If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha
What is this book about?
This book is about four young Korean women living in Seoul experiencing their challenges they face as women (and orphans). The author's use of four different personas distinctly describe these unique challenges with a particular focus on the prevalence of cosmetic surgery among Korean women.
Kyuri - She is a hostess at a "ten-percent club" which only employs the most attractive girls. Before taking on extensive surgical procedures to change her jaw and nose, she was working at a brothel. She views plastic surgery as merely as a tool to gain status and power such as moving up to a more respectable place of employment and extracting money and gifts from her rich male clients. She plays her cards as they are dealt.
Woona - She is/was a married office worker that wants to have a child of her own. When she was young, her father abandoned her and left her in the car of her abusive grandmother who resented for being a girl instead of a boy. Part of that resentment came from her mother giving too little dowry money. Due to her experience with her grandmother, a major reason why she married her husband because his mother has already passed away and hence could not interfere with her child. She is a mother through and through as she waits up every night for the other girls in the story to get home safe and longs to have a meaningful relationship with them.
Miho - She is a talented artist who had the opportunity to study in New York where she met rich Koreans Ruby and Hanbin (her boyfriend). She is naturally beautiful and does not understand the obsession with plastic surgery in Korea.
Ara - She is a mute hair dresser who lost her voice after a violent hazing ceremony in her high school. She is obsessed with Korean boy band member and then subsequently video games.
Thoughts
Beauty as power - The story highlighted the role of beauty in power dynamics. Kyuri, Miho and Sujin all attained power by the virtue of their looks, with Miho having something 'extra' through her artistic talents.
This changed my thoughts on cosmetic surgery it is similar to how someone would diet and exercise to be more aesthetically pleasing, I don't see why anyone should make a value judgement on that. They are responding to the incentives of the environment.
Raising children in Korea - Woona's experience really highlight the struggles of being a working mother in Korea where she is afraid to tell her manager about her pregnancy and the reluctance to fully utilize her maternity leave. While she is willing to forgo her leave, her husband was fired from his company and she would not be able to afford childcare. The second issue is that of generational trauma of mothers giving birth to daughters and of the older generations expecting certain behaviors of their children and their spouse. This is very clear in Miho's view that it was ideal that her husband didn't have a mother to interfere with her child raising.
Lower income men - In the story, there was an obvious lack of interest in lower/middle income men. Although the circumstances of the female protagonist were difficult, none of them were interested in being together with a non-rich guy. Woona separated from her husband after he lost his job and lied about it. Kyuri liked Bruce despite his attitude and didn't show interest in the salon manager despite him showing concern for her e.g. letting her go home early and protecting her from her the angry club boss when her friends sneaked in the club to see the boyband member. It seems that while low-income women can take on debt to change their face, and in-turn their circumstances, low-income men do not have that option. They either get rich or die trying.
Having a better life - Korea like many of the Asian Tiger economies had rapid economic success in the 80s and 90s, hence the boomers saw that hard work resulted in better circumstances. The next generation, were born in more pleasant conditions (better healthcare, less wars, better education) but the average person didn't experience the same progress as their parents and some are struggling to survive through high housing prices and youth unemployment. Students held their end of the bargain, but only a few had something to show for it. This resulted in the hopelessness that is pervasive in Korean and North Asian culture.
Quotes
Kyuri
The girl called Ji walked slowly toward us and sat down where Bruce had indicated. Up close, I could see that her face was devoid of surgery-her eyes were single-lidded and her nose was flat. I would not have been caught dead walking around with a face like that. But clearly, from the way she walked and held her head, she came from the kind of money that didn't need any.
The only gentlemen I ever see are in those dramas on TV. Those men are kind. They protect you and cry and stand up to their families for you, although I wouldn't want them to give up a family fortune of course. A poor man cannot help me when he cannot help himself. I know, because I was in love with a poor man once. He could not pay to spend time with me and I could not afford to spend time with him.
"My grandmother has already picked a date for my wedding," she continued. "Next September fifth or something. They just need a groom.
AS A MATTER of fact, I know all about respectability. My older sister, Haena, married into some wealth. She graduated from a top women's university in Seoul with a degree in early childhood education, which is the only thing that made her marriage possible. At the wedding, which was held at one of the most expensive hotels in Seoul, the groom's side had more than eight hundred guests, mostly men in black suits and animal-patterned Ferragamo ties bearing their gifts of cash in white envelopes. His family had to hire fake guests to fill our side, so it didn't look like they were marrying down. She's been divorced now for a year, and she has yet to tell our mother. The pride of our mother's widowed life is showing off her rich son-in-law.
