Latest news with #Flashlight
Daily Record
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Inside Jessie J's health battles amid breast cancer diagnosis including heartbreaking miscarriage
Price Tag singer Jessie J, 37, has remained in high spirits despite announcing she has been diagnosed with 'early breast cancer' and it's not the first of her health woes. Jessie J has faced a number of various health problems over the years. The 37-year-old has certainly not had an easy time of it, including facing a heartbreaking fertility diagnosis. It comes as the Price Tag singer and former judge on The Voice announced she has been diagnosed with 'early breast cancer'. Jessie is set to undergo surgery following her performance on stage later this month at the Summertime Ball. She has faced numerous health challenges, including being diagnosed with a cardiac condition at the age of eight, enduring a minor stroke at 17, and temporarily losing her hearing in 2020. As the Who You Are singer bravely jokes about 'living her breast life' ahead of her surgery, here's a look at some of the health woes the star has had to endure... Cardiac and stroke Jessie opened up about her rare heart condition that has affected her since she's been a child. The health problem, Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, caused her to suffer a minor stroke when she was aged just 17 years old. Explaining she first was diagnosed at the age of eight, the condition affects the electrical system of the heart and causes symptoms like irregular heartbeats, tightness and shortness of breath. The condition runs in her family and her dad also suffers from it. The Flashlight singer explained how her parents shaped her positive attitude from a young age, never allowing the condition to get the better of her. Speaking to Australian, 9Now, she said: 'I think my mum and dad never allowed me to be defined by something that was a weakness. Ever since I was young it was like, 'Just get on with it. You can do this'.' Addressing a cancer gala audience in New York in 2020, Jessie told the star-studded crowd that she wrote her song 'Who You Are' when she was 18, after she 'had just had a minor stroke," admitting: "I thought that I was never going to get better. 'I feel so lucky that I was given a second chance at life,' she continued. 'So every day when I am able to do this, you have no idea how amazing it feels that I'm so lucky to be onstage and singing and living my dream.' Waking up 'completely deaf' Jessie had another shock when she woke up one morning "completely deaf" and unable to walk in a straight line. She was later diagnosed with Meniere's disease, a chronic inner ear disorder that can cause vertigo and tinnitus. The singing sensation recalled her experience with the condition telling her followers during an Instagram live: "I woke up and felt like I was completely deaf in my right ear, couldn't walk in a straight line." Jessie added: "I know that a lot of people suffer from it and I've actually had a lot of people reach out to me and give me great advice, so I've just been laying low in silence. "Now's the first time I've been able to sing and bear it," the artist admitted. "I'm super grateful for my health. It just threw me off." Fertility struggle Jessie J is now a loving mum to her son, Sky Safir Cornish Colman, however before the happily family unit, with her partner Chanan Colman, she faced some heartbreaking news. Back in 2018, Jessie told the audience at her gig at the Royal Albert Hall she could never have children, revealing: "I was told four years ago that I can't ever have children." "I don't tell you guys for sympathy, because I'm one of millions of women and men that have gone through this and will go through this," Jessie told the crowd. Prior to performing her song, Four Letter Word, she continued: "If you've ever experienced anything with this or have seen somebody else go through it or have lost a child, then please know you're not alone in your pain and I'm thinking of you when I sing this song. "It's hard not to feel alone when dealing with fertility issues, but knowing that someone else has faced the same challenges can be a source of comfort." In 2021, Jessie suffered a miscarriage after deciding to have a baby on her own after being diagnosed with womb condition, adenomyosis. However, happily, the star did become a mum, two years ago when her beautiful son Sky was born. Revealing the happy news on Instagram, she shared: "A week ago my whole life changed. My son entered this world and my heart grew twice the size." Breast cancer diagnosis Jessie has revealed she's been diagnosed with "early breast cancer" and plans to undergo surgery after her performance at this month's Summertime Ball. The Domino star shared an Instagram video explaining that she's spent a lot of her recent time "in and out of tests". "I was diagnosed with early breast cancer," mum-of-one Jessie disclosed as she spoke directly to her fans in the video. "Cancer sucks in any form, but I'm holding on to the word 'early'. "It's a very dramatic way to get a boob job. I am going to disappear for a bit after Summertime Ball to have my surgery, and I will come back with massive t**s and more music." Jessie captioned her moving video: "No (more) Secrets and is it too soon to do a remix called 'Living my breast life'? All jokes aside (You know it's one of the ways I get through hard times) "This last 2 months have been so amazing, and having this go on along side it on the sidelines has given me the most incredible perspective. BUT… Your girl needs a hug."
