he said clownishly.
“You have lights.”
He abandoned the clowning. “It’s in case of a power outage. Which doesn’t happen often, but it could happen. Especially if there’s an earthquake.”
“Where I lived before I moved here, I felt earthquakes all the time.”
“In Japan.”
She was disappointed somehow that he already knew this, but of course he already knew everything. “Can we turn out the lights?”
“It won’t be dark.”
“You could pull the blinds down.”
“It still won’t be dark—it will be dim,” Dr. Brickner predicted, but he was already doing it. The blinds were an ancient unreliable mess and they clearly were never let down—as Dr. Brickner struggled with them they fought back, their long metal strips rattling and seesawing slantwise and releasing a dust plume before they seemed to surrender
and fall all at once. The dust, dissipating, glinted erratically, as if flashing a code, where it crossed the slim rays of afternoon light streaming in through the gap that remained where the blinds did not quite meet the wall. Dr. Brickner, reaching over his desk toward the chair where she sat, held the flashlight out to her. It was satisfyingly heavy. Louisa slid the plastic switch with her thumb and a pale cloud of light appeared on the ceiling.
“Oh good,” he said. “I thought the batteries might have gone dead.”
“If they were, and this was an earthquake, then you’d be in trouble.”
“Very true.”
She played the light over the ceiling, almost forgetting about him. The ceiling was far above her, twice as far as the extinguished overhead light—the hideous kind that looked like a huge upside-down ice tray suspended from wires. Beyond the enormous ice tray, the faint pool of light rippled over the ceiling and slid down the wall. It seemed alive, a being both at her command and mysterious to her. “Doo-doodoo-doo-dooooooo,” she sang out, inexplicably goofy herself. She was singing the notes everyone nowadays recognized, the UFO’s greeting from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Dr. Brickner laughed. They gazed up at the ceiling as if something were actually there. “Did you like that movie?” asked his voice, which she found was more tolerable than when she had to look into his face.
“It scared me.” She was surprised and annoyed by her honesty.
“Why?”
She shrugged, waving the beam over the ceiling as if in erasure. “Just in a fun way. Like Halloween stuff.”
“Is that really all you meant?”
She’d let the door open a crack, but he was too large and slow to slip through; she had already closed it. She almost felt sorry for him. The hidden side of her contempt for adults was pity: that they proudly imagined they understood her and then blundered, while she had to pretend to be caught. She sang the alien greeting again, conducting with the flashlight to make a five-pointed star in the air.
“Did you like Star Wars?” Dr. Brickner wondered.
“Sure.”
“So you like sci-fi.”
This she couldn’t allow. “Close Encounters isn’t sci-fi. Everything in that movie is normal. That’s what makes the aliens feel really real.”
“And that’s scary.”
“No. Those aliens aren’t scary at all. They’re nice.”
“Then why would their being real scare you?”
“It doesn’t. And besides, when they land, they look fake.”
“But you just said they felt really real.” He was onto something, his triumphant tone told her, as if he won a point for every little crack where her words didn’t fit themselves smoothly together. She swung the light into his face and he squinted but didn’t scold her, so she swung it away again as a reward.
“I didn’t. They don’t.”
“But the signs that they’re coming—the weird radio sounds, the lights in the sky, the dad who builds the tower out of mud and his family thinks he’s gone crazy—maybe that felt really real?”
She said nothing.
“Normal life turning strange—did that feel really real? Are there things in your own life that feel that way?”
The flashlight dropped out of her hand, its butt end striking down on the cold tile floor with a noise like a gunshot. It clattered onto its side, rolled a few inches, stopped. Louisa wiped her palm hard on the front of her jeans. After they’d arrived in Los Angeles, her aunt had taken her shopping. All her life she’d worn skirts, kilts, jumpers, pinafore dresses, sandals, oxfords. When she looked at her body in blue jeans and red sneakers, it didn’t feel or look like her body, which she had never before thought of as feeling or looking like hers, which she had never before had to think of at all. She stretched her arm toward the flashlight without otherwise moving. Its light had been trapped, like the sun through the blinds, and spread over the floor in a wedge.
“When I was getting ready to meet you, I talked on the phone to your mother,” Dr. Brickner resumed. “We talked a long time. I had lots of questions about you. She wanted to help me as much as she could.” Louisa’s arm dangled over the hard wooden arm of the chair,
fingers slack, nowhere close to the bleeding flashlight she was no longer attempting to reach. Its light spilled and spilled from its little round porthole. “She told me that when you were found on the beach in Japan, where your father had drowned, you told people your father was kidnapped.”
“No I didn’t,” Louisa said quickly, without looking up. She stared at the wasted light painting the cold tile floor. Whenever the next earthquake came, the batteries in this flashlight would surely be dead. Maybe, because of not having a working flashlight, Dr. Brickner would also be dead. Louisa might take the blame for this, for wasting the batteries now. She wondered how much of the fault for his death would be hers.
“Your mother wasn’t there when they found you, but the person who found you reported that you said this.”
“I never said that,” Louisa said again. “I don’t know what she’s talking about.”
“Louisa,” Dr. Brickner said, coming around his desk toward her and propping his rear on the edge, so that his suit jacket, which was already rumpled, bagged out at his shoulders and looked even worse, “do you know what ‘shock’ is?”
“If you rub a balloon on a wall and you touch someone else you can give them a shock,” she recited. Perhaps she had read this in Highlights or Cricket. She couldn’t remember.
“True, that’s electrical shock. But that’s not the shock that I’m talking about, though the feeling can be similar. Like a sudden, sharp, frightening feeling. Does that make sense to you?”
“An electrical shock isn’t frightening,” she countered blandly, fixing her eyes on his tie pin. It looked like a paper clip holding his tie to his shirt.
“Maybe I’m not explaining well. Sometimes I’m better at listening than talking. Maybe you talk some more and I’ll listen.”
“That’s what you’ve been trying to do since I got here.”
“And this room is full of tricks to get children to talk, but you’re too smart for them.”
“I’m too smart for compliments. I don’t like them.”
“I’ve noticed that children who deserve them don’t like them.”
“I don’t deserve them.”
“Don’t you? I said you were smart, and you agreed with me. You said you were too smart for compliments.”
“Being smart shouldn’t get compliments. Being smart isn’t something I did. It’s just something I am. And I don’t like it,” she added after a moment.
“Why not?”
“Other kids are obnoxious to me. I don’t have any friends.”
“Your mother told me you’ve always had friends. In Michigan you had friends. In Japan you had friends. It’s only since you’ve moved here that you haven’t had friends.”
“I don’t want friends.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t like people asking me questions.”
