Shoko's Smile: Stories

About

In crisp, unembellished prose, Choi Eunyoung paints intimate portraits of young women in South Korea, balancing the personal with the political. A fraught friendship between an exchange student and her host sister follows them from adolescence to adulthood. A factory worker navigates the machinery of labor exploitation. A woman's smile becomes the focal point of everything she cannot say. This bestselling and award-winning debut collection established Choi as one of South Korea's most prominent young writers. Her stories share a tonal register — spare, honest, and attuned to the specific ways that Korean society shapes women's choices — without ever collapsing into a single argument. Stories about the lives of young Korean women — told with the precision of someone who knows that the political is always personal, and the personal is never simple.