Sky News AU
20 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Sky News AU
British popstar and former Voice Australia coach Jessie J reveals devastating breast cancer diagnosis
British popstar Jessie J has revealed she's been diagnosed with 'early' breast cancer and will pause her career to undergo treatment. The 37-year-old hitmaker has revealed she was diagnosed with the disease months ago shortly before the release of her most recent single 'No Secrets' in April. In an Instagram video shared on Tuesday, the popstar said that she has spent this year "in and out of tests" before finally receiving the diagnosis about two months ago. "I was diagnosed with early breast cancer," the singer revealed. "I'm highlighting the world early because cancer sucks in any form, but I'm holding on to the word 'early.'" The Grammy-nominated singer, who has one child with professional basketball player Chanan Colman, said she was still 'processing' the news. 'Selfishly, I do not talk about it enough," she said. "I'm not processing it because I'm working so hard. 'I also know how much sharing in the past has helped me with other people giving me their love and support and also their own stories. I'm an open book." She also expressed her desire to show solidarity with other cancer sufferers going through "similar or worse". "It breaks my heart that so many people are going through so much similar and worse – that's the bit that kills me," Jessie said. The "Flashlight" hitmaker then joked about her treatment plans after her upcoming performance at the Summertime Ball in London on June 15. "It's a very dramatic way to get a boob job," she said. "I am going to disappear for a bit after Summertime Ball to have my surgery, and I will come back with massive t*ts and more music.' Born Jessica Ellen Cornish, the popstar rocketed to fame off the back of her breakout single 'Price Tag' in 2011, which peaked atop the charts in 19 countries and reached No. 2 on the ARIA chart. The British star also served as a coach on The Voice Australia for two seasons in 2015 and 2016 alongside the Madden brothers, Ricky Martin, Delta Goodrem and Ronan Keating.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
The Novelist Who Learned to Write Anger—And Its Aftermath
Following up on a profoundly angry book that made her a literary star is the daunting challenge Susan Choi faces with Flashlight, her sixth novel. Its predecessor, Trust Exercise (2019), broke out in a way that her earlier fiction, though well received, hadn't. The success of the book, a formally inventive story about a popular teacher sexually abusing a student at an elite arts school in the 1980s, may have had to do with its timeliness—it appeared at the height of the #MeToo movement—but certainly stemmed from its fierceness. One of its three narrators, Karen, incarnates its fury. In her section, the novel's best, rage crackles from every controlled, precise line. For Karen's author, such rage was a real departure. The characters in Choi's previous fiction tend to treat anger as an unwelcome guest. They repress it, relegating it to the realm of the unacknowledged in hopes that there, it might shrivel and die. Regina, the narrator of My Education (2013), reveals in one seething passage that she was raped four years before the novel begins—a memory that shifts the story—but Choi relates the assault in such a rushed, muddled way that even comprehending what happened takes two readings. The question of what violent feelings Regina might harbor, Choi quite consciously leaves unexplored. [Read: Trust Exercise is an elaborate trick of a novel] The leap from Regina to Karen might seem colossal, but Choi told The Guardian that the 2016 election led her to the latter's creation. 'Karen came from feeling so angry all the time. I specifically felt as though someone had taken a story that was my story—the story of my country, my origins. I'm the daughter of an immigrant, I'm the granddaughter of immigrants, I've always been so proud of that.' Trust Exercise isn't about immigration, but Choi's comment conveyed the broad sense of betrayal that underlies Karen's anger at her abuser and his admirers. It also, perhaps, foreshadowed Flashlight, which is about immigration on a global scale. Some of Choi's earlier novels feature characters who have immigrated to the United States, but those books all begin after the move. Flashlight, by