Source of book: Borrowed from the library
This book is from my NPR recommendation list. I nominated it for our book club, but it didn’t win the vote, so I ended up reading it on my own.
As regular readers know, I love short stories, and try to have a collection on my nightstand most of the time. Being able to browse a bit at a time often fits the smaller time slots I have for reading.
Green Frog is one of the more unusual collections, in that it contains multiple genres, from riffs on Korean folk tales, to science fiction, to fantasy, to realistic family dramas. It really is all over the place, which makes it a grab bag of fascinating treasures.
Chung is the child of Korean immigrants, devout Christians who, if the stories are any indication, didn’t really understand their free spirited and queer child. There is a lot of family trauma in the book, and parts feel autobiographical, with the tension between love and frustration with her mother.
As someone who also grew up in a high-control family where religion was supremely important to identity, who has since deconstructed (although not as much as Chung), and for whom LGBTQ identities have lead to the breakdown of relationships, I found a lot in this book that felt familiar.
Overall, the writing is really excellent, and the stories of all kinds will draw you in.
As I often do with short stories, I will talk about them individually.
“How to Eat Your Own Heart”
The collection starts with a bank, a pseudo-recipe for cutting out and eating your own heart, and a description of how it grows back, but different. It is unlike anything else in the book, but it definitely grabs your attention in its short five pages.
“Green Frog”
Ah yes, the title story. This one features a Korean folk tale that Chung’s mother used to tell her, about a naughty green frog who always did the opposite of what her mother wanted, driving the mother to an early grave. The story itself is about a daughter who can never seem to do what her mother wishes, unlike the other daughter, the golden child. And yes, the narrator is a bit of a fuck-up, and the other daughter is a hard worker. But after the parents die, things take a bit of an ironic turn. This one very much felt like it had autobiographical elements.
“After the Party”
This story is about a Korean-American woman who has married a white college professor, and essentially given up her dreams to manage his life for him. It’s a bit of a bitter story, and I wonder if she knew someone like the protagonist.
“Rabbit Heart”
A bittersweet account of a relationship between a little girl and her Korean grandmother and a magical summer spent in Seoul. It is heartwarming, but bittersweet because eventually age and death comes for us all. The level of detail in this story is what makes it great. Chung captures the sights, sounds, emotions, and personalities so well.
“Presence”
One of the science fiction stories, this one really haunts me. The premise is that a company has come up with a way to erase “adverse life experiences” from memory. It starts off with good intentions: why not cure PTSD in veterans, or relieve the victims of child rape from their nightmares?
But after the protagonist and her now ex-husband’s company soars to success, the side effects start pouring in. Erase the bad memories, and a lot goes with them. When a new, far cheaper version is developed, the protagonist rushes it into production, ignoring the troubling results.
Eventually, everything goes to hell. The protagonist is thrown under the bus and divorced by her husband, and finds herself haunted by an apparition. It is a powerful story that has some parallels to one of my favorite Charles Dickens books, The Haunted Man. This is also one of the longest stories in the book.
“Human Hearts”
Another story based on Korean legends. In this case, the Kumiho, shapeshifting fox-like creatures that eat human hearts.
The narrator in this case is only half Kumiho, the product of her mother’s affair with a human. This story also returns to the idea of a favorite daughter, who the narrator can never hope to match.
In this story, however, a lot of the drama revolves around the narrator’s simultaneous disgust with the violent life she is born to and her innate dislike of humans. The ending is deliciously ambiguous.
“Mantis”
The author imagines the love life of a female preying mantis from her point of view. After all, mantids often, but not always, eat their mates after mating. Great line from a male on a date, “It’s too bad that all of this will end with you eating me.” It’s a short one, but with a definitely unexpected perspective. It also feels relevant to the dating scene we humans have created.
“The Sound of Water”
A rare story from the male perspective. This is a realistic story, and one I thought was quite good. Justin reconnects with Ellie, who dated Justin’s older brother James. In the meantime, his father is dying, and he is faced with the question of what to do with the family store, which he has no interest in running. Not that it is even making money anymore.
At its core, the story is about regret and time and the problem of balancing duty to family with one’s own dreams. I appreciate that it isn’t a story about romantic love, but about friendship and connection.
“Attachment Processes”
More science fiction. It takes a bit to figure out at first, but a couple has just gotten their daughter back. Well, not exactly. The real daughter is dead, from an accident.
But new technology can sort-of bring them back in the form of an android with a sort of artificial intelligence that supposedly can learn and eventually duplicate the deceased child. It cannot grow, however, so the replacement will be forever at the age you choose, up until age 16 or so.
