Ann Choi preserves a way of life in Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety

https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2016/05/07/ann-choi-preserves-a-way-of-life-in-kays-lucky-coin-variety.html

Ann Choi preserves a way of life in Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety

Growing up in a Korean corner store in Toronto, Choi recalls the immigrant experience of a generation

By SUE CARTERMetro

Sat., May 7, 2016

Sometimes it takes a little push from an unlikely place to fulfil a personal dream. For Ann Choi, a guidance counsellor at a Toronto high school, it came in 2007 when she asked a struggling student what he wanted to do with his life. He responded by asking her the same question right back. Not wanting to be a hypocrite, Choi answered quickly. After all, she knew exactly what she wanted: to write a book. 

“That night I went home and did a lot of soul searching and from that moment on, I committed to writing,” she says. 

Choi also knew exactly what she wanted to write. Since the early 1990s, she had been holding onto story ideas about the Korean immigrant experience, specifically those of young women who felt torn between the demands of their parents and the desire to be a “typical” Canadian teenager. As a sociology major at the University of Toronto, she had worked on a project interviewing Korean-Canadian women and discovered many shared a similar narrative. “There was a lot of frustration with cultural expectations and the immigrant dream,” Choi says. “And a lot of frustration with our mothers. We felt a sense of burden because 90 per cent or more of our parents were variety-store owners.”

A composite of those women, and her own life, became the inspiration for Mary — or Yu-Rhee — the protagonist of Choi’s debut novel Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety, published by Simon & Schuster Canada. Mary, who lives above her parents’ convenience store, struggles with hormonally charged teenage emotions and experiences, but still must act like an adult, knowing very well that her first priority is always to her family’s business and livelihood — as her traditional mother never lets her forget. 

“When other kids got to hang out at the mall after school, most of us were stamping packages of instant soup or working the cash register,” Choi says. 

For those in the community, Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety will resonate in its accuracy and details, but for those who only head into their local convenience stores for milk and newspapers, the book is a revealing look into private lives. “While most everyone knows a Korean shopkeeper, most people won’t know about the story behind the counter,” says Choi.

For Mary’s family — and Choi’s, who owned a store on Toronto’s Queen West — that meant a life where families could never eat meals together and community get-togethers happened late at night. While growing up, Choi loved the cross-section of people who came into the store, but it could also be a very scary place, as her character Mary horrifyingly learns.

Choi was also motivated to tell Mary’s story to document the shrinking generation of Korean variety-store owners, as a way to both educate her own 16-year-old daughter and to draw attention to the culture for which she has such pride. 

“I wanted to capture all this,” she says. “The Korean variety-store generation is now dying off. Our parents sacrificed and put us through school and now, my brothers and I, we don’t work in variety stores anymore. Unless we write these stories down my daughter will never know what my parents did, and I did, and what our lives were like.”

Sue Carter is the editor of Quill & Quire.