Shoko's Smile: Stories

Product Information

Some stories are pointedly political and show how some relationships can break down due to events far beyond one's control. 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. Knowing how hard it is to put so many emotions into a short story, it amazes me how adept Choi Eun-young is at doing so with almost every single story in this collection. She writes from women's POV in brisk yet evocative writing, letting us experience and feel the quiet drama in each of her characters' lives. Sometimes the drama would feel larger than life—like a childhood friendship gone wrong over matters such as war and a massacre, or someone grieving over a tragedy like the Sewol Ferry incident—while at other times, the drama is something you've lived through: someone you cherished moving away and gradually growing apart from them as a result, growing ever distant from your mother or your grandparents as you grow up, and seeing too late your past mistakes which have led you to your own heartbreak. 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. Not all heartbreaks are over someone who you have been in a relationship with. Those may be the ones written about and portrayed most often in the music and film industries, but some of the worst heartbreaks are with people you genuinely thought had no chance of leaving your life. Couples break up and divorce all the time, but you never imagine “breaking up” with your best friend.

Bottom line: Five stars for the first five, overall 3.5 stars for the tantrum brought on by the final two. 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. One common arch found across all the stories is features Korean characters building lives across different countries and navigating their feelings while also traveling the world. This connection conveys that humans can be complicated to matter where they may live. SR: Choi Eunyoung and I did a bilingual reading once and I remember trying to consciously lower my natural volume to match her soft-spokenness. The translation process was similar. Her prose is quiet. She never shouts or gushes, keeping her syntax simple, her rhythm like that of slow, careful chewing. Her characters are always chewing over emotions and memories. Many Korean readers have said that reading Shoko’s Smile feels like reading their own diary. At times I’d be tempted to “punch up” the prose, but I resisted the impulse because I felt that her artistry lay in its artlessness, the stripped-down honesty that goes straight to the heart. My key task, then, was to catch and match the intense emotional undercurrents of her quiet sentences.JY: What would you say is distinctive about Eunyoung’s prose, and how did you try to achieve a similar effect in English? 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). But this is of a piece with the melancholy that permeates the collection, one punctuated by moments of startling insight, grief, and even joy made all the more affecting for how hard-won they are. There’s no question that this is a remarkable debut. I found myself in the title story Shoko’s Smile and there were so much that I could relate to. To me, the story was centred on the raw and vulnerable sides of being human and the desperate desire to upkeep an appearance of normalcy despite it all. We try hard to mask ourselves, but yet fail to see that others are also doing the same and we continue to judge them for who they are on the surface. 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.

Shoko's Smile is a collection of compelling short stories illustrating the growth and shattering of women's relationships and intimacies through time; presented with reality, seriousness, and moral rectitude. From Shoko's Smile to The Secret, all of these stories depict the connections that formed when women are understood by another or seen in a way that has never been seen before. 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. Yet, she offers hauntingly raw insights into the tug-and-pull of human dynamics and relationships past their expiry date. She writes: "Some people break up after a big fight, but there are also people who drift incrementally apart until they can't face each other anymore." Sister, my Little Soonae concerns is a story told by the narrator of her mother, and her mother's 'sister' Soonae, but actually only a distant relative, daughter of the narrator's grandmother's cousin, sent to live with the family as a helper. When Soonae's husband is arrested, tortured and imprisoned for alleged pro-North Korean activities, the grandmother disowns her and tells her daughter to, her philosophy: 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?Memory is a talent. You were born with it,” my grandma told me when I was young. “But it’s a painful one. So, try to make yourself a little less sensitive. Be extra cautious with happy memories, my dear. Happy memories seem like jewels when, in fact, they’re burning charcoal. You’ll hurt yourself if you hold on to them, so let go and dust off your hands. Child, they are no gift.” 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. Written with sober detail, filmic precision and absolute control . . . an incredibly impressive collection told with realism, seriousness and moral integrity’ Observer 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.

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 expe 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. 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. Choi Eunyong’s best-selling Shoko’s Smile has earned her comparisons to novelists such as Sally Rooney and Marilynne Robinson for the collection’s carefully crafted portraits of women’s relationships and intimacies formed and dissolved over time. This motif is beautifully embodied in “Hanji and Youngju”, where a Korean woman and a Kenyan man meet in France while volunteering at a monastery. Despite their different temperaments and even the language barrier, as they spoke in English and Hanji is said to not be entirely fluent in it, Hanji and Youngju develop a very special connection. The distancing between the two would break the heart of the 27-year-old-woman, who found in Youngju the comfort to be vulnerable for probably the first time in her life.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. 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. 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.