Shoko’s Smile

By Choi Eun-young

Translated by Sung Ryu

(Trans. 2021)

Penguin

(Short Stories)

Choi Eun-young’s short story collection includes seven works: ”Shoko’s Smile,” “Xin Chào, Xin Chào,” “Sister, My Litle Soonae,” “Hanji and Youngju,” “A Song From Afar,” “Michaela,” and “The Secret.” Choi’s characters are often emotionally remote, locked into identities based on private grievances and personal tragedies. Parents are emotionally unavailable and their children retaliate by living sealed-off and joyless lives. Choi’s characters are difficult to love; even when they become aware of their own failings and other characters reveal to them that their perceptions of their parents’ conduct may have been biased and unfair, they can revert to their old habits of resentment and victimhood. The stories are intimate and contemporary, but at their core, the characters embody historical and contemporary traumas. In “Shoko’s Smile,” a teenage girl and her family host a student from Japan. She is shocked when the visitor’s polite, perpetually desiring-to-please smile causes her stone-faced mother and grandfather to break out in toothy grins, and her grandfather starts speaking enthusiastically to the visitor in the Japanese he was forced to learn during the Japanese occupation. In “Sister, My Little Soonae,” a young woman reflects on a deep friendship formed in the aftermath of the Korean War between her mother and a third cousin, the only one of her family to survive the conflict. Choi points out that one can leave Korea but not leave the burden of its suffering and its sins. In “Xin Chào, Xin Chào,” a young Korean girl meets up with a Vietnamese boy at a middle school in Germany. They become fast friends, and as it happens, their fathers work in the same office. They seem destined to be fast friends when a friendly dinner becomes a minefield; the well-meaning boy brings up a family tragedy and the work of Korean mercenaries in the Vietnam War. Choi is unflinching in the face of history, refusing to patch over the peninsula’s fault lines. In “Michaela,” Choi juxtaposes a visit by the Pope to Korea’s Catholic community alongside families grieving over the Sewol Ferry disaster of April 2014, when 304 people died, including 250 students from Danwon High School in Ansan City. The tragedy took place over several days and was made worse by government indecision and incompetence. Investigation revealed safety violations by the ferry company and decisions that jeopardized the vessel’s seaworthiness. These events haunt Choi’s characters and contribute to the keeping of secrets and withholding of affection that hobbles them when they would like to form new friendships or reconnect with family–especially when Choi focuses on the gulf that separates multigenerational families.

“Mom went to see Auntie every day after work. She knocked on the front door and called her name. SHe pounded on the bedroom window asking to be let in. She wanted to show Auntie, at least in a small way, that she was not alone. Auntie had no close friends apart from her husband, and she had been told by Mom’s family not to consider them family, to leave and never look back.The fact tat Auntie didn’t have a single soul to depend on stung Mom’s heart.” -from “Sister, My Little Soonae”