“Like me?”
She shrugged. “No offense.”
“It’s my job to ask you questions.” He pushed off the edge of his desk and went behind it again. “Hand me my flashlight, please.”
She obeyed him before it occurred to her that she might not. Too late, though he didn’t seem to have marked it as a point in his favor. He was simply shining the flashlight down onto his desk, where white, yellow, and pink sheets of paper appeared in its pool of light. “You see, one of my bosses is called the Los Angeles Consolidated School District, and when they send me a pink sheet of paper with a child’s name on it, that means I have to ask that child questions or they won’t send my paycheck. You might think our meeting has to do with you, but it really has to do with Mrs. Brickner, my wife, and Kelly Brickner, my son, who’s a sophomore at USC, and Cheryl Brickner, my daughter, who’s a junior at Westinghouse High School. It’s really because of them that I’m asking you questions—and because of the Los Angeles Consolidated School District. And the reasons they want me to ask you the questions—well, let’s see what they wrote on your form. ‘Defiance, disruptive behavior, deception, peer-to-peer conflict, tardiness, truancy, larceny—’ ”
“What’s that?” she interrupted.
“Which?”
“The last one. Larson-something.”
“Larceny. A fancy word for stealing.”
“I’ve never heard that.”
“Do you mean you didn’t know that you’re accused of stealing?”
“No, I’ve never heard that word. Larson—”
“L-A-R-C-E-N-Y. We’ve found the limits of your vocabulary. Would you like to talk about larceny? You don’t look very sorry about it.”
“I’m not.”
“I’m sure your parents taught you not to steal.”
But this was just the point. Stealing was a thing you were told not to do, you were told was wrong, but why was it? Why did calling it wrong make it wrong? What bad result came when you stole, apart from people just making a fuss? Sitting in the supposedly nice restaurant her aunt and uncle had taken her to while her mother was getting more hospital tests, she’d put the saltshaker from the table in her pocket and taken it home. What bad thing had happened? Only that the saltshaker had moved from the center of the soiled tablecloth at the supposedly nice restaurant to a box in her closet. Sitting in the office of the school principal, Mr. Wamsley, she’d stolen a pen set off his desk. It had consisted of a pen made to look like a twig, a sort of trough for the pen to lie in made to look like a hollowed-out log, and a small cup for thumbtacks or paper clips concealed in what was intended to look like the miniature stump of a tree. It was the sort of thing Louisa might have begged her mother to buy her father for his desk as a Father’s Day gift when Louisa was seven or eight, before she realized, as she now realized about so many things, that it was not charming and pretty but ugly and cheap. While Mr. Wamsley consulted with her teacher just outside the door, Louisa removed her windbreaker and rolled all three of the desk items into it and sat with the roll on her lap the whole time Mr. Wamsley was lecturing her, and then walked out with the roll in her hands. In what way had Mr. Wamsley then suffered, for no longer having those things on his desk? A stupid girl named Dawn Delavan brought little plastic blue elf figurines, each with a different absurd at-
tribute like a wizard’s hat, a paintbrush, or a harp to the classroom, and though these disappeared one at a time, Dawn Delavan never learned to stop bringing them, she just fussed and cried to their teacher, Miss Prince, while Miss Prince trained her cold steady gaze on Louisa.
“You don’t think that stealing is wrong?” Dr. Brickner said now.
“I know that it’s wrong. I don’t see why. I don’t see what difference it makes.”
“Kidnapping is stealing, isn’t it?”
He lowered the flashlight onto the surface of his desk so that its light shrank beneath it and vanished along with all the white, yellow, and pink sheets of paper describing Louisa’s problems and her crimes. Then with a click he turned the flashlight off. Twilight settled around them, taking on the dim shapes of the room. Dr. Brickner set to work raising the blinds, which required much more effort and time than the lowering had. He had to haul on the dangling cords hand over hand as if they were a part of something really serious, like a boat or flagpole. The blinds screamed in protest as they rose, but finally sunlight broke into the room. It was orange, like the light from a fire. Ever since they had arrived in California, Louisa had noticed the light. Even Dr. Brickner, who presumably wasn’t new here, seemed surprised by the light and gazed out the window for a moment before sitting back down in his desk chair to face her.
“When you told people your father was kidnapped, I think you meant he’d been taken away from you. Stolen. Death steals the people we love.”
“But I never said he was kidnapped,” Louisa repeated. “My mother made that up. She makes everything up.”
Dr. Brickner answered with a contemplative expression. I believe you, he seemed to want his expression to say. Louisa gazed back at him unflinchingly, first clothing him with pity, then contempt, and then pity again, trying to decide which was best, as if he were a paper doll. There was nothing on his desk anymore to obstruct their calm view of each other, and Louisa wondered if he would notice, and thought that if he did, she would find a new outfit for him. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to have to do this. She wasn’t sure if her suspense, as she
waited, was eager or fearful. These two possibilities would seem to have opposite meanings but they felt the same way. Now Dr. Brickner took a pen from his jacket breast pocket and dropped his gaze from her face to a notepad. As he filled the pad with illegible writing his face was serene. He seemed to have found what he needed. “Why don’t you play with the toys while I finish my notes,” he suggested as he wrote, but of course she did not move. He didn’t repeat the suggestion. When he was finished writing, he came around the desk again and said something about what a pleasure it had been meeting her. He put out his hand and she shook it without standing up. If he found this rude he didn’t let on. Then she followed him to his office door with her arms crossed at her back, and after more pleasantries with her aunt he disappeared behind his door again and Louisa’s aunt drove them home in the car.
She dug the flashlight out from where she’d concealed it in the crack between mattress and headboard. Aimed at the ceiling, it made a frail jellyfish of light, pierced by the stripe from the door. Walking the beach at sunset, her father always brought their flashlight, its weight and shape awkwardly housed in his slacks pocket. If she let go of his hand and ran ahead a bit before turning back, she’d see the flashlight tugging his waist on one side. He’d been particularly cautious, her father. At restaurants he would poke through her food with a fork before letting her eat it. In crosswalks and even on sidewalks he was afraid she’d be hit by a car, and although she had turned ten years old still held her tightly by the hand any time they walked out in public. He feared the ancient wildness of domesticated animals and would not let Louisa have a pet. And he must have feared darkness, always bringing that flashlight despite how long the sunset lived in the sky, despite how easy it was to see their way down the beach even on nights when they looked at the stars. Except for that very last night, when they finally walked on the breakwater, and went so far it was totally dark before they got back to shore. They’d needed the flashlight to be sure of their footing on the slippery rocks, her father’s grip almost crushing her fingers. When the flashlight fell, it landed almost noiselessly in sand.
