Skinship
Stories
-
-
4.4 • 5 Ratings
-
-
- $6.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE • LONGLISTED FOR THE STORY PRIZE • The breathtaking debut of an important new voice—centered on a constellation of Korean American families
“To encounter these achingly truthful, beautiful stories of newcomer Americans is like gazing up at the starry vault of a perfect night sky; it’s immediately dazzling and impressive, and yet the closer and deeper you look, the more you appreciate the sheer countless brilliance.” —Chang-rae Lee, author of My Year Abroad
A long-married couple is forced to confront their friend's painful past when a church revival comes to a nearby town ... A woman in an arranged marriage struggles to connect with the son she hid from her husband for years ... A well-meaning sister unwittingly reunites an abuser with his victims.
Through an indelible array of lives, Yoon Choi explores where first and second generations either clash or find common ground, where meaning falls in the cracks between languages, where relationships bend under the weight of tenderness and disappointment, where displacement turns to heartbreak.
Skinship is suffused with a profound understanding of humanity and offers a searing look at who the people we love truly are.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Community, Belonging, and Purpose
Yoon Choi’s collection of Korean Immigrant stories is just mesmerizing. The way in which she has captured the sad yet beautiful states of reality just as it is. Choi then layers ontop of all that the complexities of the immigrant experience. A perspective best captured by the image of a new arrival with all their hopes and dreams packed into immigrant bags dragged over to a land of promise.
A country where community, belonging, and purpose are not easy to come by without the right key, language. Choi shows how language has the power to fully express one’s humanity but can also the prison that language can create when foreign. So our characters are often left turning to other resources for connection and meaning. The ingredients that create the blended soup of American culture; religion, food, media, and materialism.
They face the many flavors of ignorance and bigotry while also being guilty of misconceptions and perpetuating stereotypes themselves. All these perspectives and takes made more interesting by the power of the short story format. Sparking our imaginations to think of the larger picture because we only get a narrow glimpse. Allowing for more voices and personas to reach us in the span of a short book.
The stories are unique but tied together by the careful arrangement. Taking us from beginnings in life to the end. All along the way searching for meaning in existence and place in culture. Something we think is profound and mysterious but is often reflected in these stories as simple and right in front of us. That being family and our shared histories. Whether we embrace them or not, they are the foundations of who we are.
Loved it
Absolutely fantastic collection of stories. Cannot believe this is a debut.
Memorable, shareable, affecting
Halfway through, I realized I’d already flagged and sent friends several quotes from these moving, engaging stories of family and self-examination. This never happens. I was moved by each story, either in its echoing resonance of my own experience as a mom / woman / daughter / student, or in admiration of the author’s ability to capture each character’s inner life and temperament. Celebration, loss, and the everyday business of being a person alongside other people in the world.