08 Jun / Shoko’s Smile by Choi Eunyoung, trans. by Sung Ryu [in Shelf Awareness]
*STARRED REVIEW
Women alone populate the extraordinary seven stories in Shoko’s Smile by bestselling Korean author Choi Eunyoung, who makes her English-language debut, smoothly translated by Sung Ryu. From daughters to grandmothers, Choi’s narrators remain in motion, not only physically but chronologically, each assessing significant past events that shape their current lives.
In the first three stories, childhood experiences create lingering effects deep into adulthood. In the titular “Shoko’s Smile,” a Japanese student’s visit with her Korean host family will engender an epistolary relationship that lasts decades. In “Xin Chào, Xin Chào,” a Korean woman recalls her family’s close friendship with a Vietnamese family while living in Germany. A woman is visited in her hospital bed by the 16-year-old version of a cousin with whom she shared a close bond as a child, in “Sister, My Little Soonae.”
Suddenly truncated relationships haunt “Hanji and Youngju,” about a Korean geology graduate student and a Nairobi vet who develop an intense friendship while living in a French monastery, and also “A Song from Afar,” featuring a Korean woman who arrives in St. Petersburg to visit an older schoolmate who studied Russian literature. Missing loved ones dominate “Michaela,” about a mother who visits Seoul to glimpse her hardworking daughter, as well as “The Secret,” in which a grandmother faces death without her beloved granddaughter; the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster looms in both.
Choi writes assuredly, her sentences direct and unadorned, yet the simplicity belies intricate narratives often hinging on unpredictable details – a nipple caterpillar tattoo, an Antarctic burial, a 1997 cassette tape. As they long, endure, transform (and not), Choi’s exceptional women are well-primed for their close-up.
Discover: Choi Eunyoung’s remarkable debut collection features seven stories of Korean women, candidly assessing their lives past and present.
Review: “Fiction,” Shelf Awareness, June 1, 2021
Readers: Adult
Published: 2016 (Korea), 2021 (United States)