In her debut collection, Skinship: Stories, Yoon Choi tells eight tales of Korean Americans, skillfully highlighting both the particulars of their experience and also the extent to which they share challenges in common with other immigrants to the United States. One of the most emotionally charged stories is "The Church of Abundant Life." Soo, a middle-aged woman who has settled in Lancaster, Pa., persuades her husband to drive her to a Philadelphia revival where an old friend of her husband's from Korea is preaching. When her husband fails to engage with the minister, she "wonders if it is his friend's success or his friend's life sorrows that have made him hold back," and realizes that "perhaps there are things about her husband that she will never understand."
Choi explores a shared immigrant experience in "A Map of the Simplified World," where Anjali Anand, an Indian girl, enters the third grade class of Ji-won Li, who came to the U.S. only a year earlier. The girls quickly bond, even as Ji-won's mother expresses her prejudice against Indian people. Years later, Ji-won's college application essay sparks a memory of her old friend that prefigures, for both good and ill, what she understands as "the onset of a new worldview."
Most collections have one or two entries that don't quite measure up to the quality of the volume as a whole, but that's not the case here. Each of Choi's stories is distinguished by careful character development, patient exposition and an emotional effect that deepens as the story proceeds. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer