From The White Book, published this month by Hogarth. Kang is a professor of creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith.
frost
The day she was born was one of frost rather than snow, yet her father chose seol, snow, as one of the characters for his daughter’s name. Growing up, she was unusually sensitive to the cold and resented the chill embedded in her name. But she liked to tread the frost-covered ground and feel the semifrozen earth through the soles of her sneakers. The first…