Choco Pie

Choco Pie recurs in Winter in Sokcho as both a familiar snack and a food made strange by its political and personal settings. The purple wrapper at the bottom of the narrator’s bag, the museum’s blue North Korean packaging, and the late-night scene of a girl picking at one make the snack a material thread through hunger, division, and uneasy acts of eating.

Appearances and Material Details

On the way to the museum, the narrator wedges her legs against the car heater and rubs her hands between her thighs, unable to get warm. She has not eaten since the previous evening. A Choco Pie has burst out of its purple wrapper at the bottom of her bag, and she picks at it crumb by crumb. The pie is not a meal so much as the small, damaged food available to her in a moment of cold and hunger.

At the museum, Choco Pies appear among schoolchildren’s shoes from North Korea. These are packaged in blue rather than the snack’s trademark purple. The narrator wonders whether they are real and contain cake, or whether they were specially made for the museum. That uncertainty makes the displayed food more than a recognizable brand: it is an object whose apparent familiarity cannot settle whether it is an ordinary snack or a representation prepared for visitors.

Hunger, Eating, and Unease

The pie in the car is eaten slowly, one crumb at a time, in sharp contrast to the narrator’s later loss of control while eating with her mother. At a stall near the port, she weighs the size of each mouthful before beginning a meal; then she eats and drinks makgeolli increasingly fast, describing herself as unable to stop. The contrast does not make the Choco Pie a solution to her hunger. Instead, the separate scenes show eating shifting between scarcity and excess, neither of which gives her an uncomplicated sense of control.

Another Choco Pie appears near one in the morning, when the narrator finds a girl sitting in front of a muted television. The girl holds the pie with both hands, like a hamster, and pecks at its gooey center, lightly touching it with her tongue. Her gaze is fixed just above the screen, while lights in the room make her bandages glow and throw the scars on her face into relief. The quiet, small movements of eating sit beside the visible evidence of the girl’s appearance-altering procedures; the scene offers no explanation that would reduce either to the other.

Division and Narrative Significance

The change from purple to blue packaging gives Choco Pie a specific place in the museum’s account of a divided peninsula. Beside the North Korean children’s shoes, the altered wrapper prompts the narrator to question the authenticity of what she sees. The snack’s recognizable form remains, but its contents and provenance become uncertain. This is a modest, concrete instance of how division enters the museum through everyday objects as well as displays of conflict.

Across its appearances, Choco Pie is handled rather than explained: crumbs are picked from a wrapper, a museum version is examined with doubt, and a girl slowly eats the soft center. Those distinct gestures keep the object close to bodily experience while allowing its context to change. It can be scant food for someone who has gone without eating, a questionable exhibit associated with North Korea, or the focus of a withdrawn late-night ritual. The recurring snack links these scenes without making them equivalent, holding ordinary appetite alongside the novel’s uncertainty about nourishment, self-control, and what can be known from appearances.