My normally levelheaded sister behaved like a fool when she found out about the girlfriend, who worked at a Samseongdong room salon. But the divorce wasn't really because she kicked up a fuss. Jaesang wasn't in love with that girl or anything.
He had just fallen out of love with Haena at that point and didn't feel the need to endure her agony of heartbreak. And our family wasn't one that would make him think twice about divorcing her.
MY MOTHER CALLS me hyo-nyeo-filial daughter-and strokes my hair with so much love it breaks my heart. But sometimes, she has spells when she shakes with anger toward me. "There is no greater sorrow than not getting married!" she says. "The thought of you alone in life, no children, that is what is making me old and sick."
"Isn't that why you suffered so much pain with your surgery?" she says, stabbing her finger into my cheek. "What is the point of having a beautiful face if you don't know how to use it?"
EVEN AS A GIRL, I knew the only chance I had was to change my face. When I looked into the mirror, I knew everything in it had to change, even before a fortune-teller told me so.
I wanted to reach over and shake her by the shoulders. Stop running around like a fool, I wanted to say. You have so much and you can do anything you want.
I would live your life so much better than you, if I had your face.
"Why do you think he likes you?" I ask Miho. I am genuinely curious. Miho is pretty but not to the level of perfection you can achieve with surgery, and she has no family or money. But for some reason this boy from one of this country's richest families is dating her. It's a mystery.
I like how engaged he is in her story. I can't remember the last time a man asked me about my day and then actually paid attention to the answer, forget finding it interesting.
But back to Bruce-I don't know what came over me that Sunday at the Reign Hotel. I have always thought of hope as a natural folly of youth that should be discarded as soon as possible.
It is inexplicable to me, and I did not know I was capable of surprising myself. Perhaps I liked him more than I realized. I should have known that I could not afford to.
I know Sujin is not an idiot. She just seems simple because she reverts so naturally to a positive state. That would be essential for surviving in my industry, though I don't think anyone can truly come out unscathed.
You were so good to me that it hurt me to hear you were getting married. And you didn't even tell me directly because you didn't think it was necessary. Perhaps I should have continued to act as if nothing was different. But I have feelings. You should know that.
It is a text from Bruce. All right, it says. Now fuck off.
ALMOST WEEPING with relief, I hand over cash and walk out of the pharmacy without waiting for the change.
As the door closes behind me, I hear the pharmacist call, "Are you sure you are okay, miss?" His gentle voice falls like a patter of rain. I raise my hand and nod as I pry the pills from the thick packaging.
I'm okay. I have survived the day, again. All I need now is for these stupid fucking pills to work.
I REMEMBER MY AUNT telling my cousin Kyunghee and me, when we were small, that my grandmother had died of anger. She had choked to death on han-the rage and resentment and despair-seeing her parents die before her eyes, having served her mother-in-law as a body slave until she aged long before her time.
My aunt told us that we inherited my grandmother's wrath, that this kind of potent han could not just die off with the passing of an old woman.
She had texted me a few times and then stopped when I didn't respond. Light leaked out of me whenever I thought about her.
Woona
My grandmother died last year, in a hospital for the senile in Suwon. She was alone when she died-that is, no family members were with her-and the old woman in the next bed was the one who told the nurse to remove the body because it was starting to smell.
Most people have no capacity for comprehending true darkness, and then they try to fix it anyway.
He is a person who expects people to be kind because he is kind. When he drinks or watches a movie, he will say sentimental things that will make me embarrassed for him. If we are in a group setting, I become deeply ashamed. I married him because I was tired and it was already too late for me, even though I was still so young.
Sometimes I say hello back and sometimes I look away. They don't know that I have been waiting for them to come home.
IT'S NOT an original thought perhaps, but I think people watch so much TV because life would otherwise be unbearable.
But I grew up not knowing the difference between a bearable life and an unbearable life, and by the time I discovered there was such a thing, it was too late.
In contrast, my uncle in America not only had married rich but also was the only one of her sons who was making good money. The other sons she treated like idiots-I still to this day don't know what my oldest uncle did for a living-but she reserved the most contempt for my father, who had gone to a good college but worked at a sanitation company. It was the greatest irony in the world that she had taken in the child of the son who humiliated her the most, she often said to me.
On top of his poor choice of job, his most grievous offense was his choice of wife. "Insolent, stuck-up bitch" was how my grandmother referred to my mother.
“I should have pushed her into the river long ago, when she was pregnant with you," she said to me.
Over the years, I gathered that my mother's family had erred in sending an insulting dowry that had not included the mink coat or the handbag my grandmother had hinted at throughout the engagement.