contrast, follows a family as its members migrate, variously, from Korea to Japan, Japan to North Korea, Japan to the United States, and—in some cases—back, each seeking what's generally seen as a very American freedom: the right to learn about, and become, their truest selves in a new home. By telling this story on an ambitious new historical and geographical canvas, Choi not only detaches this quest from any one nation, but makes mobility her theme. In doing so, she has found a very different way to handle anger. No longer an unwanted intrusion or the dominant mood, it has become a tunnel that her characters travel through, a long and dark but inescapable part of getting somewhere they need to go. Choi gives her three protagonists—Serk, a professor at a midwestern college; Anne, his wife; and Louisa, their daughter—many reasons to be angry. Serk's trace back to his childhood. Born in Japan during World War II to Korean parents who'd emigrated from their colonized homeland in search of opportunity, he's devastated, at age 6, by the loss of 'his belief in his Japaneseness.' (On learning he's Korean, he says to his mother, 'But what are Koreans?') He dreams of assimilation while his family's devotion to Korea's communist cause grows in response not just to Japanese discrimination, but also to the U.S.-backed South Korean army's massacre of civilians on the parents' home island of Jeju. Eventually, Serk's parents and most of his siblings move to North Korea. Serk won't go. Alone in Tokyo, he tries to stifle his resentment at the prejudice that drove his family away, telling himself that 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. Materially speaking, Serk's strategy largely works. Though he can't assimilate, he succeeds well enough academically to emigrate and get a professorship. But emotionally, his efforts take a toll. As Flashlight progresses, Choi shows Serk's transformation into a glacial spouse, a jittery parent, a person so afraid of his anger that when he feels it, he gets angrier still. Such men aren't new in her writing: Serk shares these traits with Lee, the protagonist of A Person of Interest (2008), but Choi never calls on Lee to spend time alone with his emotions. Serk has to—though only after he is, shockingly, kidnapped from a Japanese beach by North Koreans while teaching in Japan for a semester. Such abductions really did happen from 1977 to 1983, which North Korea acknowledged only in 2002. Little is known about most kidnapping victims' fates, but Choi imagines years of horror for Serk and grief for Louisa and Anne, who think he's dead. Choi lets the reader in on his survival through Flashlight's nonlinear structure, which may be, if not the most experimental way she's told a story, the trickiest approach she's taken. She weaves back and forth in time, frequently shifting her focus from one character to another. This allows her to hide some secrets from her readers, some from her characters, and some from both. Only the omniscient narrator knows what's going on: Everyone else is at sea, and furious about it. [Read: Where Han Kang's nightmares come from] But nobody in Flashlight stays mad, no matter how complex or layered their anger may be. In captivity, Serk has no choice but to sit still with his anger—not only at his jailers, who force him to teach them Japanese, but at the Japanese discrimination that marked his childhood and his family's lives. In the process, he finds that he can allow the emotion to wane—and that, when he does, it's replaced by others, such as love for his daughter, that help him survive. An ocean away, Anne makes a similar discovery. She gets diagnosed with multiple sclerosis not long after she concludes that Serk has drowned, and is understandably bitter at fate for visiting these ordeals upon her. Yet she discovers that holding on to an anger aimed at such a large, unreachable target is less satisfying than letting it go. Louisa is livid at losing both her father and the healthy version of her mother. Though she travels through her anger more slowly, she shares her parents' capacity to let it evolve and diminish. Choi has never written about that process before. For the first time in her career, she shows herself interested above all in anger's impermanence—and in the emotions that occupy the hole it leaves once it's gone. In the same way that Trust Exercise has Karen as its incarnation of anger, Flashlight