Mary H.K. Choi's 'Yolk' is All About Secrets
This discussion contains spoilers for Yolk.
Cover art forYolk by gg
I’ve always wanted to be mysterious — the type of girl who possessed an aura of mystic.
An enigmatic hot girl.
The thing is, I’m not one. I talk a lot, fast and loudly. I’m eager to tell mine and other people's stories. If you are willing to listen, I can tell you everything about the last movie I watched, the last book I read, or whatever big celebrity gossip is going around. Even when I know nobody really cares, I put music and movies on my Instagram story. I share my thoughts even when I’m alone, yet I can’t help but try to be perceived as someone complex, whom no one can figure out right away.
In my own deranged way of trying to achieve that status, I keep different secrets from different people; I withhold information, or I overshare in a cavalier way once, and then retract for weeks or months. There’s something about secrecy that breathes life into me. It’s no surprise Mary H.K. Choi’s 2021 novel Yolk was like a drug to me.
“Yolk is about secrets,” Choi told Bustle last year. “And how you’re only as sick as your secrets.” Anyone who hasn’t read the book wouldn’t know what the author is talking about. The synopsis leads you to believe that it’s a story about sisters, New York, bulimia and cancer. It’s what made me shy away from Yolk at first. My relationship with my sister is perhaps the most complicated one I have, and no book has ever made me go: “This! This is how me and my sister are!” So, why exactly would I read Yolk?
Well, Mary H.K. Choi is one of my favorite authors. I would have read it sooner if I had been told that it revolved around secrets, and not in a Pretty Little Liars way. Last March marked the first anniversary of Yolk. In honor of that, and if you still aren’t intrigued by what’s been said so far, allow me to dive deeper.
June and Jayne Baek live both in New York City. The former holds a high paying job in finance, living a luxurious life. The latter goes to college, lives in an almost-rotten apartment with a shitty boyfriend-not-boyfriend while holding a part-time job. As the reader quickly learns, they are both sick; June confesses — in secrecy, to no one — her uterine cancer diagnosis, while Jayne admits to having an eating disorder. The reader knows those aren’t the only secrets the sisters are keeping, but they also don’t know what the others are.
“Secrets are like wishes. Everyone knows they don’t work if you tell. But if you really want them to gain power, you can’t acknowledge they even exist.”
Both sisters pretend that nothing is going on, and the secrets aren’t affecting them. When they choose or are forced to acknowledge a secret, even if it’s a tiny one, the feeling of relief that washes over the reader is overwhelming. The big secrets make me want to embrace them, and even hug my own sister.
I’m an older sister, so I empathized a lot with June — how tired she was reassuring her mother when her sister refused to communicate, trying to keep her sister safe since they were little, and feeling humiliated admitting she needed help. But it also allowed me to see Jayne's perspective: how she was feeling pushed away and hated, looking for validation and feeling hurt when someone points this out. Choi discussed these emotions further, in conversation with a friend, fellow author Jenny Han:
I feel like being the younger sister, or the younger sibling is like, especially when there’s two there’s just this relentless, unending, devastating series of like, “Nah, we’re not hanging out with you.” It’s just so much rejection on rejection on rejection and that kind of endangers this like very odd dynamic where you love so deeply and you seek approval, that nothing is enough. And the smallest wound is just so corrosive and then that becomes distance and then that becomes its own thing.
This made me remember all those times, as a kid, I refused to play with my sister — when I made her do something just to have me play with her, because I actually didn’t feel like it. I sacrificed myself for her sake so often that, sometimes, I just wasn’t up for it. She needed to earn it.
“With us there was a smart one and a pretty one.”
There’s also the comparison of the smart versus pretty sister, which feels like a secret — because sisters never talk about it — but it’s evident to them and everyone around.
I was the smart one. My sister was the pretty one. Adults put us in a box when we were little, and it’s hell to keep trying to fit the box, but it’s also hell to be completely stripped of it.
I recall how it affected me and my sister. Eventually, we came around — but never fully. The power dynamic is always there in a way. We feel the need to define why we’re different, despite knowing how deeply we love each other. That can also be a secret.
The reader slowly begins to realize how all of that affected June and Jayne.
“I knew that somewhere deep down she loved me. She might not have liked me, but she loved me.”
Sisters judge each other, but they’re also aware of how to make the other feel better when necessary. My sister is always saying how much she hates gemini women — me — and how if we weren’t sisters, she wouldn’t like me at all. But she hugs me, a lot, often against my will, and asks if she can sleep with me when she’s scared or anxious.
My sister has told me, a lot, that she cares about me. But I can’t pinpoint exactly why it feels embarrassing and cringey to express the same feelings to her.
I don’t think I’ve ever said I love you to my sister. Instead, I cook for her all the time. I braid or curl her hair. I help her with her makeup and whatever else she wants. I hope she knows. If, someday, my sister confronts me, and asks if I love her, I’ll get so frustrated that I won’t admit it. I’ve left so much proof of it that it would be ridiculous for her to not know, and I love that June and Jayne feel the same way. I finally feel that the sisterhood I’ve experienced — with all the highs and lows, the insults and the favors — is represented accurately.
Choi has a way of making her characters real and complex people that make cohesive choices according to their character, background and personality, while also being unpredictable. She balances the familiar with the unknown — even with Patrick, the love interest. He is presented as charming and respectful, but he also has his own secrets and coping mechanisms.
Yolk addresses all its themes — whether it’s the experience of being a woman of color, coming from an immigrant family, feeling close to death when a loved one is sick — like a secret, out of focus for most of the book, but clearer in the minds of the characters. ♦