Source of book: Borrowed from the library
This collection of seven short stories translated from Korean was an NPR recommendation.
The book is all about relationships involving women - mostly between women - and is overwhelmingly achingly sad. The relationships are pretty universally lost, no matter how well they start.
Some of the loss is caused by death - including in a catastrophic ferry sinking that had profound political consequences in South Korea. Other losses are misunderstandings, growing apart, failure to maintain. It feels avoidable, but in practice it isn’t.
The relationships vary as well. Parent and child. Friends. Cousins. Lovers. Brief acquaintances. Neighbors. The reasons for the losses are as varied as the stories.
Choi presents the stories without comment, daring the reader to empathise with even the most flawed characters, and see the failed relationships as the result of universal human flaws and traits, not “bad” character.
In other words, it is a challenge of empathy. The characters are never horrible, just flawed, sometimes deeply. And often by their own traumas.
As with many short story collections, I will go through each one and say a bit about it.
Shoko’s Smile
The title story is a bit unusual. Shoko is a Japanese exchange student who visits Korea, and starts a long-distance friendship with Soyu, another teen girl. Shoko also writes to Soyu’s grandfather.
Within this triangle, there are differences of viewpoint. Ironically, Shoko is able to be most honest with the grandfather - and he with her - and Soyu, the narrator, finds that she didn’t really know either as well as she thought she did.
It’s a bittersweet story, tragic more in “what might have been” than in any actual falling out.
Xin Chao, Xin Chao
This story starts so very well, and seems like a rare ray of sunshine, before going horribly wrong.
It is about two immigrant families that have come to Germany. The narrator (who may not have a name - I can’t find it now) is the young daughter in a Korean family who makes friends with Thuy, a classmate from a neighboring Vietnamese family.
Over time, the families become close friends, and spend a lot of time with each other. It is really beautiful and Mrs. Nguyen in particular seems to be a wonderful person.
But things sour when the subject of the Vietnamese war comes up, and the narrator’s dad foolishly claims Korea has never invaded anyone. It turns out that Korean troops fought with the Americans in the Vietnam war, and wiped out most of Mrs. Nguyen’s family when she was a girl.
The friendship never recovers from this, unfortunately, and the families drift apart.
One ray of hope is that the narrator, years later after her parents have died, finds Mrs. Nguyen, who embraces her.
Sister, My Little Soonae
This one is heartbreaking and frustrating. As with the title story, it spans decades. At the beginning, Soonae, a distant cousin of the narrator, Hae Oak, comes to live with her and work in the sweatshop run by Hae Oak’s parents. While Soonae is older, she is tiny, hence the name.
The two grow up more or less like sisters, and are very close during their childhood.
What goes wrong for them is not at all their fault, at least initially. Soonae marries a man who is accused of being a communist collaborator. (Whether this is true is unclear - in the reality of the times, it didn’t matter.) He is imprisoned and tortured, and when released, he isn’t really functional any more.
Hae Oak’s parents disown Soonae, and demand that Hae Oak does as well. After all, they are at risk due to their connection.
Later, Hae Oak tries to reconnect, but finds she cannot deal with her horror at Soonae’s poverty or her husband’s disability. So they drift apart, and only reconnect after death.
One wants to shake Hae Oak for being so superficial, but also one can understand the inability to bridge the gap.
A great line in this story is about how the brutal authoritarian regime of Korea of that era crushed empathy - much like Trump and MAGA in our own time.
The world sneered at anyone’s love for another person, the desperate wish to give one’s own life over and over again if it meant saving the life of another. The world said: loving others isn’t worth a penny, you weaklings better watch out; what does it matter if those eight nobodies are death, the law is what we say it is and the commies are who we say they are; when we tell you to kneel you kneel, and we can easily kill you by slapping a charge on you, so shut your mouth and do what we say.
They were murdered by the state.
That’s ICE, and how the regime wants ICE to have impunity. And why we must fight against the entire idea of a deportation force in the first place.
Hanji and Youngju
This is the rare story that is about a male-female relationship, a brief romance.
The story takes place at a weird monastery in France - founded by a mystic, and not really affiliated with any formal religious group. It attracts people from all over the world.
It is never entirely clear what the beliefs of the group are - it seems fairly benign rather than cult-like. But the people who come there seem to come from all faith traditions. The founder was vaguely Protestant, but they sing Orthodox hymns, have Catholic leaders, and have members from all over the non-Christian spectrum as well.
Youngju is the Korean narrator. She gets sidetracked from her graduate studies to volunteer at the monastery. Perhaps she is just being avoidant.
She falls in love (more or less) with Hanji, a young veterinarian from Kenya.
Their relationship becomes close, but also somewhat ambiguous. Are they a couple or not?
And then, something happens. It isn’t clear what, and Youngju seems to not actually know. One day, Hanji is with her, the next he is distant.
And the two of them never talk about it.
This is where I just don’t get it. I know there are language barriers - they meet in the middle with English. But to just not say anything? Not my style I guess.
So, another failed relationship. He goes back to Kenya, she continues her studies, and she eventually drowns the diary she wrote during that time.
The one great line from this story comes after the couple is out and about in France, and have racial slurs hurled at them. It puzzles Youngji why anyone would spend that much effort on hate.
Truly I pitied these people who couldn’t feel secure about themselves in any other way. How empty a life of deriving joy from mocking and discriminating against another was.
I don’t get it either. It’s one thing to be angry when one is wronged, but to hate strangers? To find your joy and identity in looking down on other people? It truly is an empty life.
A Song From Afar
This story uses some Korean terms that don’t translate to English, so the definitions are provided at the beginning. In particular, the way that students of different years might refer to each other are important.
Meejin is the older student, while the narrator is younger. They join a vocal group at college that soon disbands due to generational differences (particularly sexist older members), but the memories bond them anyway.
It is unclear to me if the two were lovers, but it seems plausible. They then drift apart, partly due to the narrator’s struggle with depression, followed by Meejin’s departure to study in Russia.
Most of the story takes place after Meejin’s sudden death from a heart issue. The narrator travels to Russia to meet Julia, the Polish woman who roomed with Meejin, before the two of them had a falling out.
As with other stories, there is so much “what might have been” in this one. How did they grow apart? Could they have stayed close? Why didn’t either make much of an effort?
I liked the line in this one about why they sang.
They sang because they were hurt and distressed. Some Sunbaes said singing was a tool to educate, a means to galvanize, but I think our songs were a promise we made to ourselves. The promise that I, at least, won’t live a life of pursuing darkness. The joy of being able to sing together.
As a musician, I love this.
Michaela
I will admit this story puzzles me. I am not sure if it is intentionally ambiguous, if something was lost in translation, or if the writer just didn’t connect the dots.
Michaela is ostensibly the main narrator, the daughter of an older woman who lives in poverty for a variety of reasons. She has moved to Seoul, and made a life for herself.
Her mother married a lazy man, but made excuses for him, working herself half to death while he sat around the house. He has some reasons - he has trauma from the war, he lacks skills, he is supposedly taking care of his daughter (he isn’t) - but in any case, Michaela resents him, even after his death.
In the meantime, her mother has poured herself into her religion. The story is centered on a visit of the Pope. Mother has saved money, and travels to see him, just like she did when Michaela was a child.
But, being too proud to admit poverty, she tells her daughter that she will be staying with a friend, who turns out to be imaginary. Instead, she ends up sleeping in a bathroom, and getting lost, and wondering why her daughter doesn’t call her.
The reason for that is that mom forgot to charge her phone, and Michaela is seriously worried and tries to find her.
It is at this point that the story goes weird, and I was unable to follow it. Mom meets another old woman, and the two of them go to the memorial for the ferry sinking, where the other woman (I think it is her? Or is there only one woman?) mourns the loss of her daughter Michaela.
And when Michaela shows up, the old woman she finds is not her mother. And…I really didn’t follow it.
Are there two Michaelas, one living, one dead? Are they alternative versions of reality? Is one a dream? I am seeing online that I am not the only one with some confusion here. So maybe someone can explain this story to me, because I re-read the ending and still couldn’t figure it out.
Before the story goes weird, though, there is quite a bit of story that I really liked. I very much understood Michaela’s issues with her mother. The mother who was toxically positive about everything from their poverty to her pain from overwork, praising a benevolent god. As Michaela puts it, “her mom’s gratitude for the wretchedness of reality had, for a while, felt deceitful.”
It’s harder as a kid to be positive about suffering, I guess. And it is particularly difficult to see a parent in deep denial that they have a problematic partner and that you as a child are being negatively affected - something I have personal experience with.
The story is also an excellent look at the way that pride and embarrassment can keep people apart. It’s really a great story, notwithstanding the puzzling ending.
The Secret
This one also involves the ferry sinking, but is far more straightforward.
The granddaughter, a teacher-in-training, dies in the sinking while trying to save her students. This is based on reality. And not just in the usual “teacher dies saving students” story. The greater story is that the Korean government denied compensation to the families of the teachers-in-training, claiming that they were not killed on duty, because they had not yet gained their full licenses.
That’s total chickenshit, of course, and led to public outrage.
In this story, however, grandma is dying, and she was close with her granddaughter. So her daughter and son-in-law pretend that the granddaughter is teaching in China, off the grid.
Since the story is from the point of view of the grandmother, who is fighting dementia as well as ill health, it is an interesting view into the puzzlement of trying to understand what happened.
It’s quite sad, of course, but also well written.
That is the collection. It was a good read, but definitely bittersweet and sad throughout.
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