Orthopedic Soul: On Susan Choi’s Flashlight

Susan Choi’s Flashlight is not a novel of immigration, but a autopsy of the stolen self. In the transit between Jeju, Japan, and the American Midwest, identity is not "found"—it is laminated, mispronounced, and eventually weaponized. The characters are not seekers; they are refugees from their own biographies, performing "native-ness" as if it were a high-stakes theatrical drill. To be Zainichi is to inhabit a "Japanese Smile"—lips pressed tight to conceal the teeth, a physical manifestation of a tongue that has been surgically altered by history.

The book treats geography as a series of cages. North Korea is a kitsch paradise of indoor plumbing and "revolutionary consciousness" promised in flyers, while Japan is a concrete slum where one’s name is "worn like a coat." The tragedy of "repatriation" is the ultimate aesthetic betrayal: the discovery that the "homeland" is merely a differently shaped cell.

"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... Seok reminded his younger siblings he was Seok, that 'Hiroshi' was only a name he wore outside their house, like a coat."

The self is reduced to a garment, discarded or seized as the political weather changes. In Choi’s hands, the "American Dream" is simply the final, most expensive mask in a trunk full of disguises.

Illumination in this world is never natural; it is always mechanical, battery-operated, and stolen. The flashlight—the EVEREADY, the red plastic toy, the beacon in the dark—is the only "faithful object" because it does not lie about its artificiality. It offers a "frail jellyfish of light" that temporarily arrests the darkness but never truly dispels it. The flashlight is the totem of the displaced observer, the person who needs a tool to see what should have been inherent.

"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... It was satisfyingly heavy. Louisa slid the plastic switch with her thumb and a pale cloud of light appeared on the ceiling."

The act of stealing the light is the only way to own the vision. In Choi’s universe, perception is a form of larceny.

The most disturbing diagnostic feature of Choi’s characters is their reverence for the Pathology of the Brain. The tumor, the "insult to the brain" that is removed like a "ripe fruit," is treated not as a tragedy, but as a missed opportunity for self-knowledge. There is a perverse desire to possess one’s own malignancies, to value the internal growth more than the external life.

"Everyone finds them so frightening, as if they’re grenades! But why, when they come from ourselves? When my growth was removed, the surgeons disposed of it—and everyone was surprised when I said that I wished they had not. I should have had it, don’t you see? It was mine."

This is the "Orthopedic Soul"—a psyche that can only stand upright when braced by trauma, a consciousness that identifies more with its deformities than its health. The "reeducation" of the characters is just a refinement of this bracing; they learn to love their shackles because the shackles provide the only form they have left.

Choi suggests that memory is a "stagnated pool" rather than a river. It doesn't move forward; it just sits there, reflecting a sky that might already be dead. The "truth" of the characters’ lives is leached away by the "blinding blank" of time, leaving only the "liver-spotted hands" and "mummy craniums" of people who outlived their own explanations. To read Flashlight is to gaze into a mirror and realize that the person looking back is an impostor you’ve been paying rent to for decades.