Shoko's Smile: Stories

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The attitudes they adopted out of consideration for each other slowly drove them apart, and the bond they had forged during the time they lived together could no longer sustain their relationship. (from “Sister, My Little Sonae”) Choi Eun-yong’s short stories collection, Shoko’s Smile, brings an intimate connection between people across boundaries of time and space, redefines love and loss that easily makes me lost in the seven stories included in this volume. It is easy to take for granted the emancipation of women and how technological advance make our daily lives more bearable today. But Choi Eun-yong’s stories take us to revisit how society changed in the past few decades, with her stories that seem to take points of view from people growing up in the 1990s as political and societal changes happened in South Korea. 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.

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. 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. Shoko’s Smile: Stories is one of those books that I want to share with everybody, but at the same time, part of me wants to keep it as a hidden gem. I see myself in all the four stories that I’ve read thus far, and it’s taking a lot of restraint on my part not to highlight almost the whole book. So many parts where I found myself nodding, and feeling the same emotions as the characters inside. I bought the e-book version, so I feel very liberated to do all the annotations and highlighting I want without thinking about sullying the book! 🙂 Perhaps the most heartbreaking moments in Shoko’s Smile are the stories of lives affected by political incidents too big to be overcome by the effort to keep love and faith alive. That Choi sets her stories within real historic facts, South Korean and global, makes her fiction even more poignant. Choi Eunyoung is a South Korean writer acclaimed for her nuanced yet poignant stories about women, queer people, victims of state violence, and other marginalized voices. She is the author of the bestselling story collections Shoko's Smile and Someone Who Can't Hurt Me, which have sold over 200,000 copies and 150,000 copies respectively in Korea and is being translated into several languages. Since her literary debut in 2013, she has received numerous accolades, including the Munhakdongne Young Writers Award (2014, 2017, 2020), Heo Kyun Literary Award, Lee Haejo Literary Award, and Hankook Ilbo Literary Award. Both of her story collections were selected as the best fiction title of the year by 50 Korean writers (2016, 2018). She has also published a Korean-English bilingual edition of her novella The Summer and contributed to many anthologies.JY: What would you say is distinctive about Eunyoung’s prose, and how did you try to achieve a similar effect in English? 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.

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.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. Even cooler is that the first 5 stories are excellent - the aforementioned novel-level punch (which sounds like a delicious beverage), beautiful writing, brilliantly translated.

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 Eunyoung refrains from sensationalizing the horrors of these historical events, keeping the stories firmly grounded in the emotional realities of the characters through sparse and understated prose. Reminiscent of Alice Munroe and Elena Ferrante, it is the force of emotions bleeding through Choi’s language that disarms, breaks, and warms the reader’s heart. Ultimately, Shoko’s Smile gently arouses in us an empathy for the pain of others and ourselves. JY: In that vein, I deeply admire how your work is very politically-conscious yet not didactic. Stories center around both national and international events (like Korea’s participation in the Vietnam War, the Inhyukdang Incident, the Sewol sinking). Have social issues and writing always been linked for you? The language used (at least in the English version) is simple and plain – no flowery and convoluted metaphors, no dreadfully pretentious bombastic vocabulary, nothing too abstract. Yet, it gets me right in the heart (gut). I’ve come to the conclusion that both of them are probably keen observers of life, because I have no idea how else they can write (and translate) some of these moments/thoughts that I feel (and struggle to put in words) in such simple, plain and effective language. I’m in awe, really. When it comes to collections of short stories, more often than not, I find myself rather unaffected by them. While most collections do have one or two good stories in them, the remainder tends to be either forgettable or plain bad. The stories in Shoko's Smile are by no means terrible but they did strike me as rather monotonous, dull even. I liked Eun-young Choi's restrained prose and that many of her stories hone in on life's quieter moments. Most of her stories are characterised by a sense of loss: there are those who are grieving the death of a loved one, those who regret not having done more to understand a friend or a relation of theirs, and those who long to be reunited with someone they care for. Generational divides also seem to be a recurring motif within this collection, as many stories feature children/parents or grandchildren/grandparents.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 Xin Chao, Xin Chao, a Korean family in 1990s Germany becomes fast friends with a Vietnamese expatriate family. But they fall out over a brusque remark that downplays South Korea's alleged complicity in the Vietnam War. If you couldn't share someone else's pain, if you didn't have the guts to survive a difficult stretch with them, it was better to choose heartlessness over half-hearted affection. Written with sober detail, filmic precision and absolute control . . . an incredibly impressive collection told with realism, seriousness and moral integrity’ Observer