‘The metamorphosis of childhood.’ Susan Choi.
Write within the cruel constraints of time, even as the impulse might be to avoid.
Reading Susan Choi’s novel Flashlight I’m stunned by her capacity with words to tell a story that is complex and compelling. A story that hints at the diversity of lives. The story spans the course of history and leaves you gasping. A type of insight into what it’s like to grow up in a country that is foreign to your birth right even as it is the land of your birth.
Such is Seok’s story and then that of his daughter Louisa born to an American woman whose life takes a turn when she is nineteen and gives birth to a son whom her otherwise married to another partner takes away from her to raise with his wife.
Louisa comes along years later after her mother sees almost nothing of her son and Louisa who begin life as a lovely infant whose Japanese/Korean/ American father is constantly fearful for her well-being grows into a precocious young girl who must repeat grade four because she shifts countries three times and although she masters at least two languages must also tackle the hardship of constant migration against her will.
And then when her father disappears which happens at the beginning of the book then trace back over the next several chapters to understand how we got there. The story of her parents till about the middle where we catch up to events in the beginning and then follow onto a conclusion that is as exciting and intriguing as any book I have ever read.
She talks about the metamorphosis of childhood, the way as children we shift constantly. And I my mind’s eye I see my own grandchildren whose baby years run so fast. And now grandmother of a nineteen-year-old man and a fifteen-year-old grandson I find these years the most perplexing as I found my own children’s adolescence the toughest time of all.
Mainly because in some way I think I might have by passed adolescence getting the message it was safer to by-pass that difficult period and move straight from childhood into adulthood thereby avoiding all that in between difficulty of the tempestuous years when we fluctuate between thinking we know it all and are invincible to its opposite.
The image on the front cover of my copy of Flashlight intrigues me, the sight of a small girl around ten walking alongside her father, their backs to the camera heads bowed looking under the gentle waves that lap at their feet. Each in white shirts, his long sleeved her a t-shirt. She wears shorts and he rolled up jeans. Her hands at her side as if for balance against the wobbly sand while his are clasped behind his back. And once you’ve read the first chapter of this astonishing book you know that all this will change in a heartbeat.
From serenity to chaos.
And isn’t this the way life can be, including the metamorphoses of childhood when one minute all is calm and the world feels predictable, to the moment it tilts on its axis, and we’re plunged into a swirling abyss of not knowing what’s to come.
And soon I will walk the two dogs in my care, Dogs who have been with us for two weeks now and due to tackle another two weeks before they return to their arms. And life with dogs is also unpredictable.
At this moment all calm peaceful quiet but at any minute they might erupt in fits of barking especially when my fifteen year old grandson who is also staying with us but he only for the weekend, when he comes down the stairs and the bigger dog, a labradoodle, black and furry and loud, wags her tail and barks ferociously at first seemingly out of anger but more recently out of a determination that he should throw a ball for her.
The dog is obsessed with ball throwing as many a dog. Throw that ball and I will retrieve it and return it to you as is my destiny. This dog from the poodle family initially trained to be water dogs for hunters. The dogs fetched the dead birds as they landed dead over water.
And just now my stream of thoughts was interrupted by the sensitive hearing of the little Jack Russell who can hear the meanderings of my grandson from bathroom to bedroom and will not be satisfied until he materialises.
So, I will take these dogs for a walk to remove all trace of nastiness and then my day might well progress. With its ever-increasing swirls of certainty and uncertainty. Beyond my final dream of the morning, whose initial details are vague. Only I was engaged in helping friends and others rescue a small child from a family who do not want her, a type of Cinderella story and then I look down a flight of stairs and see the face of my analyst at her door.
She has seen me from this distance, and I’m delighted to carry down my little granddaughter, plump in my arms, to introduce the two. But Mrs Milanova makes the mistake of sitting on the stairs as I approach, beaming up at me and by the time I reach her, her body gets stuck in some way and she cannot move.
I cannot help her much as I want but she reassures me her sons will arrive soon and with them some person from elderly care who is trying to talk her into something she does not want. And her final words to him, give me a small pension, and then I will consider. And he disappears.
Here my dream ends. And with it, this meandering post from Flashlight to dogs and dreams.