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The Best American Short Stories 2018 - The Art of Losing

Updated: Feb 8, 2019


“The art of losing isn’t hard to master…” begins Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art”. The main character in Yoon Choi’s poignant short story would be hard pressed to disagree. Mo-Sae has been left alone to watch his young grandson while his wife runs to the bank. What might be seen as a normal errand is fraught with tension due to Mo-Sae’s declining mental state: “He followed her into the kitchen, where she acquired keys, phone, and bag. It came to him what she was doing. She was leaving. This made him anxious. He realized that with her gone, he would be obligated to himself. To remember to eat. To remember that he had eaten.” And this is before he notices the boy he has been left to tend.


The author, Yoon Choi, made the wise decision to include some key backstory on the couple’s student romance early on in his short story. Choice details allow us to see that Mo-Sae has always perceived himself as a class above his wife. She is practical, pragmatic and reminds him of home (Korea) by cooking fermented bean curd stew. He is a serious student and fine singer, his ego tied to his ability to recall and sing any tune. In this way, Choi lays out the checks and balances of the relationship, so the reader’s sympathy is not immediately weighted with the husband. Tension dances between present confusion and past fact. They are two complex people who have been together for more than four decades, isolated by his illness: “Did he know? She could never directly ask him, never actually say the word Alzheimer’s, chimae, in English or Korean. She would rather pacify, indulge, work around his nonsense.”


Although the tale begins with Mo-Sae, Choi alternates between his and his wife Young-Ja’s point of view throughout the story. This is important because she is in denial about her own health as well, a heart condition which she doesn’t know what to do with. We see her distracted by flirtations with an elderly neighbor in their building, a Christmas cactus plant for a gift. And while she is away on her errand? Mo-Sae and grandson Jonathan creep closer to danger; a precarious chair on the balcony, a coin jar in the deep end of the pool.


Surprisingly, the climax of the story doesn’t end up being physical. Mo-Sae is invited back to join the church’s Christmas chorus. Young-Ja is tentative but drives him to every rehearsal. Their grown children come to the show. The state of Mo-Sae’s mind is revealed when he tries to join the soloist during the performance and must be escorted from the stage: “So there it was. The spectacle.” Young-Ja is mortified, but ultimately relieved when her children and the church want to help.

This slight break in the tension is followed by the son-in-law showing up at Mo-Sae’s door with the news that Young-Ja is in the hospital. Everything is brought back around to this single day when she left him to run to the bank, saying “Watch the boy,” the very line the story began with. Young-Ja’s own secret gives her away, and we are left with Mo-Sae “…beside the front door, hugging his knees to his chest.” The image presents both Mo-Sae as scared, lost child and vigilant grandfather willing his mind not to forget.


I thought that one of this story’s greatest narrative feats was feeling fractured and chaotic (frequent changes in POV and moment in time) while providing just the right amount of detail to send us swinging towards the next danger, the next secret. The portrayal of aging and denial was balanced by thought, object, and action; creating complex characters in a fully-realized world where the most mundane tasks have become a matter of life or death.

The Art of Losing By Yoon Choi

Best American Short Stories 2018 (Originally published in the New England Review)

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