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Overview
In crisp, unembellished prose, Eun-young Choi paints intimate portraits of the lives of young women in South Korea, balancing the personal with the political. In the title story, a fraught friendship between an exchange student and her host sister follows them from adolescence to adulthood. In "A Song from Afar," a young woman grapples with the death of her lover, traveling to Russia to search for information about the deceased. In "Secret," the parents of a teacher killed in the Sewol ferry sinking hide the news of her death from her grandmother.
In the tradition of Sally Rooney, Banana Yoshimoto, and Marilynne Robinson—writers from different cultures who all take an unvarnished look at human relationships and the female experience—Choi Eunyoung is a writer to watch.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780143135265 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2021 |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Sales rank: | 363,987 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Sung Ryu is a Korean-English translator who grew up in South Korea, the US, and Canada, her most recent home being Singapore. Her translations include Tower by Bae Myung-hoon (2021), I'm Waiting for You: And Other Stories by Kim Bo-Young (co-translated with Sophie Bowman, 2021), and the Korean edition of Grandma Moses: My Life's History by Anna Mary Robertson Moses (2017). She translated the Jeju myth "Segyeong Bonpuri" (Origins of the Harvest Deities) for her MA thesis.
Read an Excerpt
Shoko's
Smile
I dig my hands into the cold sand and gaze at the black, shimmering sea.
It feels like the edge of the universe.
Shoko once told me that standing on the shore made her feel like she was standing on the outskirts of the world. As if she'd been pushed away from the center, away from people, until she reached the edge of the sea that was itself pushed away from the great ocean. She said it wasn't especially pleasant for two loners to come together, only to dip their toes in the water.
"Someday I'm going to leave the shore, and live in a city surrounded by buildings."
Shoko always said "someday." She said it at seventeen, and again at twenty-three.
She said she would someday move out to the city, someday travel around Korea for a week, someday have a live-in boyfriend, someday quit her job at the hospital, someday get a pet cat, she would be up for anything.
Shoko's English was easy to understand. Although anyone could hear her distinct Japanese accent, her pronunciation was accurate and her consonants and vowels linked smoothly. Under a wisteria tree where a group of Korean and Japanese students sat huddled, Shoko said in fluent English:
"Someday I'm going to get a caterpillar tattoo around my nipple."
All the girls blushed except me-I laughed.
Shoko and three other girls were touring my school for a program called "Cultural Exchange between Korean and Japanese Students." That was the year the ban on Japanese cultural imports was lifted. Shoko was from a Japanese city I'll call A, and went to a small all-girls high school that was apparently a sister school to mine. She was among the four best English speakers in her sophomore class, which was why she was chosen to visit my school.
The principal, excited by this small event, took the four students around to every classroom, in all three grade levels. The girls seemed inexhaustible, introducing themselves in cheery voices when they came to my class, their final stop. Shoko had a shy demeanor, but I suspected she wasn't actually shy and only spoke shyly out of habit.
In the days leading up to Shoko's arrival, Mom, Grandpa, and I cleaned the house whenever we had time. Shoko was in the same year as me, and I was one of the few tenth-graders who could speak English, broken as it was. This was the excuse my homeroom teacher used to ask Mom if Shoko could stay at my house for her week in Korea. Shoko and I remained about a handspan apart while we awkwardly made our way home.
I still remember how Mom's and Grandpa's faces broke into smiles when they saw us come through the front door. How they knew nothing about Shoko yet still beamed at her in welcome, just because she was a guest who had traveled a great distance. Grandpa's and Mom's animated faces as they greeted Shoko looked strange and comical to me, given that my family normally had trouble showing affection to the point of being too embarrassed to smile at each other.
"You must be Shoko. It's great to have you here. Our place is a bit small, but I hope you won't find it too uncomfortable."
Mom chattered away in Korean as if Shoko understood her, while Grandpa translated for her into Japanese and kept on smiling.
Go get me my ashtray, bring me a glass of water, fetch hot water for my feet: giving orders while watching TV on the couch was all Grandpa did. He'd be sitting where he always sat when I came home from school and only spare a brief glance at me before turning back to the screen. But this very same Grandpa had switched off the TV and was asking Shoko all sorts of questions. His voice sounded confident when he used Japanese. Even if he had learned it from harsh Japanese instructors, it was the only foreign language he could speak.
