By Katherine Jin
Yoon Choi is the author of Skinship, a collection of short stories exploring the lives of Korean Americans and their relationships with people around them. In the span of eight thoughtfully crafted stories, Choi introduces readers to Korean Americans of varying generations, economic statuses, and “immigrant-ness.” The characters Choi creates aren’t simply projections of their demographic markers, though. They are complex individuals who navigate their worlds with different motivations, struggles, pains, and joys. I savored every story in Skinship, and I was thrilled to chat with Choi about her debut collection, as both a longtime fan and fellow Asian American writer.
Katherine Jin: Skinship features characters diverse in gender, age, upbringing, personality, and location. They include shopkeepers, good students, bad students, pianists, grandparents, working mothers, stay-at-home mothers, adoptees, veterans, and more. What is it about these particular characters that inspired you?
Yoon Choi: I don’t know that I was necessarily thinking of doing all those characters. But I was very interested in writing a collection which represented the community of immigrant experiences, specifically Korean immigrant experiences. The first story I’d written was “The Art Of Losing,” the story about an older couple where the grandfather has Alzheimer’s. As I thought about each of the subsequent stories, I did want to touch on characters of different ages. It was important to me that the characters were of different economic backgrounds. I also wanted to represent connectedness to Korea, so for example, some of the immigrants probably only speak Korean, and then the pianist in the collection doesn’t particularly care about his Koreanness at all. So I did want to represent that range, because I think that that’s accurate to the relationships we feel or don’t feel to the countries we might have immigrated from.
KJ: Your collection’s title, Skinship, evokes intimacy, warmth, and connection. However, readers delving into your stories meet characters who fear intimacy, are deprived of intimacy, or perhaps struggle to understand what intimacy even is, as was the case with Albert, the divorced pianist with undiagnosed autism in “Solo Works For Piano.” In the title story “Skinship,” we meet characters who inflict as well as fall victim to domestic violence. What motivates you to engage with not only the beautiful parts of intimacy, but also the ugly? What do you hope readers will take away from your depiction of various skinships?
YC: I never think about what the reader will take away. I do think very much about what would be true to the particular character who comes with a particular history. There is domestic violence. I think that it’s contextualized within a certain generation, which doesn’t mean that domestic violence only happens in particular generations, but I think that Korean women of a certain generation will respond to domestic violence differently than Korean Americans will. What a Korean man considers domestic violence might be different based on their background, their age, even their economic class. In that sense, it was important for me to just kind of put it in, but not to make a larger issue out of it than the characters would have the capacity to make.
It would be one thing for me to write a very contemporary story about domestic violence among educated and articulate and more Americanized Koreans, and it would be another for me to touch upon domestic violence in the context of an older couple. I think domestic violence in Asian American communities – specifically my knowledge is more localized to Korean American communities – it’s a big deal, it’s a big social problem, but I don’t know necessarily that literature is the place where I’m going to address that as a social issue. Because the characters who are experiencing that within the story don’t have the capacity to contextualize that as a social issue. In bringing it up, it’s almost like I feel as a fiction writer, you are making observations, rather than making a larger statement.
KJ: Upon first glance, many of the women protagonists in your stories appear to conform to society’s gender roles as best as they can. But upon closer inspection, every one of these characters also defies what is expected of them in both dramatic and understated ways. Soo-ah concocts a plot to visit an old flame unburdened by the presence of her husband, So-hyun’s mother leaves her abusive husband to start a new life in America, and Sae-ri tells her husband about her estranged son in Korea after years of acting like a subservient mail-order bride. As a parent, how do you hope your children will respond to the gender roles that demarcate so many aspects of our lives?
YC: Well, I’m not there yet with my kids. My kids are young, so mostly my worries with them really have to do just with, are they making friends at school? Why is my son’s presentation so bad? I was working on it with him right before this interview. So I haven’t thought, and I don’t think I have the capacity to think more specifically about their futures in that sense. Gender conversations have changed quite a bit since I was growing up and I think within the next five to ten years as they’re growing up it will continue to change. It’s hard for me to know; they’re young.
KJ: When characters in Skinship speak Korean, you leave some idioms and phrases translated literally, which results in unidiomatic or unconventional English. There’s one instance where you write out the entire phrase a character speaks in Korean script, forgoing English altogether. I’m not fluent in Korean, but as someone who speaks Mandarin at home and English everywhere else, I understand the choices you made. When I write about my experiences, I feel I need to pick between being understood and being honest, though you seem to accomplish both. How did you arrive at the approach you took with translation, and how should bilingual immigrant writers think about translating in general?