This fact—that the flashlight, in falling, landed almost noiselessly in sand—rippled over her like the pale cloud of light on the ceiling. It was not a memory, as Louisa understood memory: a fragmented, juddering filmstrip of image and sound. This wasn’t something but nothing, an absence where a presence was expected. There had been no clattering onto the rocks. There had been no splash in the water. The flashlight had landed almost noiselessly in sand.
Her father, it was understood, had slipped and fallen off the breakwater, and drowned. Louisa had been found unconscious on the shore. Her father, his body, had not been found at all. Currents explained Louisa’s father’s body’s disappearance. Shock explained Louisa’s ending up, without remembering how, on the sand. All of it was sad. None of it was surprising. The flashlight had landed almost noiselessly in sand but Louisa must have dropped it there herself, she must have obtained the flashlight from her slipping, falling, drowning father, walked the rest of the causeway of slippery rocks to the shore, and dropped the flashlight almost noiselessly herself.
What had happened to that flashlight? She had only remembered it now, holding this flashlight, gripping its warm metallic heft, and aiming its porthole of faltering light. She loved this flashlight, and not just because she had stolen it from Dr. Brickner. It was a faithful object. It had been lost, without purpose, before she had snatched it away. She would have to get fresh batteries for it; she would steal them from the rack at the checkout the next time she went with her aunt to the store.
Her door swung open and the spill of light from the hallway washed over the ceiling and drowned her jellyfish. “Louisa?” came her mother’s cracked voice. The whole chair bumbled through the doorframe, banging and scraping in haste, and then her mother was on her, having somehow launched herself across the space between wheelchair and bed. Just as Louisa had told Dr. Brickner: Her mother didn’t need that chair. She was faking.
“Oh, Louisa, Louisa, oh, sweetie,” her mother was keening, drowning Louisa in touch as Louisa thrashed her away. Her aunt was also busying into the scrum.
“What a sound, like she’s being murdered!” her aunt cried. “It’s making my hair stand on end!”
Why wouldn’t they leave her alone? She kicked with everything she had and the flashlight fell out of her covers and crashed to the floor. It made such a bang that her mother and aunt gasped and froze. Then her aunt saw the cause of the noise and picked it up from the floor.
“When the doctor called this evening and told me you’d taken his flashlight, I gave him a piece of my mind. You’ve made a liar out of me!” her aunt said.
Then they did leave her alone, though she didn’t see which of them yanked the door shut, plunging her in darkness.
Part I
Seok
Seok
At last he goes
At last he goes to school.
He’s been waiting. He can’t remember a time he wasn’t waiting, the same way he can’t remember a time he couldn’t read. The ones that make simple sounds and the ones that are entire pictures, ideas. The first time he ever saw a book was when he entered the schoolroom, a place he views as his but heretofore unreasonably withheld from him. The orderliness, the discipline, the ever-changing chalked strings of words instead of just the same street signs that never say anything new. The glorious singing and shouting, the fierce battling in the dusty schoolyard against dummies of scrap wood or sacking and husks, the inordinate amount of time spent tending vegetables in the garden, learning to use different tools including the almost-as-tall-as-you shovel, helping out the old men at the docks to coil their ropes by running the rope dizzyingly in a tiny circle because your arms are too short to do it any other way, in other words every kind of activity besides schoolwork (but there is a bit of this, too, and that feels like a lot, to one who’s never held a pencil or brush or a bottle of ink of his own). He loves all of it; he assumes his ordained place. In the pecking orders, those of the other children no less than those their woman teacher recognizes (no men in classrooms anymore, a disappointment he soon forgets), he’s at the top.
All of this he associates with his new name, another transformative
improvement. He loves the way it sounds in the mouths of his new friends, his school friends, only some of whom are friends from before, from the dirty passageway ever narrowed by handcarts and scrap heaps and laundry cascading from every possible anchorage that he will not understand for some years is not even a street, just as he will not understand for some years that the crooked concavity decorated by his own family’s laundry is not even a house so much as a clever improvisation of his father’s. Everything within the concavity is an improvisation of his mother’s, including the stiff, colorless cloth of his trousers; they’re too poor even for dye. But with school this had to change, as did so many other things; he does not know or think to wonder what his mother did to get the dyed cloth for his school pants. The things he does see her do, her eternal kneeling to a little handful of vegetables or a little water in a pot or a lapful of fabric, are so permanent a part of his experience he does not recognize his mother as productive, he does not recognize that everything that comes in contact with his body, or that makes its way inside, has been somehow created from just short of nothing by her.
His friends from before also have new names and he does not think to wonder if they wonder about them, because he does not wonder about his own new name, only appreciates how well it fits him, especially when hallooed after him with admiration and ill-disguised longing by the other children, all of whom want him for coconspirator: Hiroshiiiiiiiii, they holler as he knifes past. The name his mother and father still call him does not unfurl this way, it is unexpandable, truncated, blunt, and though it was once so intimate to him he did not notice it or anything about it—it was included in his body, part of the way things always were—that name has been lopped off and seems like an always-lopped thing, this muffled stub of a sound like someone gulping down a sob or indigestion.
“Hiroshiiiii!” comes the holler and he never turns, never seems to slow down, but imperceptibly he allows a creaking handcart to interfere with his path, he rotates like a top to eye the meager market stands, he knocks away a small rock that has bedded itself in his foot sole. By these slight concessions which his peers never grasp he makes
it possible for himself to be reached. Other children strike him as a little slow, unaware of his ways of accommodating them. His ability to hide this difference between himself and other children is pure instinct. As his self-consciousness develops this knack will recede, but for now he can still camouflage and his nascent distinction takes only desirable forms: he’s the number-one boy, his qualities bedazzle generally and especially the old and slow-moving who never suspect that this boy is the thief who accounts for the shortfall at the end of an already bad market day.
The other boys catch up and off they go on their rounds, roughhousing between the vendors, who sit like solemn stones beside their little piles of mountain ferns or frail carrots drawn slightly too soon from the dirt because the leisure to wait for a vegetable doesn’t exist anymore. Despite the decline of rations, these boys are still roundcheeked from their parents’ sacrifices, some of them even show dimples. Their reckless play cracks smiles across a few vendors’ faces; a few sets of hunched shoulders hitch with amusement. “Be careful, you boys,” a few warn, as sure enough the puppylike tangle of limbs sends a couple of boys sprawling and wailing. Now the old vendors rouse themselves from their spots, circle the fallen to check for split skin or snapped bones, nod with eventual satisfaction as the hurt boys, tear- and dust- and snot-streaked, slowly regain their footing and reassemble their pride. “Go on now, you’re all right,” the old people confirm before resuming their vigilance over heaps of foodstuffs that are not quite perceptibly smaller. The uninjured boys have long since melted away down the cluttered streetscape.
