Early on in her brave and bravura solo performance piece Did You Eat? ((밥 먹었니?), Zoë Kim lulls you into thinking that hers will be a typical immigrant’s yarn about generational differences in showing and expressing love and family ties. When growing up in South Korea, she begins, her mother, her Umma, would use phrases around the subject of food to mean everything from “How are you?” to “I’m worried about you” to “I’m sorry.” But that coded communication could also shift just as quickly into sharp-tongued criticism (“Don’t eat too much. You’ll get fat…. Nobody likes a fat girl”).

And criticism seems to be the dominant communication form in her household — coming both from a mother incapable of expressing affection and a traditional father whose anger at being deprived a son leads to verbal and physical assaults even after young Zoë is shipped off to a boarding school in the U.S. as a teenager. And then things get darker and more Dickensian in their bleakness and misogyny as the ever-dutiful daughter turns to alcohol and smoking and self-harm since lashing out at her tormentors feels impossible both culturally and personally.

There’s nothing melodramatic about Kim’s remarkable, clear-eyed performance, which leans into choreography by Iris McCloughan that adds an element kinetic body poetry and emphasizes the difference between Kim as narrator and subject. She will shrink herself into a corner of Tanya Grellana’s set while speaking to a bright orb representing her younger self, or wave her fingers in slow-motion jazz hands to indicate how she would distract her father with jokes and compliments to prevent or postpone his regular beatings. (The lighting by Minjoo Jim and projections by Yee Eun Nam also contribute to the shifts in tone as her story progresses under Chris Yejin’s smooth direction.)

Above all, Kim proves to be a master of noon-chi, a Korean term for the ability to listen and gauge others’ moods. Over time, she learns to assert herself — or at least establish some boundaries with the people who both reared her and caused her so much pain — and to reframe her biography from a saga of suffering into a more recognizable survivor narrative. The disconnect is also embodied in her frequent use of Korean dialogue which is translated in real time in Nam’s projections.

In the script, Kim describes Did You Eat? as the first work in a planned trilogy on the theme of hunger. That might explain why she skimps on detailing her time after those low, low points in her late teens — when she found herself stuck in the States and sending money home to her mom after her dad cut them both off financially. Perhaps she’s saving details from these gaps in her personal history for later works but the effect is a little disorienting here, especially in a work that runs just 65 minutes. How was she able to stay in the U.S., or get into college here, or meet the man who would become her husband and protector? The segments about this period where she experienced her most profound moments of self-discovery and found the courage to escape her parents’ oppressive gravitational pull feel both rushed and wispy, less palpable than the rest of her storytelling.

Kim is a deceptively captivating actor: friendly and chipper one moment, calm and reserved the next. You can see how she managed to endure the hardships that her family hurled at her, maintaining a brave face of composure through even the most brutal acts of cruelty. Her writing, too, is marked by a similar restraint. Time and again, she lets the words and actions of others speak for themselves rather than raise her voice or add rhetorical flourishes. She prefers to embrace the euphemisms that can convey a dictionary of subtext. Hers is a story that would rightly prompt many to scream in anger; she chooses to whisper and carry on with an admirably steely resolve. ★★★★☆

DID YOU EAT? (밥 먹었니?)
Public Theater, Off Broadway
Running time: 65 minutes (with no intermission)
Tickets on sale through November 16 for $80