Author Yoon Choi of Anaheim finds her focus — the immigrant experience — after starting a family
Raising four kids helped Anaheim author Yoon Choi shape the stories in ‘Skinship’
Yoon Choi did not know what to write about. She had just earned her graduate degrees in fiction writing at Johns Hopkins University, but suddenly she was coming up blank.
“My literary heroes had no similarities to me,” Choi says, referring to White male writers like John Cheever and Vladimir Nabokov. “I may have been looking in places that weren’t really suited to my style.”
Choi, whose family immigrated to New York from South Korea when she was 3, changed course, coming to California to get a master’s degree in literature at Stanford University, followed by a brief dip into law school. Then she got married and had four children in five years and settled in Anaheim.
In other words, life happened … and that’s what she realized she wanted to write about.
Her debut collection, “Skinship,” features eight stories about Korean immigrants and first-generation Koreans as they try to make their way in the new world. The powerful and incisive stories — sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, sometimes filled with pain and longing — have characters connected by a shared heritage, but Choi continually shifts her viewpoint: “The Art of Losing” is about an aging couple, while “The Map of the Simplified World” concerns an elementary school child. “Solo Works for the Piano” explores the life of a middle-age piano teacher who is on the autism spectrum but doesn’t realize it, and “Song and Song” is about a woman coming to terms with her life choices as she mourns her mother’s death, battles her teenage daughter and tries to understand her wildly different sister.
Choi spoke by Zoom recently about finding her way as a writer of immigrant fiction and as a short story writer. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q
What brought you back to writing?
A
The time away got me out of my head and I stopped being so self-conscious about what I wanted to do. Late one night after my fourth kid was born, I just said, “I’m going to try this again. I’ll write something really short, a character sketch.” It was a piece about a Korean grandfather — my dad was staying with us then. It was going to be a page or so, but it became a 40-page story, “The Art of Losing.”
I used that for my application to Stanford’s Stegner Fellowship. But then, during Thanksgiving dinner with my in-laws, I realized I had a typo on the first page. I did get in anyway. I was sitting at McDonald’s with my daughter when I got the call. It was life-changing. It gave me deadlines, the time and community I needed.
Q
Why stories, not a novel?
A
The length of each story I wrote was very much a circumstance of the fact that I could never finish reading a novel with four children. I’d put it down and it would get lost in the mix of the house somewhere.
Being a parent shaped my understanding of time in terms of what a day or a year means to a child, but also in terms of the time you have to read a story. At Stegner, I had a joke with Chang-rae Lee, one of my professors: We called it “The Glass of Wine Story.” At the end of the day, you can have a complete experience with your glass of wine.
Q
How did the time away from writing shape you as a person and writer?
A
As a much younger writer, I would spend so much time laboring over each sentence. I wanted to make everything I wrote such a statement about what I had in mind. Being a parent didn’t allow me the time to be so precious with everything. I had to get to the meat of whatever it was I wanted to say.
Another thing I learned as a parent is how little in control I am of things — how much is chance and circumstance.
Q
You also found your voice writing about the immigrant and first-generation experience.
A
I’ve always been conscious that I’m an immigrant. We only spoke Korean at home and ate Korean food every single day. There’s nothing in the stories that specifically happened to me, and no one event or no one character has a real-life counterpart, but I made a conscious decision to write about the Korean immigrant community. In choosing the characters and the jobs they do and the things they eat, those were deliberate choices on my part to represent a community experience that would be familiar to people.
It’s a collection I would have wanted to have on my bookshelf when I was younger.
Q
You’ve said your bookshelf was filled with Western writers, not immigrant literature. Has that changed?
A
I remember being gifted Chang-rae Lee’s “Native Speaker” and being told, “This is by a Korean.” My uncle is not somebody who would normally give anybody a novel. That’s an experience a lot of Koreans had: The book was a big, big deal.
But really, there were so many writers, not necessarily Korean, writing about the immigrant experience and I wonder why I felt there weren’t enough models. Now, I do love reading immigrant fiction like Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories — they felt familiar to me even though they’re completely not. I love the sense of an education but also a familiarity. She has a character using Rice Krispies to make an Indian snack — all cultures have this moment, where you go into an American grocery store and figure out a way to create something from your own country.
I hope my stories are not specific only to the immigrant experience but are saying something more about being human.
Q
Endings are often tricky with short stories and can make or break them. How do you approach them?
A
I love short stories because of endings. When I start, I never know what will happen at the end of the story. I might think I have a nice climactic ending, but it almost never lands there. The most exciting thing is about 30 pages in, I think, “The ending is coming; now you have to trust yourself that all these things you threw up in the air are going to land.” It might not be successful every time, but you feel your subconscious doing something.
Different short story writers have different concepts of what an ending should be — I don’t think an ending should necessarily be conclusive, but I do think whatever it is, the reader should feel satisfied. My stories don’t have a very structured plot so they don’t have always have a definitive ending, but I do hope it doesn’t feel like it just trails off.