Around a corner the boys, those who did the pushing and those who were pushed, divide the spoils with practiced efficiency. Hiroshi by unspoken agreement adjudicates. When he later deposits the edible contents of his pockets in front of his mother, she regards them without comment. They are the only fresh vegetables she’ll cook with all week. His father, who comes home every day in clothing so stiffened with dirt that his mother uses the hand broom to beat him all over like a rug before he undresses and joins them inside, is unaware of this system by which the evening soup bowl is enhanced. Hiroshi has a little
sister, Soonja, just learning to walk, and a little brother, Seung, who doesn’t yet crawl. Obviously neither of them has a school name yet. These silent transactions between himself and his mother are perhaps a reason his mother is restrained when he brings home the school note that he and his classmates have spent the morning transcribing. His note is particularly excellent, his teacher had praised it, gazing on him as she often does with a mixture of frank affection and distracted contemplation. The note is part of the continuous, exciting life of school that in just a few short months has displaced the world of home—school is where he lives, home is where he briefly eats and sleeps, his school friends and his teachers are his people, his parents and toddler sister and squalling blanket-bundle brother often seem to him like strangers, so total is their separation from, their ignorance of, the world in which he vibrantly exists. At school, a sense of purpose and progress infuses every moment. That same week they had harvested the peas from their garden—Sensei with her pale slender fingers had shown them how to press down on the seams of the pods so the seam zippered open, disclosing the fat peas so snug in their line. She had shown them how to gently spring them free, and then each pod’s peas were spilled on a cloth around which they knelt, struggling to free yet control their bouncing, exuberant peas. When all the peas had been spilled on the cloth like green stars, their sensei showed them how to group the peas in tens, then how to count the groups of ten, then how to know, from the number of themselves and the number of peas, how many peas each of them should receive in their palm. Then they had each taken up their allotment of peas and—been allowed to eat them! And the peas had been sharp with the brightness of life, Hiroshi had thoroughly chewed up and spread out the taste of each pea on his tongue, and no food had ever been so delicious. They made their eating of their handfuls of peas—he could have tossed his down all at once, they all could have, they were all always hungry, yet they weren’t even tempted to do this—take as long as it possibly could, which was helped by all the laughing and talking they did. They had grown these peas entirely themselves; it was the first thing they had ever done together as a class, remember? Remember sprouting the dried peas so
that each grew a tail? Remember carefully bedding each sprout in the ground? Remember giving the frilly pea plants bamboo poles to climb so that each plant could reach for the sun? These were the same bamboo poles they had used in their bayonet training, when they stood in the dust of the schoolyard in only their shorts, and, gripping their poles very tight with two hands, stabbed, and stabbed again at the battered dummies they’d inherited from the upper-grades students, who had made them of gunnysacks stuffed with husks, while their teacher shouted through her cupped hands, “You must be fast but also take aim! Do not stab your classmates! Do not stab your foot!” Now that the peas had been harvested, they would reclaim the poles and have bayonet practice again.
“So, read it,” his mother finally said of the note he held open before her. She made no comment at all about the beauty of his characters or the near-total absence of ink spots, and he felt sharpen into a point the sadness and disappointment that always stole into him once he was home, as if he’d stabbed the bamboo pole into himself. But once he was reading the note, the excitement of its contents renewed in his mind and the pain in his gut was forgotten.
The children continued to glorify their Emperor and their nation, explained the note, by glorifying their classroom, the shared site of their learning, which efforts made the room ever more safe, comfortable, and instructive to themselves and anyone who might visit. The children had accomplished great things on their own!—among other decorative activities, painting banners bearing patriotic slogans as well as images of uniforms and armaments—but some help was needed from the mothers. Each child would be making a padded cushion for his or her desk chair, each cushion to consist of two quilted layers. The two layers would be joined on two sides that met at a corner, and left open at the other two sides. This way, the comfortable seat cushion also doubled as a head cover—Sensei had made hers already, and had shown her students how it opened to fit on her head like a hood. In the beam of his mother’s expressionless stare Hiroshi mimed the same actions: snatching up the invisible cushion, pulling apart the two sides and ducking his head in, then hunkering swiftly for safety, the hood
anchored by his palms flattened over his ears. Hiroshi ran swiftly in place, there being no space in their home for him to actually run.
“Why?” his mother finally said. “Why wear the cushion on your head?”
Already he had the sense, though he could not have named it, that the glory and the urgency of war were somehow absent from his home. That the manner in which things mattered everywhere else— even that they mattered at all—left off at their threshold. He only vaguely knew—because its ingloriousness did not hold his interest— that his father variously dug holes and trenches, moved rocks and dirt, and otherwise contributed his steadily diminishing force to the inexhaustible demands of new roads. This, in ways both direct and indirect, also was part of the glory and the urgency of war. But even if he had connected his father’s lengthy absences and brief, hollow-eyed presences with the war, he would not have further connected the war with that sifting of dirt from which his father stepped, leaving footprints behind, when his mother and the hand broom were done. The war stayed outside. The war failed to include his home, or his home failed to be worthy of the war. But this was what school was for.
As this complex understanding moved through him, his exasperation with his mother gave way to an entirely different feeling of kindliness for her. For the first time he felt consciously how helpless she was without him.
“For the bombing raids,” he patiently explained. And then he left her for his after-school life of the streets, at the same time giving no thought to the impossible injunction he had placed on her. Somehow, the squares of quilting appeared on the morning he needed to bring them to school. He was six years old in the spring of 1945. Though worldly for a child of his age, there still were things he didn’t know.
