I attempt to review Yoon Choi's "The Art of Losing" without coming off as an insufferable, pompous ass who wants the whole world to know I speak Korean

I've written a lot of stories with point-of-view characters from other cultures. As a translator, that's just where stories come from for me. There are dangers in writing about a culture that's not the one you were raised in. Even though I've worked hard to learn languages and cultures, I'm never going to get it the way a native would. So I run the danger of reading my own cultural assumptions into the new culture. I might speak over the voice of a character from another culture with my own voice. Worse, I might highlight an aspect of another culture because to me it seems like something that will shock or titillate the English speaking reader I am writing for, meaning I am exploiting another culture and giving a false impression of it in order to earn points with Western readers.

If I've done it right, it will work in much the same way as a good translation. I'm not going to write a story with, say, a Korean setting that will really qualify as great Korean literature. It's not going to be sufficiently imbued with Korean-ness to accomplish that. But I might be able to get some key sense of Korean-ness across to an English speaking audience. I can write good English literature about Korea. Hopefully, I've gone deep enough into the culture I'm setting the story in to be able to pull something real out and present it in the idiom of the reader from my culture.

When someone who really belongs to another culture writes for an English audience, there is a different kind of danger that presents itself. I might compare it to the danger that confronts a film director when she tries to adapt a book with a rich alternate universe to film. Does the director try to convey the fullness of that world and risk losing a general audience? Or does the director simplify the world and risk irritating the core fans of the book who feel the world they love has been ripped apart and made poorer in the attempt to translate it for a general audience?

That's the choice that Yoon Choi faces in her short story "The Art of Losing," the third selection in the 2018 Best American Short Stories anthology. She's a Korean-American, which means she has deep access to three cultures: Korea, America, and the very real, third culture of Korean-Americans. In this story, she is mining all three. Her two main characters, a very sympathetic elderly couple who came to the States from Korea as young adults, carry marks from all three cultures. They have deep memories of life in Korea, although we see more of hers than his. We see also into their lives as Korean-Americans, largely through that most elemental of settings for Korean-American life, the church. They also have a uniquely American part of their character, one that is colored for the man, Mo-sae, by having grown up near a military base in Seoul, where he built up ideas about America before he ever came. American symbols like a can of Coke and an ice cream truck both play a role in getting the action going.

Choi had choices to make throughout about how the Korean aspects would be presented to an Anglophone readership. Would she go deep and risk alienating most of the readers of the New England Review, in which the story first appeared? Or would she keep it simple and risk alienating the "core fans," who in this case would mostly be other Korean-Americans reading the story, or Koreans in Korea with enough English to read it, or, in a much smaller niche, people like me?

To put it in culinary terms, does she give her audience Bulgogi, a beef dish that goes down easy with Westerners, and which is therefore often given to them to introduce them to Korean food? Or does she serve them up oeenaengkuk (오이냉국) and let the chips fall? Does she introduce them gently or throw her readers in the deep end?

Korean 101 and my rage-reading

This story kept it simple. The biographies of both of the main characters, Han Mo-sae and his wife, Han Young-ja (they seem to have followed the Western custom of the wife changing her surname, rather than the Korean practice of her keeping her own surname), are well-worn material. You could create characters like this without much more than a half-day introductory class on Koreans in the diaspora. He's from Seoul, she's from Busan. She worked in a factory where the work was exhausting and unsafe back during Korea's transformation to a powerful economic nation. He came to the States to study. They met at the Korean church in Philadelphia. They took over a dry cleaner's. They raised two kids who now are a lot more American than Korean.

There was a passage early on that irritated me. Knowing I'd be prone to reading hyper-critically, I was trying to suppress my inner Simpsons-Comic-Book-Guy, but this got to me:

He was working toward a master's in mechanical engineering; she tailored and mended for a dry cleaner. At church, he was a star. His fine singing voice, the impressive school he attended. But at the university, he was struck dumb. Every morning, he would tear out a page from his English dictionary, memorize it, and eat it. Still, the language would not take.

Why does this passage irritate me? Because I knew American readers would fawn all over it, but I also knew the passage was not as fresh as it seemed. The picture of a man so desperate to learn English he would actually eat the dictionary does seem arresting and memorable, but only if you don't know anything about Korean culture. This is actually a very old, well-worn trope in Korea. Students were told to eat the pages of their books for decades. It was supposed to symbolize their commitment to learning. I think some students actually did this, to hear them tell it, although I suspect some are exaggerating. I've heard this one a hundred times. But I KNEW that Western readers would just about pass out with ecstasy reading this. When I read the interview from New England Review of Choi after the story came out, I found I was dead on:

RW: There are a few really striking details that stay with me: the first is the way that Mo-Sae “memorizes” English. It’s such a powerful, bizarre, and almost terror-filled act. What was the origin of this moment in your writing?

