In Flashlight, Susan Choi aims to illuminate the plight of ethnic Koreans in postcolonial Japan through the experiences of a Korean-American family. The novel opens with ten-year-old Louisa walking along a beach in Japan with her father, who is on sabbatical from an American university. The pair don’t return. A search party finds Louisa alone on the shore in hypothermic shock. Her father, who can’t swim, is presumed drowned. 

Louisa’s father was born Seok Kang during the Second World War in Japan, where his Korean parents had moved to find work. At school, he was known as Hiroshi. After the war, with Japan ceding control of Korea to the United States and the Soviet Union, he felt betrayed upon discovering his origins. ‘But what’s Korea?’ he asked his mother. ‘What are Koreans?’ Ten years later, his parents moved to North Korea, seduced by propaganda portraying it as a socialist paradise. Seok declined to join them. Rather than stay in Japan as a second-class citizen, he chose to pursue graduate studies in Massachusetts. In the United States, where he became known as ‘Serk’, he met and married Anne, a self-taught high-school dropout. Both misfits, Serk and Anne were united only by the ‘somber intensity of their sex’. 

Biracial Louisa struggles to fit in at school. She is surprised that, despite her ‘brown hair, brown eyes, and brown skin’, she sticks out among her Japanese classmates. ‘Contentious by reflex’ as a child, growing up Louisa is disdainful of her mother. She eventually installs herself at an unnamed Ivy