Cover of Gina Chung’s Green Frog (Penguin Random House, 2025)
When I am eight years old, I am a girl who would rather hide than seek, a girl who fears bullies and teachers and loud noises and speaking in public and God. I am overweight for my age group, friendless, and known for thick glasses and dark overalls, which I wear because my mother is exasperated with my clumsiness and tendency toward spillage.
But when my mother takes me to Seoul to meet my grandmother for the first time, my grandmother tells me that I am beautiful, and for a whole summer, I am. My grandmother combs my hair and braids it across the top of my head like a crown, marveling at its strength and sheen. She clucks over my glasses, at how they are almost as thick as hers, and she tells me that I have an American nose, which she says I should be proud of. She has made me dresses that do not fit, but she just laughs and lets out the seams so that they do, and I am suddenly pretty in yellow, pink, green. My mother says to Grandmother that she will spoil me, and Grandmother tells her to hush.
I twirl in the dresses for hours in Grandmother’s backyard, among the vegetables and the little white butterflies that dance from row to row. When I get dizzy, I help her pick perilla leaves, which she will wash and marinate in soy sauce, vinegar, and slivers of garlic later for dinner. “Your mother loved these when she was your age,” she says. The three of us eat them under the flickering fluorescent light of her kitchen, which always smells of sesame oil and red peppers.
A cicada finds its way inside the house one evening, a wet slick of terror with too many legs and orange eyes, and my mother and I scream and scream while Grandmother chuckles. Finally, she traps it inside a jar and takes it outside, where it sits, stunned, on the grass, until she shoos it away.
“You have the heart of a rabbit,” she says when I tell her my fears, numbering them like favorite songs. She tells me stories of timid rabbits who have outsmarted tigers, rabbits who have dared to visit the underwater kingdom of the Dragon King and tricked sea turtles into bringing them back to shore safely. The lesson here, she tells me, is that fear is no reason not to be brave. As the summer ripens, she tells me more stories, about a snail who fell in love with a man and became a woman, a little girl who became the moon, the bear who became a woman after spending one hundred days in darkness eating only mugwort and garlic, and fox women whose heavy skirts hide their nine tails.
The air is wet and heavy in Seoul, and Grandmother’s house does not have air conditioning. I wake from nightmares in which my lungs fill with seawater, where my classmates watch me drown in a glass tank and say nothing, their blue eyes as flat as stones. On our seventh night in Seoul, when I wake up crying, Grandmother takes me to the kitchen, where she spoons strawberry ice cream into glass bowls for us, while my mother sleeps, exhausted from the heat. The ice cream melts and drips down my pajama shirt a little, but unlike my mother, my grandmother doesn’t mind my mess.
When the ice cream is finished, she slices bright persimmons for us, the fleshy segments unfolding like thick petals across her cutting board. We eat them in the backyard, listening to the cicadas buzz while Grandmother points out the pale yellow disc of the moon and shows me its grooves and shadows, which she tells me make up the silhouette of a rabbit pounding a mortar and pestle. I like the idea of a rabbit inside the moon, a small friend made of shadows and light to watch over me as I sleep.
When the summer is over, Grandmother sends me back with a sweater she knit herself, a sweater as soft as cloud-floss and as pink as strawberry ice cream. I wear it on the plane and fall asleep, and for once I do not dream that we are falling out of the sky.
Grandmother becomes a voice on the phone. “Please be healthy and live a long time,” I learn to say in Korean.
Excerpt from “Rabbit Heart” in Green Frog by Gina Chung, published by Penguin Random House. Copyright © 2025 by Gina Chung. Reprinted courtesy of Penguin Random House.
Click here to read Gina Chung’s conversation with Mikayla Emerson about Green Frog, family, and the truthful clumsiness of translation.