YC: When I first read this question, I absolutely couldn’t remember this moment in the story. At a random moment later in the day, it came to me: I once had a Sunday School teacher with a face scarred by smallpox. I remember two things about her. Once, she gave us a demonstration of sin using a pitcher of water and food coloring. Another time, she told us that she had learned English by eating a page of the dictionary each time she had memorized the words. Decades later, I had Mo-Sae do the same.

It felt like hearing someone take credit for a joke you've already heard someone else tell. I don't doubt that Choi really heard it the way she said it. It's possible she wasn't aware of the larger use of this image within Korean society, since she grew up in the United States. Choi was born in Korea, but grew up in the States. The image of eating the book in order to internalize it is a perfect symbol of a culture obsessed with test scores and kids getting into the best colleges. It's fine for her to draw upon that cultural heritage, but it seemed like a bit of plagiarism to pass it off like it was her own. Choi was getting credit for something fresh and original because her story was written to be part of American literature, but the same image, if used in Korean literature, would have elicited a yawn.

But the story's not really about that, so I got over it

Much as I wanted a story with Korean-American characters to be about truths unique to Korean-American life, maybe what's unique about this story is that although it's got Korean-American characters in it, it's not just about truths unique to that culture. It's about universal stuff, about getting old and the legacy you leave behind and what marriage does to one's identity. One of the things I noticed in that interview was that the word "Korean" doesn't appear once on the page. It's not about that. Which is a nice thing. It's great that a story can have recognizably ethnic characters and not have the whole story be about questions concerning ethnicity. Ethnic identity is important, but there are other issues for writing to be about. Just because Choi is Korean-American doesn't mean she should be confined to one type of issue. She wrote using characters familiar to her, but she expanded the consciousness of those characters to cover new ground.

Once I get past my pedantic nitpicks about the cultural appropriation of the author's own culture, it's a pretty nice treatment of other kinds of identity issues besides ethnic ones. The patriarch of the family is losing his sense of self through Alzheimer's. The mother is losing her sense of self, too, because so much of her own self-identity is bound up in her ability to serve others (another frequent type in both Korean literature and Korean society). As her health declines, she is losing her ability to care for others. So much of the Hans' identity is bound up in each other now that as one slips away, the other can't help but slip with them. The most solid the man's mind is throughout the whole story is when he sees a container of loose change at exactly the moment he needs it, which he sees as an embodiment of his wife's entire existence: "But what really stirs in him is sadness. This is his wife. This is the evidence of her life. A handful of small saving actions."

But the coins end up being dropped into the pool, slipping away just like their co-dependent existence is slipping away.

Or is the story kind of about being Korean, too?

Then again, there is a way to read this story that would make it sort of about the uniqueness of the Korean-American identity. The Hans have made their own existence in the world, a new existence they had to forge for themselves. There was no template for what it meant to be Korean-American, but they made meaning as they went along. Now that meaning is being washed away, replaced by a new reality that is more American-Korean than Korean-American. Han-sae remembers, looking at the coins, that "these are American coins." The thing he saw as such proof of his wife's existence is American.

The kids have American names. When Mo-sae is trying desperately to ground himself amid the muddle of his mind, he is looking for the names of people: "Some things he knew for sure. His name was Han Mo-sae. His wife was Han Young-ja. They had been married forty years, possibly fifty. The wife would know. They had two children: Timothy and Christina." He has a hard time remembering his grandson's name. If a name is one of those last, fundamental things to help ground one's identity, then the kids will be grounded in a different way than Mo-sae.

The couple met and were married in Philadelphia, a city with important meaning to the beginning of the American experience. They began a Korean-American experience together there, but as Han-sae is forgetting himself and Young-ja is losing her ability to serve those around her, their entire generation is being lost. Their children look upon their church rituals as something to smirk at, a relic. The grandchild will be raised on the Cokes that Mo-sae once saw as exotic. Opening a Coke, which is to open up the insides of American life, is a secret beyond Mo-sae. He can't provide that to his grandchild. The daughter has married an Indian-American man, and thereby created a different story line altogether from what her parents wrote.

I'm glad this wasn't the kind of immigrant fiction I'm so tired of, the kind that has endless scenes full of the scents of cooking an ethnic meal. In this story, the only time Korean food comes on stage, the father is looking for something and finds only "ingredients, not food."

In the end, that's what a lot of us come down to. We still have the ingredients for life, but we no longer know how to craft them into something greater than the sum of their parts. But Yoon Choi did, and the result is a story that goes deep into the meaning of consciousness and identity, even if it doesn't delve that deeply into Korean issues.

FOR ANOTHER TAKE ON THIS STORY, SEE KAREN CARLSON'S TAKE; KAREN'S BEEN REVIEWING BASS FOR YEARS AND ALWAYS COMES UP WITH SOMETHING I HADN'T CONSIDERED.