Shoko's Smile: Stories

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Each story forces me to confront a part of myself and I find that oddly comforting and liberating. It’s as if the book helped me put in words, or to realise, what I’ve been feeling (deep down). She must have felt it too. That I’d become mentally stronger, tougher than her. I was watching someone who’d had a piece of her mind shattered. Soyu’s vulnerability and her need to feel that odd sense of superiority over her friends and peers stood out to me. It’s not a great trait, but instead of despising her for it, I felt that I could empathise with her and I found it oddly comforting to have a character that felt so.. human. While we don’t like to admit it, I think this is true that instead of recognising our own vulnerabilities, we (sometimes) try to cover for it by revelling in a warped sense of superiority and feeling the need to feel justified and comforted that our choices are “better” than the others. Shoko's Smile is an exceptionally touching collection of realistic, profound, and tender stories. Each is impassioned and complex but never bleak. They depict the reality of the female experience and human connections in their truest form. Each story portrays ordinary life's complexities and challenges in an authentic, untarnished narrative. The end effect is a lingering and poignant kaleidoscope of women and their resilience in the face of the uncertain future. Pure dreams were meant for talented filmmakers who could afford to enjoy their jobs. Glory was meant for them, too. Film art in general, only revealed its true face to hardworking mediocrities. I covered my face with my hands and sobbed. It was difficult to accept that fact. The moment untalented people clutch at the mirage of dreams, it slowly eats away their lives.

The final two stories - Michaela and The Secret - revolve around the heartbreaking 2014 Sewol ferry sinking that killed 304 passengers, many of whom were high-school students and their young teachers.This is easily a new favourite read of mine. Shoko's Smile is an extraordinary collection of short stories with a lot of heart that centers around woman navigating human relationships amidst grief, trauma, suffering and injustice. EC: The Sewol sinking has numerous existing victims and is an ongoing incident that hasn’t even been fully investigated. Many people were scarred by the incident when it happened in 2014 and still are. To fictionalize such great pain of others is a scary, delicate task, as you run the risk of objectifying and othering real-life victims. But when I wrote those two stories in 2014 and 2015, there were calls to “bury the past and move forward” and to “stop raising a fuss.” I felt strongly that the incident shouldn’t be intentionally forgotten and, as a writer, I had to write. There were attempts by certain people to corner and isolate the victims’ families by spreading the framework of “us vs. them” and “over-demanding surviving families vs. ordinary citizens.” I felt such distinctions were violent and wanted to ask these people if they truly, hand on their heart, thought they had nothing to do with the incident. My portrayal of the sinking is cautious, and never direct, to avoid objectifying the suffering of others in a rough manner, and to show that even people who appear to be unrelated are, in fact, connected to what happened as members of a shared society. JY: Your writing achingly shows the many ways in which we, from one human to another, keep hurting each other in our society. Are there ways in which you think we can help lessen this overarching pain and cruelty? Shoko's Smile interweaves challenges of squandered youth, melancholy, family strife, and grief with kindness, hope, and love.

Shoko’s Smile is filled with a tender vulnerability, presented simply in unadorned prose. “I didn’t want to stage a protest about my pain to other people,” the narrator states in “Hanji and Youngju,” a novella about a Korean woman negotiating a complicated relationship and quiet heartache. There is nothing staged or forced about Choi’s stories, which are filled with understated tragedy. Rather than focusing on the drama of the event itself, they reflect the nuances of the grieving process, and what it means to continue living with trauma—such as the violent repercussions of the Vietnam War or the repressed aftermath of the Sewol sinking. Whenever she felt very fortunate to live a particular moment, the woman remembered her husband, who was called to heaven thirteen years ago. Thinking about him, a heavy pendulum seemed to scrape along the bottom of her heart. He never got to see Michaela enter university or watch her grow into a fine young woman. He never saw the Holy Father holding the Mass at Gwanghwamun and no, he had never been to Jeju island either.Each centres around the life of a young Korean woman, with political overtones in some of the stories, such as the rounding-up and torture of suspected leftists, the sinking of the Sewol ferry (see below) and the pro-democracy student movement. Written with sober detail, filmic precision and absolute control . . . an incredibly impressive collection told with realism, seriousness and moral integrity’ Observer

Brilliantly conceived, the stories in Shoko’s Smile are emotionally raw and true to life: a compilation of a writer who has not only devoted time to the development of the craft, but who has invested in the deep observation of character. The resulting emotional portraiture is both extraordinary and moving.

