Skinship

June 21, 2021
Journeys large and small, physical and emotional, dominate the eight stories in Choi’s poignant debut collection. “The Church of Abundant Life” focuses on Soo-ah, a Korean transplant who yearns to travel from Pennsylvania to Maryland for a religious revival led by an old friend, much to her husband’s chagrin. In “First Language,” Sae-ri and her arranged-marriage spouse, James, drive to retrieve their troubled son after his expulsion from a Christian-based reform camp called the Second Chance Ranch for making sexual advances toward other boys. Teenager So-hyun, who escapes her abusive father with her mother and brother, narrates the title story, which takes a sharp turn when the quartet is reunited years later in America. “Song and Song,” employing a mother’s death to generate a rift between sisters, also hinges on a reunion, this time in England. More end-of-life drama is found in “The Art of Losing,” in which elderly Mo-sae labors to retain memories as he steadily declines, and “The Loved Ones,” which chronicles a single day in the life of a home hospice aide attending to a dying man. While Choi tends to lean on similar narrative elements, she handles them with skill and humanity, and succeeds in making every character complex. Each voice has something meaningful to say in this accomplished collection.

Starred review from July 1, 2021
The characters in Choi's stories are caught in-between cultures, families, generations, even life and death. Especially stupendous are her Korean immigrant women-in-flux. In "The Church of Abundant Life," a childless woman recalls how she met her husband through her English tutor in Korea and became half of a Pennsylvania convenience store-owning couple. In "First Language," a woman travels to pick up her troubled son from Second Chance Ranch. In "Skinship," a mother and her children leave Korea to escape her abusive husband, only to be reunited with him in a act of misdirected kindness. Familial bonds are sharply interrogated in "Song and Song" as sisters lose their mother, in "The Loved Ones" as younger generations are about to lose their elders, and in "The Art of Losing" when a grandson is in the care of grandparents facing Alzheimer's and atrial fibrillation. In other tales, friendship fails two third-graders who get lice, and gifted piano students meet again 22 years after parting. Rare is the impeccable first collection, even if the writer's already been anointed by Roxane Gay, who chose "The Art of Losing" for Best American Short Stories 2018. Multiple prestige outlets have previously published the Korean-born, Long Island-raised, Johns Hopkins/Stanford-educated Stegner Fellow, presciently aware that Choi's debut would be a masterpiece.

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Starred review from July 1, 2021
The rare story collection that draws you in so completely that the pages turn themselves. That's the happy experience of reading Choi's debut book of eight luxuriously long stories that chronicle the lives of Korean American families. Tolstoy wrote, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Choi's families aren't unusually unhappy, but her characters bear the weight of the small indignities, compromises, and sometimes great sacrifices that families require. In "The Church of Abundant Life," Soo spends her days behind the counter of the store her husband bought when he immigrated to the United States. A chance encounter with an old acquaintance from South Korea makes her reflect on her somewhat impulsive choice to marry one man and not another--who then married her acquaintance--and the tragedies both couples have borne. "The Art of Losing" (selected for the Best American Short Stories in 2018) captures the tenderness and brutality of long marriages. "Sometimes," the wife observes, "she felt that patience and kindness could be stretched so far in a marriage as to become their opposites." Similarly, in "Song and Song," a sprawling piece about losing a mother and becoming one, the narrator realizes that mothering is an act both of forgiving and being forgiven; though her children haven't brought her the happiness she expected, "they have taught me all I know about the meaning of life." Choi's stories are both closely observed and expansive, a feat of narrative engineering that places her next to Alice Munro. Nearly every one builds to what feels like an epiphany, or a pearl of wisdom, only to rush on for more pages as though to remind us that life does not stand still, that flux is the normal state of things, and loss always lurks on love's horizon. An exceptional debut.

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