My family didn't talk much during meals. We would have the TV on, out of habit, and watch soap operas or the news while eating as quickly as possible. But as soon as Shoko turned up, Grandpa started jabbering away in Japanese and chuckled so often that I couldn't squeeze a word into the conversation. It was the first time I'd ever seen him talk or laugh so much.
Shoko knelt on the floor and very politely listened to Grandpa with a smile. Just as when I'd seen her bashful expression in class, I felt something was off about her smile. I sensed that she wasn't smiling because she was truly pleased, nor nodding because she really sympathized. The gestures were simply meant to make the other person feel comfortable.
Now and then Grandpa pointed at me and cackled in Shoko's presence. I asked her what he was on about, and she said he was telling her funny stories about me. Like the time I forgot to bring my backpack to school and had to come back home, or the time I peed my pants listening to a ghost story, stupid stuff like that. Grandpa had been furious with my accidents when they occurred, so I had no idea why he was recounting them as if they were fun memories we shared.
Shoko seemed to find it easier to communicate with Grandpa than with me. There were many things we couldn't talk about in English, but she and Grandpa could talk about pretty much anything in Japanese. Grandpa asked Shoko to call him "Mr. Kim." He said he wanted to be a friend, not old and boring like some school principal.
It was an evening in July shortly before summer break.
Shoko and I were chatting as we strolled along a nearby river. She said my family members were kind and funny. I didn't reply. My English was limited, but I wanted to show her that I liked her. I linked my arm with hers.
Shoko stopped in her tracks and looked at me, her face stiffening. She said formally in English, "I am heterosexual. I am not attracted to you sexually. Or to any other girls. I like boys."
A little taken aback, I told her I wasn't attracted to her, either, and explained that linking arms was a common way to display affection between friends here, so she shouldn't take it the wrong way. She didn't quite believe me, but understood what I meant when she saw hordes of girls arm in arm at school the next day.
Shoko said she lived with her aunt and grandfather. That was why my family didn't feel like strangers to her; if anything, she felt at home. Her aunt was the real head of the family, but wasn't around much because her job involved frequent travel. Her grandfather treated her like a princess, convinced that she was the prettiest and smartest girl in the world.
"I'm his religion, his whole world. Every time I remember that I want to die."
She said that on rainy days, when her grandfather came out to meet her with an umbrella, she climbed over the fence into her house to avoid running into him. Once, when he used a portion of what little money he had to buy her new clothes, she chucked them in the trash can still wrapped. The thought of her grandfather seeing her as some kind of girlfriend turned her stomach. As soon as she was done with high school, she would take off to Tokyo and never set foot in her hometown again.
"Then I'll give you my grandpa. Mine thinks I'm the dumbest girl in the world and nags at me to lose weight every time he sees me. He's never bought me so much as a pack of gum, let alone clothes."
Shoko smiled quietly at me. It was a pleasant but cold smile. Like she was a grown-up dealing with a silly little kid.
The house teemed with a curious liveliness during our week with Shoko. Grandpa went to the grocery store to buy watermelon after Shoko mentioned she liked the fruit. Mom set a goal to learn a new language whether it was English or Japanese. We had trilingual conversations over a plate of rice balls made by Shoko.
"Say cheese!"
Shoko loaded film into her Pentax camera and snapped the three of us munching watermelon. And like paparazzi, she took pictures of Mom cooking dinner and Grandpa cleaning the living room. While Mom and Grandpa were startled, they didn't seem to mind the attention and laughed it off.
I barely recognized this smiling, twinkly-eyed Mom and chatty Grandpa. I might've easily believed them to be good adults if they were strangers I met on the street. Mom and Grandpa had always been lethargic and socially awkward. I used to think they were like grandfather clocks that had stopped ticking, that gathered dust and faded in color each year. Like people who had neither a goal nor the will to change, whose lives had come to a grinding halt.
It seemed to me that the strangest of strangers was family. Perhaps Shoko knew more about my grandfather than I did.
Shoko and I would rent movies on our way home from school. Most of them were rated R, but I could rent them without arousing suspicion if Shoko accompanied me to the VHS store. They were movies like Great Expectations starring Ethan Hawke as a painter; Shakespeare in Love, which had some racy love scenes; the Japanese horror film The Ring; and Notting Hill with Julia Roberts. We watched them in the living room with the lights off, sipping green tea. Whenever a racy scene came on, silence stretched between Grandpa, me, and Shoko.
