“Each disclosed his or her life to the point of their meeting with an air of cool regret that tended to ratify their prior isolation, ratify their meeting. The world had not been fit for either of them; this suggested they were fit for each other.”

Their past Loneliness in Family Life is the foundation of Serk and Anne’s relationship. While they become lovers, they mutually acknowledge that their remoteness draws them to each other—no one else has been able to offer the understanding of being isolated that each has been living with and prefers. This makes their relationship paradoxical: They can only achieve intimacy by respecting each other’s distance.

“Yet she already shared not only Serk’s expression, but his force of personality. The two of them appeared identically regal, and grim, as if awaiting a correction of substandard conditions.”

Anne’s experience of motherhood is heavily influenced by her alienation from her family of origin and her marriage; after Louisa is born, Anne feels like a stranger to her own husband and child. In this passage, Choi emphasizes Anne’s separateness by pointing to the traits that Louisa inherits from Serk; perceiving these, Anne feels as if Louisa is purely Serk’s progeny and has no genetic link to Anne.

“Serk had been so incensed he’d shown up at the Y and shouted Anne down in the parking lot, but Anne had not survived their marriage thus far to surrender to this much unreason. The earth was more than half-covered with water, she shouted back at him, how would he like it when his daughter fell into some water and drowned, because in his ignorant fear he had not let her learn how to swim?”

Anne’s insistence on Louisa learning to swim by threatening Serk with her potential drowning foreshadows Louisa’s successful escape from Serk’s captors and the turbulent ocean water. Anne makes the fight a contest between “reason” and “ignorant fear”—words that have a mild undercurrent of xenophobia as Anne connects Serk’s over-caution to his upbringing. By contrast, Anne wants Louisa to inherit her grit and survivalist mentality, not Serk’s paranoia.

“She tries to think what she would say to him if he were conscious, tries to say it anyway. I’ve never forgotten about you. I’ve always loved you. You have always been my child, nothing changes that. It’s no use; these wash-worn phrases make everything worse, she might as well be acting out a scene in General Hospital. What use is she to him?”

Faced with the possibility of Tobias’s early death, Anne feels the unsatisfactory nature of language to compensate for her absence through all of Tobias’s life. She wants to express their relationship in terms that obscure her shortcomings, such as “You have always been my child.” Instead, these expressions are so trite and empty that they evoke a daytime soap opera. Anne’s attempts to bond with Tobias result in feelings of self-alienation instead, as she assumes that she is of no “use” to him.

“Children pick up a new language almost without trying. Once they’re adults, it’s a much bigger effort.”

Languages in the novel are a motif supporting the theme of the Tension Between Belonging and Identity. Here, this blanket generalization about how easily children can learn new languages foreshadows Louisa’s relationship to languages other than English. When she is in Japan as a child, she easily learns Japanese in her desire to assimilate and blend in. When she is older, she forgets that she even learned Japanese because she does not see it as part of her identity. At the end of the novel, she learns Korean to communicate with Serk; she sees his first language as an integral part of herself because it connects him to her father.

“‘It’s just they’re not used to Americans.’

‘I don’t look American.’ All her life she’d been asked what she was, where she came from—in the second-grade Thanksgiving play she’d been cast as the sole Indian. She’d expected the disadvantages of brown hair, brown eyes, and brown skin, all imposed by her father, to be clear advantages here. Wasn’t this where he came from? It must be her mother’s fault.”

Louisa’s mixed heritage causes her to feel like an outsider wherever she goes, playing into the novel’s focus on the Tension Between Belonging and Identity. In the United States, she is othered because of she has inherited her father’s physical traits, which set her apart from the white majority. In Japan, however, it is the behavior, language, and culture that she’s inherited from her mother that set her apart, sowing the seeds of her resentment for Anne.

“The town had briefly turned itself inside out for her—she’d grasped what it was to belong there, to step out her door without feeling the atmosphere flinch in alarm. For a blessed instant she’d forgotten her body…She’d again been a housewife and mother. She’d repossessed her minor powers.”

Anne’s day out with Tobias has a restorative impact on her health. Anne’s failure to engage with her new environment is here mitigated by Tobias’s familiarity with and facility within the town and its life. Just as much as it improves her physical mobility, Anne’s exposure to the way Tobias relates to the townspeople awakens her to the possibility of making a life there in spite of her outsider status as a white woman.

“When Louisa hated her mother, it was because the thought of her caused so much pain.

When she hated her father, it was because she was conscious of emulating his remoteness.”

