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A Novel
by Susan Choi
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 round-cheeked 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.
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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