He’d had less practice with a needle than with a brush, and the stitches assembling his cushion were correspondingly rudimentary. His effort, however, was as exceptional as always, and Sensei had praised his cushion and shown it around to his classmates: see how she could yank
the two sides open, see how she could pull the cover tight around her head, and Hiroshi’s stitches held strong without threatening to tear. He would have the use of this cushion/head cover for a good long time, Sensei told them all, inviting his appropriate pride, and indeed his cushion long outlasted the war. It long outlasted his adored, gentle sensei, who after the war’s end got married and left the classroom, to be replaced by a male sensei who, though he’d spent the war doing the sort of important brain work that did not involve combat, refused to speak of it because, as he angrily informed them, they were far behind their grade level and would never make their contributions to society if they did not hurl themselves into the effort. But this new effort was not tangible, comprehensible, or enthralling, as the war effort had been. One afternoon a fresh disturbance rearranged the afternoon street, which recently had happened so often that Hiroshi was less aware of the difference between uneventful and agitated than he was aware of varieties of agitation. There had been that summer day of the war’s abrupt end, when running shouts had streaked past like comets until one threw open the door to the classroom and their principal, shocking in his loss of composure, cried out that the Emperor was on the radio and they all must run home to their parents immediately. There had been a different tone of clamor the day American troops first arrived in their small seaside town. Today’s disturbance was somehow furtive. It zigzagged like a mouse rather than sweeping all persons with it like a tide. It found Hiroshi in the form of a friend of his mother’s, one of their slum’s sisterhood who treated all the children with equal rough authority. She yanked him close and barked, “Get your mom out here fast,” in his ear. In the distance he heard shrill whistles, lively cracks like artillery fire, and beneath them at slow intervals a more menacing, thunderlike boom. Such phenomena would generally empty the crowded street in the direction of the sound, and yet he sensed a hesitancy around him, and observing eyes followed him as he ran. “Auntie Kim says come fast,” he conveyed, and somehow his mother, with his sister by the hand and his brother on her hip, unquestioningly followed him. “I told you!” Auntie Kim said to his mother. “I told you!” Whatever it was she had said to his mother couldn’t be guessed by Hiroshi as he
darted his glance back and forth between his mother and the source of warlike noise that had come into view: a ragtag parade, perhaps threetimes-ten women and men, messily anticipated and flanked by running children and a few wobbly cyclists. The formation of persons was loose but their repeated shouts were loud, and several poles bobbed from their midst, from which snapped a standard-size United States flag such as he had already seen flying from the back of military vehicles on the coast road; a white flag so many times larger than the US one, of so much seething, undulating fabric that three men were struggling to control it on its pole; and a skinny white banner. The symbols on both the enormous white flag and the skinny white banner were illegible to him. He could see a colored medallion at the center of the flag, red and blue swirled together like the crests of two waves; and at the corners of the flag, short and longer black dashes making different designs. On the banner were markings that, unlike those on the flag, he knew for certain were words, but unnervingly, they were not words he recognized.
“What does it say?” he asked his mother urgently. “What are they yelling?”
Auntie Kim snarled in disgust. “The smartest boy in his school, and he can’t even read his own language.”
“I can read!” he said furiously. “If they write it correctly!”
But the women were ignoring him now.
“Aren’t they afraid?” his mother implored, sounding frightened herself.
“I told you,” Auntie Kim repeated.
“But what if they’re arrested?”
“They won’t be. The Americans say we’re liberated now.”
“The Americans were our enemy,” Hiroshi scolded the mothers. Was it possible this was the first time he’d ever seen his mother outside their home? She certainly acted as though she had never been outside before. “They inflicted unthinkable cruelty on us. Our job now is to take them in hand and show them how to make peace.”
“Korea is free,” Auntie Kim concluded, and then, to him: “Are you paying attention? That’s what the banner says! That’s what they are shouting! That’s our own Taegukgi!”
The fishmonger on the main shopping street owned a radio and sometimes Hiroshi loitered nearby and watched him tune it, the man’s calloused fingers touching the dial so slightly Hiroshi could not even see the dial change position, but something would shift, out of spraying static would resolve spoken language, like a melting in reverse, the puddle lifting into a lace of snowflakes. Something like that happened after Auntie Kim spoke. Hiroshi understood that the incoherent noise that had meant nothing to him was in fact two languages, overlapping and dismantling each other until his realization helped him tease them apart: the language he spoke and wrote at school every day and spoke at play and in the streets of his town; and the language his parents used with each other, mostly late at night when they thought he was asleep. He knew this language also, he understood it when he heard it directed at him, but it rarely left his mouth and he had never learned to write it down. The parade had moved past and the crowd closed in its wake as if trying to decide whether to join. The enormous flag heaved and snapped in the distance like a sail pulling free from its mast. Korea is free! and Long live Korea! and Out of darkness, into light! were all three being uttered in his school language and in his parents’ late-night language, both at the same time, so that as his intense concentration on the cacophony flagged, and as it drew farther away, the filigree of clarity collapsed, and all he heard again was meaningless noise.
“But what’s Korea?” he asked as they turned to walk home.
“Let me die,” Auntie Kim said.
“Korea is the homeland of Koreans,” his mother told him.
“But what are Koreans?”
“We are,” said his mother. “You are. That’s why your name isn’t really Hiroshi, it’s 석.”
“What do you mean my name isn’t Hiroshi?” he cried.
“I told you,” Auntie Kim said to his mother again.
His mother replied, “But what choice did we have?”
His parents’ homeland was an island called Jeju, where mer-women raised glittering heaps of succulent bivalves from the deep, where
oranges the size of melons and sweeter than candy so weighed down the boughs of the trees that a person didn’t even have to stretch to pick the fruit, and where the soil was so rich, being the gift of an ancient volcano, that it was almost good enough to eat on its own. Why his parents would ever leave such a paradise was a question it would not occur to him to ask until he was older, by which time he would know that it’s possible to be poor anywhere. He no longer remembered that his knowledge of his parents’ island’s wonders came from the ancient bedtime stories told him by his mother, which, like the island they concerned, belonged to a bygone halcyon period, his toddlerhood, before his younger sister had arrived.
Even if he had remembered his process of learning, he would not have known that Jeju Island was not one of Japan’s many thousands of islands, because this had never been mentioned. For his mother it went without saying, just as for Hiroshi it went without saying that this island, like all the other islands that made up his known world, was Japanese. To learn it was not Japanese but Korean was so profoundly disorienting that the greater discovery, that he himself was Korean, was for the moment secondary. He pined for some tangible proof, but the map of the Japanese Empire had disappeared from his classroom along with all his and his classmates’ decorative efforts, all their colorful drawings, all their painstakingly calligraphed slogans and songs, everything except their seat-covers/bomb-raid-head-protectors, spared perhaps by their deceptively domestic appearance. Even the Imperial Rescript, basic as the blackboard, had been replaced by a pale rectangular ghost on the wall. Almost every textbook but those pertaining to math had also vanished, to undergo some process called revision, which made their intemperate sensei angrier than ever, and more disinclined than ever to notice Hiroshi’s particular gifts, which hadn’t gone away just because the war and the empire had. Yet the day Hiroshi arrived at the door to the school building so early even the custodian wasn’t yet there, and once his sensei finally arrived made a deep bow and scuttled, eyes on his own toes, in that man’s wake all the way to the administrative offices in which no student was allowed, his sensei did finally turn to him, to ask with bitten-back impatience what he was doing there.
