Excerpt from Skinship by Yoon Choi, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

After Rhonda has gone, Soo returns to the ad. She now sees it differently, without sympathy or nostalgia. The picture of the large oak tree with many spreading branches. The topic of the revival, which is written in a leafy-green font with flourishes: abundant life. That word, "abundant." In light of what everyone knows about Hong Ki-tae and the tragedy that made his name, is it not a touch defensive?

Then Soo notices, beneath the title and the speaker's name, event details provided in a more modest lettering.

bethel baptist church of columbia, maryland

february 5, 2005, 8 p.m.

She sits motionless. This information affects her more than any picture of an oak tree, any beautiful word rendered in leafy green. She thinks:

Columbia is a ninety-minute drive down the 83.

February 5 is next Saturday.

* * *

In the fall of 1981—or, as Soo thinks of it, in another life—Park Soo-ah arrived at Newark International Airport with four immigrant bags. Jae-woo picked her up in a car that had been described to her as "almost new," but the car was brown, touched up in varying shades of tan, and there was a slight depression in the hood that was lightly rimmed with rust.

"It is very nice," she said in the formal Korean that wives use with their husbands, and in telling that lie, she was reassured of her love for him. She faintly tasted mint in her mouth and remembered that, right before landing, she had brushed her teeth in the airplane bathroom with a toothbrush packed for that very purpose. These were the tender courtesies of marriage, she told herself as her hand unconsciously went to pat the back of her hair. This is my husband, she thought. I am his wife.

They had been married for five years, but Jae-woo had been in America for the past two, moving around, connecting with old army buddies in places like Fort Lee or Atlanta. Friends who did import-export, or ran liquor stores, or sold golf equipment and visors. He was looking for what he called a business opportunity. His goal was to make money. "Make money" was one of the American phrases he had picked up, and it sounded strange in translation because the Korean idiom was to earn it.

She looked at his driving profile. His hands gripping the steering wheel.

"I changed my hair," she said. "What do you think?"

"I like it," he said, keeping his eyes on the road. He continued driving and didn't say much more.

At first, she didn't notice the quality of his silence. She was giddy with questions. He had not been able to tell her much on an international call about the life he had prepared for them. He simply said that he had found something, a store, and a place for them to live. But what was this store? And what would their house—their home—be like? She almost didn't want to know, to prolong her feeling of excitement. At the same time, she schooled her anticipation. She told herself that they would start someplace modest, that she would be cheerful and resourceful.

As he drove, Jae-woo adjusted the quivering red line on the radio until he found a station playing a song from the sixties. Soo recognized the song. It was by a person named Simon Garfunkel. She always found herself moved by that line in the refrain: "Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down."

"Did I tell you about my latest interest?" she said. "I'm through with calligraphy. Now I crochet. I can make anything. Ask me what I can make. Hats. Blankets. Bootees. I must have made twelve pairs of bootees for all our friends who are having babies!"

She was a little breathless at having said this to him, at having hinted at the act of love and what could result. But in her body, she was not at all shy in her desire for a child. In the months before she left Korea, she had undergone a cycle of acupuncture and drunk daily decoctions of velvet deer antlers that the house girl brewed on the flat rooftop to keep out the smell.

Excerpted from Skinship by Yoon Choi. Copyright © 2021 by Yoon Choi. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.