has an incarnation of anger's absence. In Anne's youth, before she met Serk, she had a son, Tobias, custody of whom she ceded to his older, married father. Years later, he reenters her life, initially as a teenager consumed by rage that turns out to be the effect of a brain tumor, and then, post-surgery, as a preternaturally placid drifter, a young man given to 'floating through the world like a mote.' Tobias is Flashlight's court fool, a source of chaos, comedy, and pathos. He can't fully take care of himself, which worries Anne and aggravates Louisa. It also reminds the reader that if anger can grow stagnant, so can its absence. The capacity to get mad, to rise to provocation, and to strike out against insult is not just a good thing but a goad to growth. On that front, Choi's perspective hasn't changed since Trust Exercise. What has changed is her prose. The critic Ron Charles said of her in 2013 that 'few other writers alive today make their sentences work so hard.' Before Trust Exercise, her writing was carefully balanced, sinuously elegant yet never showy. And then she swerved, compacting her sentences to convey anger, as in Karen's blunt summation of her non-relationship with the mother who failed to protect her: 'When I visit my brother, he doesn't tell our mother I'm coming. When he visits me, he doesn't tell her he's going. He pretends that he's traveling on business.' In Flashlight, she swerves again, expanding her prose further than ever before, packing an astonishing amount of beauty and meaning into her descriptions. Growing up, Serk steals from 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.' His mother accepts his haul silently, and 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.' These detail-rich sentences thrive on patience. By slowing down her description of the vegetable market, Choi calls attention to the small amounts of loveliness present there, amid the devastation of war, and to the poverty that makes Serk steal and his mother allow it. By taking the time for Serk's mother to beat his father like a rug, Choi puts her readers in the father's place, on the threshold of the family home, waiting for the woman in charge to let us in. As the novel goes on, the more brutal a character's conditions are, the more carefully Choi writes them, forcing readers to slow down and inhabit them. Her characters, too, have to pay close attention to their life; their survival depends on it. In a passage in which Serk, famished and desperate in a North Korean prison camp, discovers that he can trap and eat rodents, her descriptions of the geography around him—to say nothing of his joy once he has a belly full of rat—are almost too vivid to bear. Here, in the rat stage, is when Serk gives up the last of his anger. Choi seems to draw on, or at least she echoes, Viktor Frankl, the psychologist and Holocaust survivor who maintained that the hallmark of humanity is 'the freedom to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.' When Serk summons the energy to catch rats to keep himself alive, the strength to notice his surroundings comes with it—and that, in turn, provides the hope he needs to try to escape. Just as anger could not do this for him, it can't assuage Anne's loneliness after Louisa leaves for college. Living alone for the first time, she becomes, through an inner process that mystifies her, someone so responsive to the outside world that what she sees around her counterbalances the physical and emotional pain she feels: She is genuinely uplifted by sunlight in her apartment and by a sighting of a circus elephant, 'its ancient flanks as otherworldly as the moon, its eye as bright, the four stupendous steles of its legs bearing its hulk easily as the sky bears its clouds.' Remembering the elephant, Anne thinks simply, 'That was the sort of thing you stayed alive for.' If Choi had written Flashlight less lushly—if the elephant just had legs, not stupendous steles— Anne's replacement of bitterness with appreciation would risk registering as corny uplift. So would the gratitude that comes to preoccupy Serk. Choi's style conveys that the world, even at its worst, rewards devoted examination; her characters' long arcs, meanwhile, remind readers that just because anger has ebbed doesn't mean it's gone. Louisa knows almost nothing of her father's past as a Japanese colonial subject, and yet she inherits a version of his anger about it: The awareness that she will never know what his childhood was like festers. Louisa's emotions speak directly to Choi's earlier work. In A Person of Interest, a character named Mark, on learning that his parents concealed his past, imagines discussing his grief and anger with a long-dead mentor. 