If one seeks to characterize “Asian-American writing” as something other than just the ethnicity of the author, one might well land on Gina Chung’s short story collection Green Frog as a sort of case-in-point, if not a model. This is American writing, populated with American protagonists (albeit of Korean extraction) dealing with American issues in (almost entirely) American settings, in an American idiom, yet inflected through Chung’s Korean heritage and literally through smatterings of the Korean language. Korea, here, is the “old country”, a place of parents, grandparents, comfort food, and various cultural touchstones, slightly exotic in their Koreanness perhaps, but little more so than had they been Sicilian or Polish, and familiar in that they are, after all, touchstones.
These are stories of mothers, daughters, grandmothers—men are mostly the foils here—relationships, birth, death, growing up, growing old, marriages gone wrong. But let’s start with the craft: Chung is both talented and deft. The stories are written alternatively in first-person singular, third-person, second-person and even first-person plural (a story about twins). The protagonists range from children through women of a “certaine âge”. Some conclude in a matter of hours, others unroll over years if not decades.
Chung will on occasion dip into magic realism and speculative fiction (or rather, very near-future science fiction). The plots manage to be both familiar and varied: one, the lead story (“How to Eat Your Own Heart”), has a plot that can only be inferred; it might not be out of place to call it a prose poem. The prose is accomplished; there is hardly a note wrong anywhere.

Chung’s talent (one of them; she has many) is to make the ordinary, extraordinary; to make emotions palpable and visual. Here a young girl is with her grandmother when she dies.
She wraps me in her arms, and I breathe her in, one last time. She says my name, and then she vanishes completely, turning into gold crossbars of light. I walk in alone, with a fistful of dandelions. Their snowy heads nod gently nod gently as I look for my mother in the long hallways of the hospital, to tell her that Grandmother is gone.
The titular story is of a young woman who grew up in the shadow of her more successful (and traditional) older sister, while she, both contrary and responsible, dropped out of art school whether her mother developed cancer; she stayed home to help the family. Her mother once compared her to a frog in a Korean story.
“A long, long time ago, there lived a green frog who always did the exact opposite of what his mother asked. If she asked him to go to the market to fetch rice, he’d go down to the valley and take a nap. If she told him to stay near the river, he would go up to the mountains.”
One of more innovative stories, “Presence”, has, in its tale of a medical startup gone wrong, echoes of both Theranos and, because it deals with technology that interacts directly with the brain and memories, some of Elon Musk’s current activities, as well as certain recent movies and television series. Yet, in its deployment of technology not for its own sake, or even for drama, but rather to allow a sensitive exploration of individuality, it hearkens back to an older generation of writers; Robert A Heinlein comes to mind.
Magic realism takes center stage in a story of twins who’s talking dolls help them navigate an unhappy household, or rather two. Their uncle, to whose house they were exiled when at the break-up of their parent’s marriage, collects (rather obsessively) butterflies:
“You must never, never touch,” he spat as we shrank back.
“We saw it move!”
He said, “That’s impossible. It’s already dead,” but that was not true, because all the butterflies were awake now. We felt their eyes on us, heard the rustling of their wings against the pins that kept them fastened to the foam backing of their cases. Uncle seemed unaware of the thousands of small movements that rippled throughout the library as each of the butterflies—from the giant Queen Alexandra’s birdwing to the western pygmy blue, no larger than one of our thumbnails—stirred and fluttered.
Such dexterity aside, however, one is left with the impression that Chung doesn’t need magic realism or science fiction to tell her stories. The most touching stories, which are for that reason the strongest ones, don’t need anything but her knack for getting to the heart (literally) of relations, between people and between individuals and themselves.
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