“I’d like a map to study, Teacher,” he told his teacher, still studying his toes.
“Straighten up. For what reason do you want to study a map?”
“To learn where different things are, Teacher.”
“What things? There are many things and many maps.”
“To learn what are the islands that are Japan and—what aren’t.”
His sensei’s lips compressed with what could have equally been distaste or contemplation. “You’ve chosen an unpropitious time for such an interest,” he said, and sent Hiroshi to their stripped-bare classroom, even more discouraging a place when entered all by oneself. But at the end of the next day his sensei, while dismissing his classmates, called him forward to his desk. Once they were alone he removed a brightcolored pamphlet from his briefcase. “One Nation, One System! The People’s Transport Network: Comfortable, Modern, Far-Reaching.”
Stylized pagodas peeked out from behind stylized hills; a pen-and-ink locomotive and steamship stood shoulder to shoulder, ready to span land and sea. Dwarfing them was the familiar blood-red sunburst logo for Sunrise Toothpaste.
“This is my personal property,” Hiroshi’s sensei said, unfolding the map so it covered the desk. The map was breathtaking, so beautiful Hiroshi felt a strange pain in his chest. He’d never seen anything so bright, clean, and beguiling. The land was yellow, with green mountain peaks surging across it like arrows, the sea was bright blue, and the rail lines—for that was what this was, Hiroshi understood, a map of all the trains and where they went—were dark red ribbons twisting over the landscape, with the countless circles of their stations strung densely along them like beads.
The map could not accommodate the size of the rail network without breaking it into pieces. While the greatest part of the map was a skinny rectangle almost as long as Hiroshi’s wingspan that pressed the four big islands into its borders, obliging them to lie flatter than they did naturally, there were three more panels of yellow land, green mountain, red rail line, and blue sea that Hiroshi struggled to connect to the map of the empire that had once been so familiar a part of his classroom. But his sensei touched a fingertip to each of those
panels in turn. “Formosa, Chōsen, and Manchukuo you must now disregard. And I’m afraid this map does not show all the thousands of our smaller islands, because they are not reached by train. I think that was your main interest? But this is the only map that I own.”
“I don’t need to see all of the islands. I’m just looking for the one called Jeju.”
“Jeju?” His sensei paused a moment. “Ah. Kang-san, I believe you mean the island that we call Saishū. It’s a big island. It may appear here.” His sensei leaned toward the map and adjusted his glasses to sit a little closer to the tip of his nose, and Hiroshi imagined him during the war, doing the sort of brain work that is even more important than combat, and riding the modern and far-reaching trains with the aid of this map. “Here it is,” his sensei then said, laying his finger near the base of Chōsen’s dangling paw, where it disintegrated, just where the paw’s claws would be, into many tiny islets that might not even be fully detached, and one larger and farther-off oblong like a fallen-off toenail. So it was true. The island was a part of Chōsen. It held no green arrow-shape mountain, no red ribbon of track. It was itself held, by wispy black threads, to the paw, as if in danger of floating away. “Our ferry system linked Saishū to the peninsula,” his sensei said, explaining the threads, “though I can’t say whether any ferries still operate. That would be up to the Americans in their infinite wisdom.” Hiroshi’s riveted gaze no longer took the map in, his desire to take it home with him had become so overwhelming. He only wanted to be alone with it, to pore over it as long as he liked, to trace the routes of the tracks with his fingers. He was still so stunned that Jeju had an outline and location and alternate name it hadn’t even occurred to him to find the town in which he himself lived, the bright white bead indicating the station with its single set of tracks and peaked-roof station house, the front façade of which held his town’s most reliable clock. He was still struggling to choose the right words to ask his sensei, whose show of favor to him today was so unprecedented, how he might stay with the map just a little bit longer, when, like a reverse magic trick, in a few quick folds his sensei made the map disappear behind the Sunrise Toothpaste logo—and then that too was gone, into the briefcase. Hiroshi was so
stunned by the dispossession it took him a moment to realize his sensei was still speaking to him.
“Then your parents are from Saishū, Kang-san? Though with your surname I suppose you could be a Formosan.” Hiroshi could not follow the thread of this at all; his gaze kept straying to the briefcase, as if enough silent imploring might cause the map to creep out again on its own power.
“My parents are from Jeju, from Saishū,” he managed to confirm.
“And will they return there, as so many Koreans are doing?”
Return there? Why would his parents return to a place they had left? But this wasn’t Hiroshi’s own wise comment, it was the argument he heard day and night, whether between his parents, or between his mother and Auntie Kim or another such woman friend, or between his parents and some other agitated pair with whom his parents both agreed and disagreed often at the same time. “Will you go back?” “Why go back to a place that we left?” “Because it’s different now—” “Yes! Worse!” There had been the story of Auntie Kim’s brother, who had been cheated ten different ways just getting as far as the port of Senzaki, a long expensive journey as it was; who had then been made by the American military authorities to give up all the money and goods he had brought with him, so that he boarded the “liberty ship” with barely enough yen in his pocket to eat for a week; who had found on his arrival in Busan late at night that he couldn’t even change his yen into won, so that he had to beg a meal and sleep on the street; and whose prospects had steadily diminished from there, because southern Korea was a place of sheer chaos, presided over by Americans who could not even coordinate the two ends of a single boat journey, but greeted with dismissive bewilderment the very same people who’d been herded to Korea by the Americans running Japan! Auntie Kim’s brother had finally stowed away on a boat coming back to Japan, minus his life savings, minus working papers. He now smuggled Koreans like himself as well as contraband into Japan. This was what happened! And in the next breath the very same Auntie Kim was imploring, often with tears splashing off her chin onto the floor, “How can we not go to Korea, our own country? That is finally free?” While
someone else demanded, “One thousand yen per family? Or for each person? Could the baby be counted?” And another cried, “How can you ask this? What does it matter if you’ll starve there in three weeks, or six?”
“I don’t think they want to return there,” Hiroshi said now, though in having the question posed to him, and by his sensei, the prospect became suddenly real, a real thing that might really take place.
“I hope not. It would be a shame, for a boy like you, who clearly has prospects. Prospects that could have gone far, when all of us were one people, one nation. Now a boy like you is meant to go back to the peninsula, where the very universities that our Emperor built are being stripped of their scholars and books. But the Americans, in their wisdom, would not like to hear me talk this way. They would call this a glorification of our imperial past. They would find me, possibly, an impediment to democratization. I would certainly not want to be that. I am, however, glad to hear that your parents have not dropped everything and gone running for ‘liberty ships.’ ”
“Yes, Sensei.”