'If we don't know the people we came from,' he muses, 'how do we know who we are?' Choi eventually gives Mark the knowledge he wants, but in Flashlight, she denies it to Louisa—which is the realistic choice. When war, colonialism, and discrimination force people to migrate, family history all too often gets left behind. Japan's occupation of Korea has this effect on Choi's main characters, and Serk's anger about it ripples throughout the book, becoming part of Louisa's inheritance. But his and Anne's ultimate bequest to their daughter is the ability to struggle against her resentment rather than sinking permanently into it. Doing so isn't easy, but Choi's characters manage it over and over. In fact, it's what keeps them alive. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
2 days ago
- Health
- Atlantic
The Novelist Who Learned to Write Anger—And Its Aftermath
Following up on a profoundly angry book that made her a literary star is the daunting challenge Susan Choi faces with Flashlight, her sixth novel. Its predecessor, Trust Exercise (2019), broke out in a way that her earlier fiction, though well received, hadn't. The success of the book, a formally inventive story about a popular teacher sexually abusing a student at an elite arts school in the 1980s, may have had to do with its timeliness—it appeared at the height of the #MeToo movement—but certainly stemmed from its fierceness. One of its three narrators, Karen, incarnates its fury. In her section, the novel's best, rage crackles from every controlled, precise line. For Karen's author, such rage was a real departure. The characters in Choi's previous fiction tend to treat anger as an unwelcome guest. They repress it, relegating it to the realm of the unacknowledged in hopes that there, it might shrivel and die. Regina, the narrator of My Education (2013), reveals in one seething passage that she was raped four years before the novel begins—a memory that shifts the story—but Choi relates the assault in such a rushed, muddled way that even comprehending what happened takes two readings. The question of what violent feelings Regina might harbor, Choi quite consciously leaves unexplored. The leap from Regina to Karen might seem colossal, but Choi told The Guardian that the 2016 election led her to the latter's creation. 'Karen came from feeling so angry all the time. I specifically felt as though someone had taken a story that was my story—the story of my country, my origins. I'm the daughter of an immigrant, I'm the granddaughter of immigrants, I've always been so proud of that.' Trust Exercise isn't about immigration, but Choi's comment conveyed the broad sense of betrayal that underlies Karen's anger at her abuser and his admirers. It also, perhaps, foreshadowed Flashlight, which is about immigration on a global scale. Some of Choi's earlier novels feature characters who have immigrated to the United States, but those books all begin after the move. Flashlight, by contrast, follows a family as its members migrate, variously, from Korea to Japan, Japan to North Korea, Japan to the United States, and—in some cases—back, each seeking what's generally seen as a very American freedom: the right to learn about, and become, their truest selves in a new home. By telling this story on an ambitious new historical and geographical canvas, Choi not only detaches this quest from any one nation, but makes mobility her theme. In doing so, she has found a very different way to handle anger. No longer an unwanted intrusion or the dominant mood, it has become a tunnel that her characters travel through, a long and dark but inescapable part of getting somewhere they need to go. Choi gives her three protagonists—Serk, a professor at a midwestern college; Anne, his wife; and Louisa, their daughter—many reasons to be angry. Serk's trace back to his childhood. Born in Japan during World War II to Korean parents who'd emigrated from their colonized homeland in search of opportunity, he's devastated, at age 6, by the loss of 'his belief in his Japaneseness.' (On learning he's Korean, he says to his mother, 'But what are Koreans?') He dreams of assimilation while his family's devotion to Korea's communist cause grows in response not just to Japanese discrimination, but also to the U.S.