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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Aug 2021, 304 pages
Paperback:
Apr 2022, 304 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Tasneem Pocketwala
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An exquisite collection from a breathtaking new voice - centered on a constellation of Korean American families.
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.
The church of abundant life
Soo occupies the high stool behind the register as her husband, Jae, brings in the cartons of eggs, the infant formula, the glue traps, the dried beans, the Little Debbie cakes, the single rolls of toilet paper, the strawberry cigars, the Jamaican castor oil, the yellow boxes of S.O.S. steel wool, the cough syrup, the cereal, the hydroquinone cream, the little glass pipes of love roses, the foil-capped plastic barrel drinks called Little Hugs that their customers call grenades. It is a Wednesday. On Wednesdays, Jae restocks the store.
"Just see this," he says to her in Korean, setting down a final stack of boxes. "Would you just take a look at this?" He takes a Chosun Ilbo from the top of a box and slaps it on the counter. She does not put up the reading glasses that she wears on a chain around her neck. Without them, she can only discern that what Jae has put in front of her is some kind of an ad.
Men, she says to herself in consolation.
Soo knows that if Jae...
The stories present a sweeping view of Yoon's characters, so though we're with them for only a few pages, the depth of the flashbacks and backstories are so illuminating, it feels as if she's giving us unlimited access to them. Choi's stories are built up on small moments, constructed upon a frame of tiny potent instances that she tends to with careful, laborious detail. In "A Map of the Simplified World," a young child's crucial moment of change occurs when she slightly betrays her friend. That moment doesn't come out of context; it is borne of the progression of many other small moments of development, of a person's subtle becoming...continued
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(Reviewed by Tasneem Pocketwala).
Adam Johnson
Think Alice Munro. Think Tobias Wolff. Think Lucia Berlin. Yoon Choi is a writer whose talents must be measured on the Richter Scale. The eight rich stories in this debut collection Skinship send tremors through our sensibilities, forcing us to reimagine the bonds that secure families, marriages, and generations. The rolling cadence of Choi's prose—at turns lovely, wise, and funny—releases her characters' voices to speak the truth of lives they'd likely never have otherwise been able to share. And what lives they are. Skinship charts the underlying power and deep humanity of those remanded to be bodega owners' wives, arranged brides, hospice workers, and caretakers, all with inner realms that cascade forth under Choi's careful gaze. Chang-rae Lee
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 of Yoon Choi's observations of love and devotion and sacrifice. Here is a writer who roots you and unsettles you and then roots you again in a new and revelatory axis. Tessa Hadley
Lovely stories, such a good writer, everything so delicately made but robust and unsentimental too.
"Skinship" is a term commonly used to describe physical affection in Korean culture. It can be read as a portmanteau of the words "skin" and "kinship." In the eponymous story from her book Skinship, Yoon Choi puts a different spin on the word's agreed meaning and uses it in an unexpected way. In the last scenes, instead of any kind of loving touch, physical contact in the form of violence becomes the turning point in a dysfunctional family's dynamics, and eventually their fate.
"Skinship" may have its origins as an English-derived, Japanese-coined word, and can refer to the bond through touch between mother and child. It has also come to generally describe bonding through physical contact that takes the form of carefree touching, ...
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