Choi introduces a cast of characters in seven short stories that vary in age, occupation, and motive, but all long for connection, typically with themselves, as well as those around them. The desire for intimacy and to be understood intensifies as relationships eventually deteriorate or become estranged from one another. Hanji and Youngju is a story of an enigmatic relationship between the narrator Youngju, and a young Kenyan man Hanji, both volunteers at a monastery in France. While as long as Shoko's Smile this story is more constrained in scope and more intense as a result. Many of Choi’s stories feature relationships which form when one woman is uniquely understood by another, or is seen in a way that they have never been seen before. In “Xin Chao Xin Chao”, the loneliness of immigrants is sharply rendered in the story of a Korean family who befriended a Vietnamese family in Germany. The narrator’s mother bears the double burden of being in a loveless marriage in a foreign country but is cared for by Mrs Nguyen who “understood our worries before we mentioned them.” Mrs Nguyen sees the narrator’s mother as no one else has ever seen her, as a woman with “a big heart and the innate capacity to sympathize with other people” and someone who “ached for the people who couldn’t ache.” Mrs Nguyen’s special understanding and affection however, does not suffice to cushion them from the collateral damage of an argument about the Korean participation in the Vietnam war, especially when the Nguyen’s losses are revealed as a result of the conflict. Truth to be told, I'm not sure why I started this when I don't feel like having any literary fiction at the moment. After looking further on what the message forth, I think this book is astonishing and agonizing all the same. I find the prose to be a bit dry and monotonous which is why as much as I wanted to love the book, I couldn't find myself engaging with them. I got weary instead. I also agreed on the part where most of the characters felt one-dimensional and barely distinguishable despite it being anthologies. It’s also true that some fairly major aspects of human experience are noticeably missing from the book’s purview. Sexuality, romance, and even strong marital bonds may have existed in the characters’ pasts, but they are more or less absent from their present-day lives.

EC: On the news I see anti-Asian hate crimes cropping up all over the world. Considering that only the most egregious cases make it onto the news, how many “lesser” hate crimes and discriminations are happening? Some people choose to blame, target, hate, and dump their rage on those who are weaker instead of fighting their powerful oppressors. How were such people raised and educated? Their values had to have been planted in them originally—no one is born a bigot. That’s why we need to educate children painstakingly on human dignity. One small thing we can do is to call out people who, in our everyday interactions, try to joke about or justify discrimination, and make it very clear to them that their thinking is harmful. And when we ourselves start to feel prejudiced against a certain group or entity, it’s important that we introspect, interrogate our emotions, and reflect on why we’re projecting our problems onto another person or group. 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. Such is the grace and delicacy with which the characters open up themselves that the reader can’t help but be taken by surprise whenever they’re hit with epiphanies or moments of straightforwardness, such as:Sung Ryu is part of the Smoking Tigers collective ( https://smokingtigers.com/sung-ryu/). I have previously read her translation of two sci-fi/speculative fiction works, I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories by 김보영 (Kim Bo-Young) and the brilliant Tower by 배명훈 (Bae Myung-hoon). Similarly, in “Hanji and Youngju,” the narrator, a young Korean woman, develops an intense friendship with a Kenyan man she meets while both are volunteering at a monastery in France. At some point, their relationship goes wrong, and he stops speaking to her. But despite the narrator’s best efforts, she cannot figure out the cause of their estrangement, what she might have said or done to upset or offend her friend. The reader can’t, either. Instead, we are left with the gut-punch of that lost intimacy and no tidy way to reassure ourselves that the same thing wouldn’t happen to us under comparable circumstances. I was also blown away by how rich and fully fleshed out every piece in this collection was. All Choi's characters were so vivid, and complex, and real, I experienced every emotion they felt as though they were my own. And every ending was so satisfying, so complete, each story felt almost like a full-fledged novel in itself. In crisp, unembellished prose, Choi Eunyoung 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, travelling 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.