-backed South Korean army's massacre of civilians on the parents' home island of Jeju. Eventually, Serk's parents and most of his siblings move to North Korea. Serk won't go. Alone in Tokyo, he tries to stifle his resentment at the prejudice that drove his family away, telling himself that 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. Materially speaking, Serk's strategy largely works. Though he can't assimilate, he succeeds well enough academically to emigrate and get a professorship. But emotionally, his efforts take a toll. As Flashlight progresses, Choi shows Serk's transformation into a glacial spouse, a jittery parent, a person so afraid of his anger that when he feels it, he gets angrier still. Such men aren't new in her writing: Serk shares these traits with Lee, the protagonist of A Person of Interest (2008), but Choi never calls on Lee to spend time alone with his emotions. Serk has to—though only after he is, shockingly, kidnapped from a Japanese beach by North Koreans while teaching in Japan for a semester. Such abductions really did happen from 1977 to 1983, which North Korea acknowledged only in 2002. Little is known about most kidnapping victims' fates, but Choi imagines years of horror for Serk and grief for Louisa and Anne, who think he's dead. Choi lets the reader in on his survival through Flashlight 's nonlinear structure, which may be, if not the most experimental way she's told a story, the trickiest approach she's taken. She weaves back and forth in time, frequently shifting her focus from one character to another. This allows her to hide some secrets from her readers, some from her characters, and some from both. Only the omniscient narrator knows what's going on: Everyone else is at sea, and furious about it. But nobody in Flashlight stays mad, no matter how complex or layered their anger may be. In captivity, Serk has no choice but to sit still with his anger—not only at his jailers, who force him to teach them Japanese, but at the Japanese discrimination that marked his childhood and his family's lives. In the process, he finds that he can allow the emotion to wane—and that, when he does, it's replaced by others, such as love for his daughter, that help him survive. An ocean away, Anne makes a similar discovery. She gets diagnosed with multiple sclerosis not long after she concludes that Serk has drowned, and is understandably bitter at fate for visiting these ordeals upon her. Yet she discovers that holding on to an anger aimed at such a large, unreachable target is less satisfying than letting it go. Louisa is livid at losing both her father and the healthy version of her mother. Though she travels through her anger more slowly, she shares her parents' capacity to let it evolve and diminish. Choi has never written about that process before. For the first time in her career, she shows herself interested above all in anger's impermanence—and in the emotions that occupy the hole it leaves once it's gone. In the same way that Trust Exercise has Karen as its incarnation of anger, Flashlight has an incarnation of anger's absence. In Anne's youth, before she met Serk, she had a son, Tobias, custody of whom she ceded to his older, married father. Years later, he reenters her life, initially as a teenager consumed by rage that turns out to be the effect of a brain tumor, and then, post-surgery, as a preternaturally placid drifter, a young man given to 'floating through the world like a mote.' Tobias is Flashlight 's court fool, a source of chaos, comedy, and pathos. He can't fully take care of himself, which worries Anne and aggravates Louisa. It also reminds the reader that if anger can grow stagnant, so can its absence. The capacity to get mad, to rise to provocation, and to strike out against insult is not just a good thing but a goad to growth. On that front, Choi's perspective hasn't changed since Trust Exercise. What has changed is her prose. The critic Ron Charles said of her in 2013 that 'few other writers alive today make their sentences work so hard.' Before Trust Exercise, her writing was carefully balanced, sinuously elegant yet never showy. And then she swerved, compacting her sentences to convey anger, as in Karen's blunt summation of her