Hanji, a Punjabi, grew up in Nairobi, where he trained as a vet. Hanji and Youngju relates the uneasy relationship of two volunteers living in a Christian monastery in France. The 1975 trials of Korean young radicals are the subject of the story Sister, My Little Soonae. In a subsequent discussion, the Korean girl discovers that the grandfather of the Vietnamese family was killed by Korean soldiers fighting on the side of the Japanese, a sudden awareness that undermines the relations between former friends. In their German school the children discuss the history of World War 2. The families grow close, drawn together by their common Asian culture in an otherwise alien land. She is caught up not only in the distrust between the two countries but also with her own ambivalent attitude to the recent history of Japan: she always wears a smile, a polite mask covering feelings she hides from everyone, including herself.Ī Korean family moved to former East Germany in the early 1990s and makes friends with Vietnamese neighbours.

In Shoko’s Smile, Shoko, a Japanese student, is visiting Korea on an exchange programme for the first time since such links between the two countries were resumed in the 1960s. The stories range across the history of Korea, from the occupation by Japan, 1910-1945, to the anti-communist trials of radicals in 1975, when young South Koreans were imprisoned and tortured, only acquitted in 2007, and the tragedy of 2014, when 304 passengers, most of them school children, died after the MV Sewol sunk off Jeju on the south coast. Their grandchildren are now educated, many living and working outside Korea, unwilling to follow the hierarchies that curtailed the freedom of their grandmothers and even of their own mothers.

For example, Choi gives a voice to older, often illiterate, women from the working class whose social function was to marry, give birth to sons and to obey the dictates of their mother-in-law.

Shoko's Smile by Choi Eunyoung