Which happens to be the age that the real Elly died. But instead, the parents get her back at age five.
As we come to understand, this was an unraveling relationship when death cut it short. The real Elly became more and more difficult as she got older, partying and skipping school. The mother (the narrator) is filled with the “what-ifs” and thus wanted to go back to before Elly became difficult.
And now the replacement Elly will never grow beyond age five.
I will admit this story affected me a bit. I have wondered myself if my parents wish they could have kept me at a younger age, before I got to be difficult, questioning things, insisting on doing things my own way, and generally resisting their attempts to create a clone of themselves.
And on the other hand, if I could go back to age twelve, and somehow redirect my parents from getting involved with Bill Gothard, if I could have gotten my mom to get treatment for her mental illness, if I could have somehow managed to get them to embrace mainstream ideas of child development so they could have enjoyed my teen years, rather than freaking out that I was giving my soul to Satan when I did the normal teen things.
What if?
There is a good line in this one, that seems appropriate to my situation as well:
There is no possibility of life continuing after death. But that didn’t mean the end of love, even if it was the kind of love that was easy. The kind of love that didn’t demand anything of me, or require me to change, to become better, or to dive into the dark waters of my own faults and weaknesses and emerge with treasure. Elly would always be small and sweet and easy to love, never asking anything of me that I couldn’t give.
Dang.
“The Arrow”
Man, there are a lot of stories about parental expectations in this book. A woman finds herself pregnant after a brief encounter with a married co-worker. This leads to her considering how she always felt her parents had a path laid out for her - the arrow to follow, which she gets tattooed on her arm.
The pregnancy, strangely, seems to affect her mother in an unexpected way, and the two of them end up bonding as the result. The pregnancy ends in miscarriage, but somehow both mother and daughter end up seeing each other in new lights.
“Names for Fireflies”
A very brief story, more like a vignette, about a brief friendship between tween girls. It is also more than that, as the narrator has a crush on her friend. It ends all too soon, as the other girl’s parents divorce and she moves away, but the narrator is left with the memories and the desire. There may also be a bit of autobiography here, including the author’s rejection of the kind of religion she was raised with.
“Honey and Sun”
This one is a bit bizarre, with twin girls, dolls that are (maybe) sentient, an eccentric uncle who takes the girls in when their mother has a midlife crisis, and a giant butterfly collection.
It’s definitely more toward the magical realism side of the spectrum, or perhaps even straight-up fantasy.
“You’ll Never Know How Much I Loved You”
This is the longest story in the collection, and one that goes all over the place. It is a story of a woman from birth to middle age, from her dreams of being a singer to her discovery that her husband has another wife already. The ending is ambiguous as well. Will she stay or leave?
It also has a grandmother, who in this case tells the narrator:
“Listen to me. In this life, you must be your own prize, and then no one can take that away from you.”
“The Fruits of Sin”
A short tale of a teenage pregnancy with more than a little resemblance to The Scarlet Letter. It also explores the way a conservative church congregation slowly changes from judgmentalism to acceptance. It also leans into magical realism territory.
There are a couple of lines in this one that are worth quoting.
“Who might the father be?” the rest of us wondered, telegraphing our curiosity to one another with our carefully plucked eyebrows. We were none of us young anymore, and our eyesight was going, but very little escaped the attention of our eyebrows, which quirked upward at the first sign of gossip, like antennae.
And this one, as part of a passage on how so many of the children of the church had disappointed.
Other than Mrs. Park’s Philip, most of our children were unremarkable in the ways they disappointed us.
Ah yes, the children who disappoint - it is such a theme in the book.
“The Love Song of the Mexican Free-Tailed Bat”
This is about a daughter who is left to take care of the final arrangements for her father, from whom she has been estranged for years. Her mother moved back to Seoul, and her sister is extremely pregnant and can’t travel.
The story is told in a kind of irritating present tense second person way, with the protagonist addressed as “you.” This isn’t my favorite style of writing, and I think it really only works well in things like Neil Gaiman’s poem, “Instructions.”
Aside from the style, though, it is a good story. The protagonist’s memories of her father are tied up with his fruit bat research, and she has a lot of good memories. But alongside that are memories of his violence and anger. And a particular memory where her father abandoned her sister on the side of the road after an argument.
For so many of us, our childhood memories are complicated this way. There were plenty of good times. But also some real trauma that our parents don’t want to talk about.
Again I wonder how much if any of this story has its basis in the author’s life.
Overall, this is a good collection, and worth checking out. Apparently Chung wrote a novel before this book, and it will be interesting to see if she publishes any additional books in the future.
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