non-relationship with the mother who failed to protect her: 'When I visit my brother, he doesn't tell our mother I'm coming. When he visits me, he doesn't tell her he's going. He pretends that he's traveling on business.' In Flashlight, she swerves again, expanding her prose further than ever before, packing an astonishing amount of beauty and meaning into her descriptions. Growing up, Serk steals from 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.' His mother accepts his haul silently, and 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.' These detail-rich sentences thrive on patience. By slowing down her description of the vegetable market, Choi calls attention to the small amounts of loveliness present there, amid the devastation of war, and to the poverty that makes Serk steal and his mother allow it. By taking the time for Serk's mother to beat his father like a rug, Choi puts her readers in the father's place, on the threshold of the family home, waiting for the woman in charge to let us in. As the novel goes on, the more brutal a character's conditions are, the more carefully Choi writes them, forcing readers to slow down and inhabit them. Her characters, too, have to pay close attention to their life; their survival depends on it. In a passage in which Serk, famished and desperate in a North Korean prison camp, discovers that he can trap and eat rodents, her descriptions of the geography around him—to say nothing of his joy once he has a belly full of rat—are almost too vivid to bear. Here, in the rat stage, is when Serk gives up the last of his anger. Choi seems to draw on, or at least she echoes, Viktor Frankl, the psychologist and Holocaust survivor who maintained that the hallmark of humanity is 'the freedom to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.' When Serk summons the energy to catch rats to keep himself alive, the strength to notice his surroundings comes with it—and that, in turn, provides the hope he needs to try to escape. Just as anger could not do this for him, it can't assuage Anne's loneliness after Louisa leaves for college. Living alone for the first time, she becomes, through an inner process that mystifies her, someone so responsive to the outside world that what she sees around her counterbalances the physical and emotional pain she feels: She is genuinely uplifted by sunlight in her apartment and by a sighting of a circus elephant, 'its ancient flanks as otherworldly as the moon, its eye as bright, the four stupendous steles of its legs bearing its hulk easily as the sky bears its clouds.' Remembering the elephant, Anne thinks simply, 'That was the sort of thing you stayed alive for.' If Choi had written Flashlight less lushly—if the elephant just had legs, not stupendous steles — Anne's replacement of bitterness with appreciation would risk registering as corny uplift. So would the gratitude that comes to preoccupy Serk. Choi's style conveys that the world, even at its worst, rewards devoted examination; her characters' long arcs, meanwhile, remind readers that just because anger has ebbed doesn't mean it's gone. Louisa knows almost nothing of her father's past as a Japanese colonial subject, and yet she inherits a version of his anger about it: The awareness that she will never know what his childhood was like festers. Louisa's emotions speak directly to Choi's earlier work. In A Person of Interest, a character named Mark, on learning that his parents concealed his past, imagines discussing his grief and anger with a long-dead mentor. 'If we don't know the people we came from,' he muses, 'how do we know who we are?' Choi eventually gives Mark the knowledge he wants, but in Flashlight, she denies it to Louisa—which is the realistic choice. When war, colonialism, and discrimination force people to migrate, family history all too often gets left behind. Japan's occupation of Korea has this effect on Choi's main characters, and Serk's anger about it ripples throughout the book, becoming part of Louisa's inheritance. But his and Anne's ultimate bequest to their daughter is the ability to struggle against her resentment rather than sinking permanently into it. Doing so isn't easy, but Choi's characters manage it over and over. In fact, it's what keeps them alive.
Los Angeles Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Her Korean father disappeared on vacation. Now Louisa is stuck in L.A.
