Shoko’s Smile by Choi Eun-young
Review of Shoko’s Smile by Choi Eun-young
“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.”
Shoko’s Smile by Choi Eun-young (2021). Published by Penguin Books.
This book has been everywhere! I think a member of BLACKPINK, Jisoo, recommended it and then it exploded in popularity all around the world. Generally when a K-pop idol recommends a book (like every time a BTS member recommends a book I suddenly begin to see it seeping everywhere in my life), that author probably just got an insane amount of royalties from the number of fans going off to buy the book. And that, my friends, is how Shoko’s Smile made its international debut.
And I see why this book in particular she recommended. I heard she’s an avid reader of feminist literature, and this short story collection is about the lives of young women residing in South Korea. Not all of our main characters are Korean, we have some Japanese and Vietnamese characters in here too. Which is good for representation in Korean literature! We don’t hear much about other ethnicity in the country, although there is a small minority of non-Koreans residing there, especially in Seoul. We delve into a lot of harder and good topics in these short stories, and while some of the stories are weaker than the others, they still manage to make good points about contemporary society, not just in Korea.
With that being said, let’s begin the review!
Book Blurb
A bestselling and award-winning debut collection from one of South Korea's most prominent young writers.
In crisp, unembellished prose, Eun-young Choi 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, traveling 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.
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.
Content
Before we dig deeper into this review, I think it’s important for some to note that this is a work of realistic nonfiction. You’re going to find some hard, heavy-hitting themes and discussions about ethnicity and race in contemporary Korean society in these short stories, which I as a reader familiar with Korean culture, having lived there for a brief time, really appreciated. I also prefer short story collections to novels, which is shocking considering the vast majority of my reviews are about novels. This collection features seven short stories that focus mainly on female characters that tend to skewer young, which I also appreciated (I fall into this demographic though).
There is something truly unique about Korean literature because Korean authors manage to connect this universal trauma and sadness caused by Korea’s past into their works. Perhaps it’s because of how recent Japanese colonialism and then the Korean War was, but you can still see this in a collection like Shoko’s Smile.
But, at the same time, we bring up how Koreans actually massacred Vietnamese civilians—something many people are 100% unaware about. In the first short story, where we have an exchange student living with a Korean family, we then bring up the topic of mental illness, which, in South Korea, still tends to be unacknowledged in mainstream society. It’s changing, but we’re still at the point where it’s still kind of hush-hush to talk about it.
I legitimately also forgot that this is a translation because the writing was so smooth and well-done. I enjoyed it quite a bit and found that there were no holes that irked me as I kept reading. The plot of the stories all tended to be pretty solid, Choi did a good job of conveying the delicate sadness and heartbreak that came with these stories. My favorite story in the collection, hands-down, was “Hanjo and Youngju.” It touches upon the concept of life versus death, as well as discrimination. I like philosophical topics like these, so this was right up my alley.
Overall Thoughts
This was a pretty solid short story collection! I usually side-eye when celebrities recommend books because half of the time, they aren’t book people and their taste 100% does not line up with mine. But this is actually a really good collection. There are some minor qualms I have with it, although I overlooked them in favor of liking the content enough to. The narrators do kind of blend together voice-wise and I would prefer if they managed to be a bit more distinguished from each other.