"I've never met anyone who likes movies more than you do. Maybe you'll end up making movies yourself," Shoko said as I returned the VHS tapes. "Like a screenwriter or director."
Laughing, I shook my head, but oddly enough her words left a deep mark on me. Shoko's words held a certain power.
Shoko gave me a world map folded up in a square. She said the world was big and we were free to go anywhere. That I shouldn't limit myself to cities near my town, I might as well venture out to Seoul, Beijing, Paris, New York. I thought this was a funny thing to say, so I just laughed. No one in my family had ever lived in Seoul, and I assumed I'd also keep on living near the town I was born in.
I stuck the map on my bedroom wall and drew a red dot on my county and Shoko's home, City A. The two dots were barely a handspan apart. Then I marked cities around the world that Shoko wanted to visit. Beijing, Hanoi, Seattle, Christchurch, Dublin. I was awed by the thought of people living inside those tiny dots.
Shoko's first letter arrived a week after she left. She wrote that she would never forget her stay in Korea. And someday when she went to university, she'd come back and travel with me. She complained that Japan was too humid when she returned-entering her house felt like walking into her grave. She added that we should definitely link arms the next time we met.
I wasn't the only one to receive a letter from her. Shoko had written a letter in Japanese and addressed it in a separate envelope to Grandpa. The two of us sat side by side on the couch and read our English and Japanese letters. Grandpa kept her letter on the armrest and pored over her vertical writing several times a day.
Shoko was always fair with her letters. Grandpa and I received letters of the same length on the same day; on some days I was the one to find her letters in the mailbox, on others it was Grandpa. We practically competed to get to the mailbox first and sat together on the couch discussing the everyday goings-on in her life.
Shoko seemed to share only bright news in her letters to Grandpa. She ran in a race and came in first, she went to a delicious curry restaurant with her aunt, she went boating with her friends on a holiday, she went on a trip to Hokkaido. What she wrote to Grandpa were beautiful anecdotes that might belong on postcards.
Yet the letters I received contained only dark stories.
She stole her grandfather's money, but he pretended not to notice; she tossed that money down the drain; she sometimes wanted to slip poison into her grandfather's food; she discovered her aunt was squandering the child support money from her dad, so she tore up her aunt's underwear one by one and hurled them out into the street; she sometimes cut herself on the pelvic area with a sterilized knife.
At first her contradictory stories confused me. It was hard to tell which was real, what she told Grandpa or what she told me. But over time I supposed that both versions of her letters were true. Not every detail may have been fact, but all were truthful stories. No, even if everything were made up, they would still be truths. As her letters to Grandpa showed, she must've wanted to be recognized and loved, and as she wrote in her letters to me, she must've wanted revenge against the people closest to her, including herself.
Shoko wrote us around once every ten days. She didn't care whether we wrote back or not. She continued to send us letters until she graduated from high school.
Shoko said she didn't have any close friends. There may have been people she appeared to hang out with, but she seemed like the type that didn't know how to build intimate friendships. That's why she never opened up to the people around her, choosing instead to write letters to foreigners she didn't need to meet in the flesh.
If I were Japanese and lived anywhere near her, Shoko would not have shown the slightest interest in me.
People say things like "Out of sight, out of mind" or "Love or even hate-love grows only when you meet often enough," but they didn't apply to Shoko. For her to call someone a friend, they had to be a safe distance away, out of sight and out of earshot, with absolutely no chance of ever intruding on her life.
Shoko did well in school. She was positive she could get to Tokyo one way or another.
Her letters stopped coming in March, right after high school graduation.
In her last letter, she wrote:
Turns out I can't go to Tokyo. -Shoko
And to Grandpa, she wrote:
I wanted to visit you in Korea, Mr. Kim, but I'm not sure if I can now. I'm sorry. -Shoko
Grandpa held the one-line letter and sighed, saying nothing. For him, too, Shoko was a dear friend to talk to. He had even planned to take everyone on a trip to Jeju Island when she came to Korea after starting college. Once a man who bristled at any mention of Japan, Grandpa now said the country's nutty politicians were to blame and we shouldn't take it out on its good citizens.