Louisa considers her relationships with her parents through the lens of hatred. Although she resents both for different reasons, there is a common thread to her antipathy: Louisa hates what she cannot control in her mother and father, and her feelings are complicated by the guilt and frustration she feels at her own role in the dynamic she describes. Louisa cannot alleviate her mother’s illness, and suffers as a result; she adopts some of her father’s elusiveness, and is annoyed by their similarity. Louisa’s feelings thus illuminate the process of reconciling herself with her shortcomings.

“To Anne, this was motherhood—not her own mother’s depleted benignity, nor the sharp exasperation of some of the other young mothers she met, but being playmates. Her own authority was perhaps sometimes lacking. But after all, she’d been raised by her sisters.”

Anne forges her relationship with Louisa through the frame of her family of origin—a frame of reference that subverts the parent-child dynamic into one of equals. Anne came from a large family, so she formed closer bonds with her siblings than with her parents—her sisters were both peers and authority figures who “raised” her. Because of this, she relates to Louisa as a “playmate,” her equal rather than someone she has power over.

“By the time of his death, the world Serk had shared with Louisa was far larger than the world in which Anne lived with either of them.”

Anne’s envy of Louisa is driven by the assumption that Louisa had greater access to Serk’s life than Anne ever did. What deepens her isolation is the idea that the reverse was also true—that she cannot gain the same access to Louisa’s life that Serk had. This fuels the quiet antagonism that marks their relationship over the next few years, preventing Anne and Louisa from properly relying on each other to process their grief.

“Walter was always a little afraid—a big man like him!—and this knowledge, once she acquired it, would make her heart actually ache in her chest, the way her calf muscles ached long ago when she ran, when she really used them to their limits.”

Walter’s fear is his defining character trait; it also becomes the basis of Anne’s love for him. The transparency of Walter’s anxiety turns him into the polar opposite of Serk, someone who masked his paranoia as anger and coldness. Anne finds that her love for Walt is a mixture of affection and pity, as it “makes her heart ache” as though after physical exertion.

“Unlike Anne, Walt had never been married…And yet even here Anne felt a sameness with Walt. An inherent unfitness for marriage, an unspoken but obvious failure on both of their parts to hold marriage in awe, lay in both of their hearts, or so Anne, as she came to know Walt, also came to believe.”

Walt functions as a foil for Anne, revealing new insights about her by way of contrast. Choi deploys contrast in this passage, where Anne resonates with Walt’s bachelor status in a way that emphasizes her shortcomings and low self-esteem: Anne sees them both as losers “unfit for marriage.” Anne and Walt’s connection, which contains the mutual understanding that Anne imagined she had with Serk, subverts Anne’s expectations: Because neither she nor Walt “holds marriage in awe,” they will together no longer experience Loneliness in Family Life.

“‘I might have been angrier, when I was younger…But I honestly don’t remember. After everything changed for me—when my brain cracked its pan and they taped me back up—I always felt the same way I feel now. And…’—here he paused and stared before him as if reading out the words in advance—‘not long ago I was nineteen myself, when I was left to settle up your affairs after she and you—and your father—were all in Japan. I felt terribly tested. I felt then, if I didn’t already, so much compassion for her. I can’t judge her.’”

Diction and syntax here highlight the impact of Tobias’s feelings by presenting his speech in ways that underline his vulnerability. His frequent pauses marked by em dashes and his constant interjections differentiate this monologue from his usual effusiveness, making readers feel like Tobias is candidly answering Louisa. This supports the meaning of his words: He acknowledges that he should hate Anne for abandoning him, and admits that it scares him that something beyond his control allows him to love her instead.

“She wrenched open her duffel bag’s zipper again and desperately clawed through its contents, coming up with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which she’d chosen to read on the plane. She stuck the little pages in their little envelope into the book, repacked the book, and then struggled to reclose the zipper as if the featherweight addition had inflated the duffel past its outermost limit.”

Choi underscores the emotional weight of Louisa’s unearthed diary entry by exaggerating its physical characteristics. This “little envelope,” which fits neatly into a book, makes it hard for her to close her bag, as if the symbolic heft of the pages has “inflated the duffel” to bursting. Additionally, the allusion to the novel Frankenstein resonates with the entry’s resurfacing of memories of Serk’s disappearance that have been “dead” for many years.

“Love is, perhaps, the sensation of expertise that erupts out of nowhere, and as time goes on accumulates enough soil at its feet to be standing on something. Louisa’s expertise, though, resisted this process. She understood Roman, which was better than knowing him, which was perhaps conditioned on her not entirely knowing him.”

The novel marks Louisa’s transition from naivety into wisdom with an insight into the nature of love. Where Louisa’s childhood was marked by her resistance to her parents’ remoteness, her maturity is marked by the acceptance of nuance. She can love Roman without knowing the minute details of his life, so long as she can understand the kind of person he tries to be. Ironically, this recapitulates in some ways the dysfunction of her parents’ marriage—something the novel implies later with the revelation that Louisa and Roman get divorced.

