One thing writers never have enough of is time. Lately, I’ve been looking for creative ways to use AI to free up more of mine. Never to do actual writing for me, but to help me perform other tasks as efficiently as possible, opening up the hours and brainspace for the part I find genuinely fun: lovingly handcrafting my own prose.

One such task is finding excellent new stories to write about that are, ideally, on-vibe with whatever else I’m thinking about in a given week.

To this end, I fed GPT 4 a list of random topics that had been on my mind this week and asked it to recommend flash stories available online that I might enjoy writing about for my craft Substack. It seemed to hone in on my very broad theme of “encounters between Asia and the west” and presented me with a list of options and links.

I clicked on the first one — “The Mirror” by David Hoon Kim, over at The New Yorker — not sure what to expect. I had never encountered Kim’s writing before.

The sensation of falling into his fiction was like dipping a toe into a narrow pool (picture it on the edge of a snowy forest) only to find myself plunging through a cold, deep well, hitting a weird murky bottom, and getting immediately ejected again.

I knew right away that this would be a delightful story to explore in a craft analysis.

It’s only seven paragraphs long, if you’d like to take the plunge for yourself before coming back here to reflect on how Kim pulls all of it off, and how you can achieve a similar emotional effect — showing us the shape of an absence in someone’s life — by sending your characters on their own doomed journey.

The Emotional Superstructure of “The Mirror”

How to Reflect an Absence

From the very first sentence, the narrator and his love interest are mirrored on either side of a semicolon—her bright and sunny, him a bit more shadowy and mysterious:

She was the star pupil, extroverted, the teacher’s favorite; I was in my third year, unsure of myself, my life, and everything in between.

They’re both students at Copenhagen University. We quickly learn she’s the head of the class and immediately linked to the teacher, a point the story will certainly circle back to.

The stakes are set at the beginning of the second paragraph with a striking visual:

We were the only Asians, two dark spots among the bright blond heads of varying shades

If he doesn’t see anything significant of himself — of his Asianness at least — reflected back in this person, he’s pretty much out of options, at least at university.

In the world of the this story, the only Asians who appear are those adopted by Danish parents and brought up to think of themselves as Danish.

The only thing Asian about us was our birth, and, of course, our appearance.

The significance of this feels at once like everything and nothing, and the story will continue to explore this strange duality. If you’re culturally Danish yet look strikingly different from almost every other Dane, what does this amount to?

So far in the narrator’s life, not much. He’s encountered four other Asian-born adoptees at earlier stages, all girls, all Korean-born (he’s Japanese-born). The encounters were so surface-level, just introductions to slightly warped reflections of himself, that all he remembers are their very Scandinavian names.

This time, with Ditte, he plunges in a lot deeper, or so it seems at first.

Kim tips us into a relationship that develops at an almost breathless, gravitational pace, each beat swiftly and inevitably leading to an even deeper beat, at least for the first few months. A beer in the cafeteria after class becomes a third date becomes his complete familiarity with her body and sexual preferences.

Her body reflects things back to him that feel unique in a Danish context: the color of her hair, her nipples, even the fact that neither of them ever need to use deodorant. But how signifcant are any of these similarities if they share them with many people of Korean and/or Japanese descent, who just all happen to live elsewhere?

As the narrator already knew, everything else about them is pretty much standard Danish stuff. They explore Copenhagen and compare what it was like growing up in different parts of Denmark. They like Danish food and Danish TV.

Is there any sort of a deeper connection to be found here? Any sort of deeper truth about what it means to be an Asian-born Dane?

By the sixth of seven paragraphs, the similarity of their bodies — the only thing uniquely binding them in a sea of blond Danes and Danishness — is pushed to the weirdest, murkiest depths it can offer. “The mirror at last reflected someone back at me,” as the narrator puts it.

He has a dream in which it turns out she’s a long-lost sister, their relationship incestuous. He is aroused enough to wake up with an erection. He has had about the strongest possible response to a body that physically resembles his.

Even though he only admits to the dream and not the erection part when he tells her, it’s the beginning of the end. We’ve hit the bottom of the well and are now being quickly ejected. There are no further depths to plumb here. If he was hoping for even deeper significance to their shared Asianness, he’s not going to find it.

Ditte is weirded out by the revelation and extricates herself from the relationship even more quickly than the two of them fell into it. From the moment she’s introduced in the first sentence, we get the sense that “star pupil” is a much more important characteristic of hers than her Asianness anyway, and she cycles back to exactly this by leaving the narrator for their mutual thesis advisor.

The thesis advisor is not even that good-looking — “out of shape, dark-haired (for a blond Dane), and his chin receded a bit — though after mentioning this, the narrator immediately and wryly acknowledges “his vast and bottomless intelligence, his daggerlike wit, his impressive list of publications” — all probably the basis for a stronger and deeper relationship than having similarly Asian bodies.

After the narrator reflects that he didn’t really know Ditte better than any of the Korean adoptees he’d encountered before her, Kim ends the story with a callback to the earlier striking image of “two dark spots among the bright blond heads.”

All this time, I had thought of her as a mirror, a strange and beguiling reflection, but it would seem that she had been drawn to me because I was different, a change from all the Danes she had previously dated.

From them being two black-haired heads in a sea of blond ones, he’s now become the one lonely “dark spot” among Ditte’s personal progression of Danish partners, an even more isolated position.

The mirror imagery and title feel especially apt here. If the only things the narrator and Ditte have uniquely in common are their Asian birth and Asian appearance, then this is fundamentally all she can reflect back to him about himself, and it isn’t very deep in the end. It is just surface level, all about appearances, at least in this story’s world.

The answer to the superstructural question — how much can he see of himself in the only other person who looks like him — is: not much. This gives the overall story an emotional tone of cold, existential loneliness that feels hard, like the glass of a mirror.

And to have a character search as diligently as they can for something and not find it shows us the contours of what is missing in their life, reflecting back to us that otherwise invisible absence.

Prompt for Story Creators

To try for an effect like this in your own work, ask yourself: what does your character want that you know they’re never going to find? What does it look like if they seek this anyway, in the most promising places available to them?

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