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A Novel
by Susan Choi
Seok
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.
Excerpted from Flashlight by Susan Choi. Copyright © 2025 by Susan Choi. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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