“She had no more access to her true thoughts of that time, if such true thoughts existed, than to those of a stranger.”

Anne reckons with The Limits of Human Memory in this passage. Her failure to recall the motivations behind earlier phases of her life distances her from that younger self, such that she becomes a stranger to her past. This deepens her sense of loneliness by turning her into someone she knows less about as she gets older.

“‘I remember feeling as though Daddy and I had a secret from you, and I liked feeling that, and felt bad about liking it,’ Louisa finally said. ‘But then I realized it was also a secret from me.’”

This passage marks a turning point in the relationship between Anne and Louisa. Having antagonized her mother for much of the novel, Louisa finally discovers common ground with Anne when she realizes that neither had special access to Serk’s secret life. Conversely, this admission convinces Anne that her assumptions about Serk and Louisa’s relationship—that it was a deep bond that Anne was excluded from—were wrong, allowing them to grieve Serk’s loss together anew.

“Disappearance demands explanation…and no explanation is too ludicrous. This isn’t death, where the body can always give some explanation. A disappearance is so inexplicable that any explanation at all will seem reasonable.”

The novel frames disappearance as a fate worse than death because of its ambiguity. Where death brings people certain knowledge of what has happened to a person, disappearance can have many different explanations, none of which can satisfy the initial mystery. In this way, disappearance not only affects abduction victims, but also greatly shapes the lives of their families who are seeking resolution.

“For years they had been told by the authorities, by their friends, and even by other loved ones that their grief blinded them to the facts. Their assertion was the opposite: their grief showed them facts to which others were blind.”

The novel is bookended by people whose stories of abduction are not believed. In the Prologue, Louisa’s claims of her father’s abduction are dismissed even though she is the only witness to Serk’s disappearance. Here, at the end of the novel, Saho and Yumi’s parents also go through similar nay-saying, as everyone around them is convinced that “grief blinded them to the facts.” Unlike Louisa, who has no allies supporting her story, these parents found reassurance in their solidarity, which allowed them to assert their conclusions. By ending on this more hopeful version of the experience, the novel points to community as the antidote for The Limits of Human Memory.

“For all their brutally rational sleuthing, the group was, at heart, a faith exercise. Yes, they traveled, raised funds, printed flyers, lobbied politicians, wooed members of the media. But mostly they kept up each other’s belief. It was hard to believe all alone.”

The novel posits the idea that solidarity and faith are mutually reinforcing. The victims’ families need each other to sustain their belief in the abduction theory; likewise, they must be convinced of their loved ones’ potential return to continue supporting one another. To emphasize this, the novel narrates the abduction families’ support system using the third-person plural. The collective strengthens the power of each family in the struggle for justice.

“The quartet with whom Serk shared his meals cared no more about God and His Son than they had cared to win glory in the Arduous March, as the famine was called in their homeland, by valiantly drying and pounding a wild-growing root into a toxic inedible flour. They memorized and regurgitated the Bible because that was what this Dear Leader asked them to do, in exchange for bus fare to the China-Mongolia border, where they would hike through the Gobi to an unguarded stretch of the border, climb through the barbed-wire fence, claim to be South Korean tourists who’d lost their way, and beg whatever Mongolian authorities they encountered to hand them over to the South Korean consulate in Ulaanbaatar.”

As a counterpoint to the strong belief system of the abductees’ families, Serk’s encounter with the Reverend presents a negative version of faith, one that requires obedience to guarantee salvation. Choi draws an extended comparison between the Reverend and the North Korean Leader Kim Il Sung: Serk may have escaped North Korea, but he cannot be free from incarceration while others use the same predatory power systems to control him.

“Love, for Serk, always flowed first through authority’s channel. As he loved no one more than Louisa, there was no limit to the topics on which he meant to be the authority for her.”

Serk overcame his selfishness by becoming an authority figure for Louisa’s benefit rather than her restriction. Although he previously opposed her swimming lessons, he comes to understand how much she enjoys the activity, which compels him to reorganize his life around her joy. Guidance becomes the primary vehicle of Serk’s love.

“Are events that are forgotten by all the participants, or that weren’t admitted to cognition in the first place, something other than events, or are they nothing? Do the witnesses make the event?”

Chapter 2, Anne fears that collective memory was the only way to preserve personal history: If no one remembers her only afternoon with Tobias, then perhaps it never existed. In the final chapter, Choi suggests that this is not the case. Louisa’s escape is evidenced by her survival; though she may not remember fleeing her father’s captors, her role as a witness is unnecessary to say that it happened.