YC: This is a question I love thinking about. When I committed to writing about Koreans and Korean Americans as my subject matter, I found it extremely challenging to negotiate the language issue. There’s so much complexity in what you’re doing. The whole written system is different. There’s no commonality between English and what you’re trying to render. I would think about when Koreans are speaking Korean to each other, how should that sound in English, and if I’m gonna use quotation marks. But then you also want to think about when a Korean is speaking imperfectly in English, how do you do that without sounding like a complete stereotype, and having the reader immediately write off that particular character? And then there’s Konglish, these hybrid words that Korean Americans use very simply and easily which is just a part of everyday conversation. And then there are English speakers speaking in Korean.
There are just so many levels of communication going on that I found extremely challenging at first, and then I found extremely invigorating to think through those problems in writing. So I don’t have a one rule approach to how I do it. There are times where I might imperfectly transliterate something because I feel that it gets the English reader’s attention in a different way, where a more literal translation of the Korean would completely not make sense. So at a time like that, I’m playing with the foreignness of the sound, and the felicity of the expression, or the unusualness of the expression. Korean can be a very playful language; there’s a lot of onomatopoeia, there’s a lot of metaphorical stuff going on, so to kind of capture that somehow, I play around with that. The one thing I almost always try not to do is to actually phonetically spell something out. I know a lot of writers do that, just personally for me when I read the writing of writers from other cultures and I see that, I can do it for about a line, but after a while I’m just not reading it anymore. I recognize that about myself, so I try not to do that. The one instance you mentioned where I just full out went into Korean script, I felt should be a moment of alienation for an English reader, because the speaker of that particular story has reached the end of her narrating potential and has to switch into another language. So that kind of slamming of the door was an effective thing to do. I wouldn’t do it again, I don’t think, but for that particular story it seemed to be okay. One other thing is I almost never write dialogue and leave it as it is. I’ll look at it a number of times and I’ll tweak it to see how different sounds work and how it plays off each other. I think those kinds of challenges, as you begin to really engage with them, does give voice to your fiction.
KJ: It sounds like translation is something you think deeply about; there’s a reason why a character’s speech is rendered this way or that. When you said you preferred not to transliterate, did you mean you would rather not write the English sound of the Korean word? For example, for 바보 (idiot) you wouldn’t write pabo.
YC: So for small touches, I might. For example, in Korean you call mom “umma,” so I would say umma in quotation marks, because I can’t imagine that that particular character would say mom or mommy. But would I phoneticize a sentence? I think that’s starting to stretch the reader’s patience. So little phrases or little words of endearments, I might phoneticize. I’m also sensitive to the way that sound might come off to an English ear. I think the sound of umma also feels very maternal, and that sound is very similar among many cultures, so I think that one particularly works.
KJ: This is definitely a very interesting subject to get into, and I’m curious what other writers think. I love that you said you have to think about how it sounds to the English speaking reader and that you can play around with it, there’s no one size fits all approach.
YC: I don’t only think about the way it sounds in English; I actually feel a very strong commitment to my Korean reader. I know that of course, all works of literature can mean anything to any reader. And I have felt so deeply connected to the literature of writers from all different cultures. But I also feel that there is a specific responsibility that a writer of a particular culture has to that culture’s readers. So I did feel a twin sense in which I’m thinking about the English reader, but I’m also thinking about the Korean reader who would not want me to get it wrong. In terms of the accuracy of describing a dish, or the accuracy of an idiom that would or would not be used. Even if I’m playing around with the literal translation of an idiom, or at least the feel of that, I felt very much that it would have to stand to the judgment of the Korean American reader. So I try to stay as true to that as I can.
KJ: Many of your short stories feature music, and/or song lyrics such as in “The Loved Ones,” when the protagonist’s coworker at the home health care agency sings along to the jubilant Springsteen song “Thunder Road” in the car after their patient dies. Is music a big part of your life? What do you enjoy listening to?
YC: Music was a big part of my life. I love classical music, and I hate top 40, but my kids made me listen to top 40 so I know all the top 40 songs now. I don’t love Bruce Springsteen, but I know there’s a certain portion of America that reveres Springsteen and I needed to tap into that particular population. I didn’t know the song “Thunder Road” until I wrote the story. I looked for what I thought would be the song to fit the story. I think culturally, Koreans are a very musically oriented culture. They love karaoke, and in terms of the older generation of Koreans who grew up during the war, they are very well-versed in American movies and American songs, like Gone With The Wind, or they’ll know all these Bing Crosby songs. It’s just so much part of the American soldiers who were there, and the Western culture which came in at that time.