“And your name?”
“My name?”
“Your given name. Perhaps you have heard that the Americans, in the interests of democratization, are concerned that we teachers should not discourage our students from using their given names, even if these are not Japanese. You don’t feel discouraged from using such a name, do you?”
“I don’t have another name besides Hiroshi,” he said honestly, and then realized this wasn’t correct. “Oh, I do!” he said, feeling the surprise of discovery. “But I never use it. I don’t know how to write it.”
His sensei did not say, What a shame, or, In that case, you must learn. Instead he said, “I hope you enjoyed the map.”
“I did enjoy it very much, and appreciate it very very much. Thank you very much, Sensei, for the opportunity to see it.” He wondered what additional expressions of gratitude and appreciation he could add that might inspire his sensei to give him the map forever or even
just for one night, but his sensei had already stood, cueing Hiroshi to bow as his sensei took leave.
Now Sensei’s word “democratization” seemed to find Hiroshi’s ears all the time. In the interests of democratization, the Americans were letting Koreans start up their own schools, where for the first time their children could learn the Korean language—or at least the Americans had so far done nothing to stop the schools from being set up. It took time for this news to make its way to Hiroshi’s small town with its small—yet larger than Hiroshi had known—number of Koreans. By the time the news arrived, it had already been invalidated by further developments the news of which would also take time to arrive. But still, the news seized his mother’s imagination. It was as if the shock of that day when Hiroshi had brought her to see the parade had finally ceased its reverberations and left her strangely alert, different than she’d been in the past. The nearest Korean school was said to be setting up in Kanazawa, an hour away by train, but Hiroshi was nine, more than old enough, all the adults agreed, to manage a simple train ride while safeguarding his six-year-old sister. “Change schools?” Hiroshi cried, horrified by the seriousness of the conversation, the number of adults involved—lately it seemed that every person who’d turned out to be Korean in their town was squeezing through their door at all hours of the night, while Hiroshi and his now three younger siblings were trying to sleep. They’d formed a Committee of Koreans Who Live in Japan, and seemed to consider his home that could barely fit its occupants’ bedrolls their emergency headquarters. “I won’t change schools, I’m top boy! My sensei says I have prospects, he’s been loaning me books!” This stinging rebuttal only made the committee trade glances. The discussions of a new school continued, somehow not despite but because of his protests.
The whole debate was soon nullified, at least so far as it touched on Hiroshi; the culprit was democratization again. This time, the word was invoked bitterly: no sooner had the Korean schools opened than the Americans were ordering them closed, on the grounds that the Koreans who had opened the schools were too much allied with
the Japanese Communist Party. “And so what if we are?” Hiroshi’s father exclaimed, to the murmured assents of the room. Hiroshi’s father also was changing—or perhaps he was reverting to a person he’d been in the past, a person who had scraped together the cost of passage and permits, who had led his young wife, their first child in her belly, onto the ship that carried them and the single box that held all their possessions from Jeju Island to the port of Busan, from the port of Busan across the lurching East Sea into the Kanmon Strait, from that eye of a needle into Japan’s inland sea and across its whole length to the port of Osaka, never knowing if, at the end of that journey, work, food, and shelter would surrender themselves to his quest to obtain them. How could Hiroshi, the son of a man who was beaten like a rug by his wife every night, have suspected the existence of such a daring person? “The JCP are the only Japanese who ever gave a damn if we Koreans on road crew got paid the same wage as the Japanese men. They’re the only ones who ever gave a damn if we got our arm broke by some fool and got fired when it wasn’t our fault. That’s why our committee stands with them, because they stand with us! But the Americans are saying, Those Koreans—they’re an enemy people. They’re anti-democratic. That’s why they’re killing us on Jeju. All the while saying, Why won’t you go back to Jeju? Last year you could starve there, now you’ll also get shot!”
If the Emperor had never spoken over the radio, announcing it was time to stop fighting and create a grand peace; if all the people who turned out to be Koreans had not begun shouting Freedom and waving new flags in the street; if there had been no “liberty ships” transporting floods of them to that paw-shaped peninsula, and leaky, sneaking fishing boats smuggling scores of them back, even poorer from the effort of returning to the homeland than they’d been the first time they had left; then Hiroshi might have kept on being lonely in his family in the way he’d never noticed let alone minded, instead of being lonely in this new way, in which his family seemed to contain scores of strangers, and his realm of happiness—in the classroom, with Sensei—was somehow a source of outrage, another of so many outrages to be debated deep into the night. When his parents had sailed away from
Jeju they’d been part of a great emptying of their impoverished island, until for every family still living on Jeju, it was said at least one of their members had left. And when Hiroshi’s father made his way north and east from Osaka, always chasing the new chance of a job, other Jeju islanders were always alongside, so that the handful who finally set roots in this far-flung small town on Japan’s western coast still were links in a chain, down which modest sums flowed to the people back home, and, in the opposite direction, news and gossip flowed to the people who’d left.
In March of 1948, when Hiroshi was nine, Jeju islanders protesting the division of liberated Korea into US- and Soviet-occupied zones were fired on by the soldiers of the US-backed provisional government in the south, and in April the back-and-forth between the two sides mushroomed into all-out war; for every family who’d sent one member to Japan in the previous decade, there was one member at least who’d been murdered by the government forces, often an old man or a child. The same month in Kobe, riots broke out when the Japanese police tried to enforce the US order to close the new Korean schools. In May, despite the ongoing protests, elections were held in the US-backed half of Korea, leaving no way to rejoin south and north. The Americans wanted only to cement the regime they’d installed, led by the same man who had ordered the bloodshed on Jeju, Hiroshi’s parents and fellow committee members agreed. Even here in Japan, to which more Jeju islanders than ever were now trying to flee, it was clear the Americans scorned the Koreans as ignorant rabble or worse. The committee members who had fought for the schools, and for other measures for Koreans that were simply fair and right, were threatened with deportation to the new US-backed southern Korea, where the US-handpicked president vowed to throw them in jail, incorrigible Communists that they obviously were.
One afternoon Hiroshi came home to find his mother and her friends awaiting him with a square of paper that they seemed both to fear, and fear for; he must wash his hands immediately before he touched it, how did a smart boy like him get so filthy? The square of paper, when he had finally been permitted—though it felt like
compelled—to examine it, held three sentences in English, including several words he’d never seen before. This was a blow, as his most recent triumph in school was in the subject of English, in which he’d swiftly caught up to his sensei (who said to him, in that unsettling tone that mingled reprimand and praise, “Soon you’ll be teaching me”). Yet here, alongside newly familiar terms like US Forces and Korean and army were mysteries like inasmuch and oppression:
Honored Commanding General of the Great US Forces!