While genre fiction steadily advances onto bestseller lists, realism soldiers on, amid cyborgs and dragons and boozy detectives. Innovative novels from Ann Patchett and Claire Lombardo are rooted in ordinary lives, magic tricks kept to a minimum. Now the formally restless Susan Choi turns to social realism in her beguiling if baggy 'Flashlight,' mapping a family's journey among political autocracy and personal pain, from Midwestern cornfields to the Pacific Rim. Seok 'Serk' Kang, a taciturn professor at a Michigan university, accepts a year's appointment at a college in a Japanese town close to Osaka in 1978. He's accompanied by his white wife, Anne, and their adored 9-year-old, Louisa. Serk contains multitudes: the eldest son of a Korean couple displaced by war, he was raised in Japan, where he was known as Hiroshi. He'd distanced himself from his parents' communist sympathies, disapproving of their repatriation to North Korea, opting instead for an academic career in the U.S. He's betwixt and between, a country of one. It's a fraught moment for a move: stagflation stalks the globe; the marriage flounders; Anne's health flags (eventually leading to a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis), and the precocious Louisa asks probing questions. There's also Tobias, Anne's son from a youthful fling, for whom she'd waived legal claims after his birth; he's caught wind of the family's plans and lives nearby, a 19-year-old vagabond eager to connect with his biological mother. The year abroad is a kind of homecoming for Serk, yet it's cut short one August evening as father and daughter stroll across a beach while on vacation. He's carrying a flashlight when he vanishes; his body is never found. Louisa is discovered face-down amid the shoreline's foam, almost drowned. This mystery kicks off 'Flashlight,' propelling the plot forward, backward and sideways. With Franzen-esque fastidiousness, Choi unpacks each character's backstory, exposing vanities and delusions in a cool, caustic voice, a 21st century Émile Zola. Her period details are spot on, candy for those of us who were children during the Carter presidency: hot plates, instant coffee, accordion files, 'Smokey and the Bandit.' (I was hoping for a Sleestak cameo — if you know, you know.) Choi weaves long, sinuous sentences, teasing out the aftermath of Serk's presumed death. His wife and daughter's troubled relationship is the novel's pole star: 'Flashlight' is less about the absent Serk than the omnipresent, annoying Anne. Settled in a working-class Los Angeles neighborhood, invalid parent and rebellious child clash: Anne 'never so much as misted an eye when Louisa could see,' Choi writes. 'She was aware that Louisa regarded her as an unfeeling person, a sort of robot whose heart — if she even had one — must be made of the same dull aluminum, cold to the touch, as those hideous crutches all but fused to her arms.' Louisa heads east to an elite university (a thinly disguised Yale), putting a continent between her and her mother. The book's middle section is bulky with their dramas, which Choi approaches like a documentarian. She wants to get their story right, even if she risks a narrative doldrum. A European sequence drags on and on, overstaying its welcome, but it also underscores Louisa's divided self as well as Choi's deep ambivalence about status and privilege. The Ivy student finds herself friendless and franc-less in Paris, boarding a cheap bus to London: 'Beyond the station was a wide black trench of oily water that was somehow the Seine. It seemed to Louisa that there were two Parises, the famous and beautiful one to which Christiane held the keys, and the other, where the cigarette butts and empty eau gazeuse bottles and people like Louisa belonged.' Choi flirts with the conventions of political thriller, too, recalling the shadowy resistance groups in Ed Park's prize-winning 'Same Bed Different Dreams.' Chapter by chapter, 'Flashlight' inches back to its opening, scattering clues to the puzzle of Serk's disappearance. Is it random tragedy or something more? A stray orange cat; a séance in a hostel; a 'nearsighted galoot' who decodes cryptic messages from Radio Pyongyang; flashlights that aren't just flashlights — these bread crumbs guide us to the novel's denouement. Her prose occasionally shades purple: 'Not her fault, then, if her nerves could be considered not-her,' Anne reflects on her disease, 'and what else could they be, those shredded nebulae whose feeble glow reached Anne's imagination across light-years of the void of her ailing insides?' The author could have trimmed rhetorical flourishes and excessive explication, shaved off a few adjectives and adverbs; yet the power of 'Flashlight' derives from its exacting psychological portraits, Choi's reconnaissance through the tradition of social realism, the rich tension between her natural cynicism and a desire for empathy. As in Park's Pynchon-style satire and Angie Kim's affecting 'Happiness Falls,' 'Flashlight' explores the collective experiences of Korean Americans, agonies closeted away, the rage that screams inside. The term generational trauma may seem abstract to some, a cliché to others, but Choi makes it concrete, like Louisa's red backpack or Serk's electric torch. She brings her impressive literary toolbox to bear here, and the novel ranks among her best work, alongside 'American Woman' and the National Book Award laureate 'Trust Exercise.' Cain is a book critic and the author of a memoir, 'This Boy's Faith: Notes From a Southern Baptist Upbringing.' He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