KJ: When you said music was a big part of your life, does that mean you used to take lessons?
YC: Yeah, I grew up in Long Island, New York and I went to one of those music prep schools – it’s called Manhattan School of Music. So every Saturday, we would have to go play piano or play violin, but I loved it. It was so much fun. The classical music in the classical music piece “Solo Works For Piano” are all pieces I specifically wanted to be in there. But “Thunder Road”, I had to look up. I had to look up, what’s the most popular Bruce Springsteen song?
KJ: I was amazed by how true to life your characters felt. Do you have any tips on writing characters that feel real? How do you get into your character’s head and help readers understand their perspectives?
YC: I actually get asked the character question quite a bit. I want to be thoughtful in how to respond to character in saying that I think writers don’t often understand that character is an invention. The idea that you work at a character, and try things on, almost like a doll where you’re putting on the clothes. In the beginning, as I formulate character, I will try different things on that particular character. When I first started writing, that would have felt very artificial to me. And I think that’s because I would think there are certain things in writing that you work at like description or metaphor, or other things that should just be inspired, like character, or story. But I actually think that that’s not perfectly true, because ultimately even the greatest characters in fiction are invented characters, and their creator worked on finding who they are. I think about Tolstoy, who initially had made Anna Karenina ugly, and then he labored on this draft, and then as he made her so powerfully beautiful, he began to find the core of his story. Because if she’s not beautiful, where is the energy of this plot going? And there are lots of different examples of writers making substantial changes in trying to find who they are.
So I play with it. In the beginning few pages, for the first two or three characters, it’s a lot of voice, what sounds right. I think about the story of the character. In writing these stories, I would have to think pretty specifically about the point of immigration. I would have to make that decision because depending on when they came, their language would change and their immigrant-ness would be different. In “The Church Of Abundant Life,” I thought about whether this couple would have a child. Because most immigrant couples of that culture and generation would have a child, and it would be a very odd thing for them to have decided not to have a child, so then I had to figure out if they don’t have a child, why wouldn’t they? I felt there were certain questions I had to answer, and I could play around with different explanations, and then as the story keeps going, I feel things settling and I begin to understand the character more and I know that I’ve committed to seeing her as this type of person or that type of person. But in the beginning pages, the characters can swing pretty wildly from one thing to another, and sometimes I think it’s helpful to think of it that way too, because then it helps you not fall into the stock character that you always have in the back of your mind. When you’re not careful, when you’re just writing, because most of us who write were such big readers, the character that already exists is already there for you to access quickly. So I think going against those instincts and tinkering for me is very useful.
KJ: In your view, what are the characteristics of a good short story?
YC: For me, there are at least two characteristics of a good short story. One, which is not limited to short stories that I look for in all writers, is clarity. And by that I don’t mean you can’t express confusion on the page, but I get pretty impatient in situations where I feel the writer hasn’t clearly seen something and is leaving a bit up to the reader to create the description or the explanation or the motive or something along those lines. So if we’re talking about Tolstoy again, I think he is the ultimate example of someone whose character, the moment that character walks into the room, even if you only get a little bit of description of that individual you know that is a clearly-seen character. It’s not just incidental; there’s an authority there which I look for.
In terms of the short story, I look to the ending. Because I’ve been in workshops, I’ve read so many different short stories, I feel there are so many writers who are very talented. There are just so many really, really talented writers out there. They can do voice, they can do characterization, they can do description, they can be so funny, or have so many different talents. But where I find that most writers falter is when they’ve ended the story. I think a lot of time if you don’t have a clear sense of what you want a story to be, the story can kind of peter out, or it can feel a little bit random where it has ended. One of the people whose work has really shown me what an ending can do is Alice Munro. When you get to the end of an Alice Munro story, whatever seems random or circumstantial, she somehow ties up all the loose ends as she goes to the ending. Not all endings need to be like Alice Munro’s, but I do think that strong short story writers end a story here because it had to end here, and it couldn’t end somewhere else, because this is where the vision of the story reaches completion.
Skinship: Stories is available from Annie Bloom’s Books, Barnes & Noble, Book Cellar, Book Soup, Eso Won Books, Kona Stories, and Strand Book Store.
Katherine Jin is a short fiction writer currently based in New York. She was longlisted for the 2021 CBC Short Story prize, and has work forthcoming in The Margins by the Asian American Writer’s Workshop.