I am a Korean schoolchild who lives in Japan. I beg your permission for my revered teachers to freely teach me Korean subjects in my own language, inasmuch as it was your Great Army that liberated me from ruthless Japanese oppression!
“I don’t understand some of the words,” he admitted at last, but his mother made a sound of impatience.
“It’s not for you, it’s for American soldiers. You only need to copy it in your best English writing. And don’t make mistakes.”
“I couldn’t make mistakes if I tried!” he said, deeply offended. “And why should I copy it if you already have it?”
“Because it’s a letter from a schoolchild, isn’t that what it says? That’s what we were told that it says!”
“But I don’t want to send this letter! I don’t want Korean school!”
“It isn’t from you, it’s from Soonja. You’re to sign it, Kang Soonja aged 6.”
“Have her do it herself!”
“You know she’s too little to write anything! Can’t you do this one thing for your dongsaeng?” And so he set himself to copying the letter, not so easy with his mother and the aunties all crowding and following hawkeyed each stroke, as if to catch him subverting the message.
No local Korean school with the required, impossible permit materialized in their town as a result of the letter, and Soonja followed him to ordinary school that spring. If his mother blamed Hiroshi, or his penmanship, for this latest defeat at the hands of the American imperialists, who were apparently no better than the Japanese imperialists, at
least no one said so to his face. Nor did he receive any credit when, the following year, such a school did open its doors. In the interval, his parents’ noisy committee had changed, in his view for the better, if only because it withdrew from the foot of his bedroll to some other accommodation. It called itself a branch office of an Organization that had knitted itself out of countless committees all over Japan. The Organization achieved what the riots in Kobe had not: not just Korean schools but other good things, like mutual-aid groups for small-business loans, and pressure on the government to make Koreans into citizens, not just leftover subjects who’d lost even the scant rights they’d had when Japan had been an empire. The Organization didn’t limit itself to the welfare of Koreans who lived in Japan but campaigned tirelessly for reunification of the now-two Koreas. The Organization’s many small offices, which sometimes doubled as the small businesses of its officermembers, flew the flag of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the new name for the north, for it was the DPRK that called for reunification, and that championed the rights of poor working Koreans. Its southern counterpart, the American-backed Republic of Korea, called any Koreans who objected to its policies Reds, and with seeming relish reiterated its threats to jail and execute them.
In 1952, at the same time that Hiroshi started regular high school, the Organization’s long-promised Korean high school in Kanazawa finally opened. His younger siblings (except the new baby, Jeong, who was still too young for school at all) were already attending the Korean primary school that Hiroshi’s parents’ branch office had done so much to launch, his own father building the shoe cubbies, his own mother sewing the blue and red flags. The Americans had finally left Japan, satisfied with the state of democratization, but there was a war now between the two Koreas; it was imperative the North win, so that the two sides were reunified into just one Korea again. At eleven, Soonja had been in charge for years of Seung and the youngest girl, Yeonja, but after his dismissal Hiroshi still sometimes walked to their school, so much smaller and shabbier than his own, to watch them at play in the dust of the yard, to walk them home, holding the two younger ones’ hands while Soonja shouldered their backpacks. His three siblings loved
to sing their school songs, the tunes of which had settled in Hiroshi, but the words of which he barely understood; and often the three of them laughed and teased in the language Hiroshi could less and less bring to his tongue, even as his English had become so advanced it was hard to believe inasmuch had ever caused him trouble.
He knew his parents longed for him to change to the Korean high school in Kanazawa, less for his sake than the school’s. He was a prize pupil, the pride of their town. His attendance would transfer that pride to the school. But “these private ethnic schools are not in full conformance with our education laws,” his old sensei said, when Hiroshi asked him for advice. “They’re permitted to operate, yes—but their graduates can’t sit for our top university entrance exams. If you go to such a school, you throw away all your chances.”
Hearing this he felt both heartbreak and relief at a cleavage that had formed through no fault of his own. “And so I can’t consider it,” he explained to his parents, realizing a distance had opened already, for they hadn’t even asked, although he knew it was the thing they most wanted.
After a time his father said, “We understand and respect your decision. But there is something else. You’re fourteen, a grown man. We know you will do what you want, but please consider this most firm request.”
“Anything,” he said, from so wanting the distance to close, and from feeling so alarmed at being called a grown man.
“We would like you to go by the name that we gave you, at home. It’s confusing for your brothers and sisters. And now that they’re schooled in Korean, we don’t like the sound of ‘Hiroshi’ coming out of their mouths.”
He no longer remembered becoming Hiroshi; he no longer recalled the bright banner it seemed to have trailed behind him as he ran. It was merely the way he’d long answered to roll call. It felt like a painfully undersized thing to give up, given the somberness of the request. “Of course,” he told them. “I’m sorry I didn’t think of it first.” That night when the family sat down to eat, he reminded his younger siblings he
was Seok, that “Hiroshi” was only a name he wore outside their house, like a coat.
Despite his stellar entrance exam scores he wasn’t admitted to Todai. He was also rejected from Kyoto, Tohoku, and Keio. In the end he received a place at the Tokyo Technical College. Later in his life he would claim that this humiliation came as no surprise, that he expected and even hoped for the destruction of his Japanese prospects because it revealed to him, before he wasted real effort, that his future lay elsewhere. But this was a face-saving lie. He was devastated—an experience he had never so much as intuited despite being the son of his parents, whose entire lives had demonstrated systematic unfairness. He remembered his parents blossoming in their Organization, his siblings singing their Korean school songs, and was reminded for the first time in a very long while of his own happy zeal the last year of the war, a little boy whose belief in his Japaneseness hadn’t yet been corrected. The correction having finally arrived, he had no outlet, such as his parents and siblings had found, for his disappointment and shame. He had never been a political student, to the contrary had carefully avoided political clubs, meetings, casual conversations, and even people—he’d felt he couldn’t afford it. Sometimes, the unjustly downtrodden took up arms and fierce miens, but equally often they turned the other cheek, studied harder, camouflaged themselves ever more behind obedience and merit and bided their time, believing against all evidence that the future would bring something better, for them if for nobody else. He tried to be the second kind of ruined person. Despite his unfriendly appearance, despite his bone-deep competitiveness, he was still a poor boy, climbing the one ladder offered to him. He moved to Tokyo to begin his new life, and vowed to demolish his classmates in the race for what second-rate prizes there were.
Yet, disillusioned as he was, when his parents decided to abandon Japan he was dumbfounded.
He’d been living away from his parents for three years when they