My mother also had worn "unacceptable, arrogant" expressions on her face during her first year of marriage, when my parents lived with my grandmother.
IF YOU ASKED me why I married my husband, I would say it was because his mother was dead.
There was actually another thing that made up my mind that day; the fact that he had chosen a restaurant near my house so it would be convenient for me. I had been on many a blind date at restaurants that were near the man's work, or near the man's favorite bar, or, the very worst, near the man's home. The better he looked on paper, the more selfish he was, that much Iknew. But this man, not only was he kind, but he had a dead mother. If we had a child-and I wanted a baby, a wee creature who would be completely mine-she would not interfere with its upbringing. Nor could she ever take it away from me. It was too good to be true.
The baby is tapping again When she does this my heart lurches and I stop in the middle of whatever I am doing and I put my hands on my belly to feel her.
Whatever it is, I am so grateful that a gush of hope springs deep inside me and it is everything I can do to not break down completely in public. I want to share this with someone-anyone. I want to clutch the lady who is sitting next to me on the subway and tell her. I want her to know a little world is erupting inside of me. My baby is trying to talk to me. She is trying to live.
FOR THE PAST three months, I have been playing a little game with myself. I call it a game but it is more a series of negotiations. With whom, I do not know, because I do not believe in God. The game goes like this. If my baby lives for another week, I will do this. Or I will give another thing up. Last week, I promised to never smoke a cigarette again even after I give birth-although I do not like to think that far ahead for fear that I will be punished for doing so. I don't even smoke that much but I was running out of stuff to relinquish.
I know that most of the things on her list are frivolities. There will be no extra toys or reading robots or book sets of fifty for my child. But I'm also not naïve enough to think that I won't want them when the time comes. It will wring my heart that I can't buy things for my daughter.
You will have things I did not when I was growing up-like cherished photographs and birthday cakes and days spent at the beach. And then it is time for you to leave me again, to go back to your own life, humming with aspiration. You don't have to worry about me-I will be the happiest I have ever been, even as my heart breaks a little to let go of you.
**"You have to grow up with parents whose lives become better as time goes by, so you learn that you must invest effort for life to improve. But if you grow up around people whose situations become worse as time goes on, then you think that you have to just live for today. And when I ask young people, What about the future?
What will you do when the future comes and you have spent everything already? they say they will just die. And that is why Korea has the highest suicide rate in the world."**
Miho
For all its millions of people, Korea is the size of a fishbowl and someone is always looking down on someone else. That's just the way it is in this country, and the reason why people ask a series of rapid-fire questions the minute they meet you.
Which neighborhood do you live in? Where did you go to school? Where do you work? Do you know so-and-so? They pinpoint where you are on the national scale of status, then spit you out in a heartbeat.
"In New York, you can talk to anyone about anything at any time and have a conversation so long you'll fall a little bit in love with that person, and then never see them again," she told me. It now feels strange to her that in Korea, if you try to strike up a conversation with someone you have not been introduced to, people look at you as they would at a large rat, but if even the flimsiest of introductions is made by the most peripheral of acquaintances, they fuss over you like a long-lost sibling.
When it comes to love, I am not quite the fool that my roommate, Kyuri, believes me to be. Lately, she has been looking at me with great pity, alternating with scorn, and I know that she is contemplating my impending heartbreak.
She considers it entirely my fault, for setting my heart up to be broken in the first place, with reckless disregard for the prime years of my man-attracting life.
It is her job to know men of course, and she thinks she can sum up Hanbin, my boyfriend, and how he will leave me. She believes girls should operate like Venus flytraps-opening only for prey that can actually be caught.
Kyuri also suffers from persecution mania. This is entirely my own and secret opinion. She sees herself as the victim-of men, of the room salon industry, of Korean society, of the government. She never questions her own judgment, or how she creates and wallows in these situations. But that is another story. One day, years after we stop living together, I will embark on a Kyuri series. I know that with absolute certainty. I cannot start now, when I am in the midst of my Ruby series, nor while I am still living with Kyuri. I need time and distance between us. But this is why I relish living with Kyuri now. I am spoon-feeding the muse that lives in a well deep inside of my brain-hearing Kyuri's stories, watching her drink to oblivion every weekend, obsessing over her face and her body and her clothes and her bags. I take photos of her and her things whenever I can. I will need them to remember her by. The other girls too, I have glimmers of them lurking in the outer regions of my mind;
AS FOR HANBIN, I don't need Kyuri or Hanbin's mother to know that he will not be my salvation.
SOMETIMES, WHEN HE is holding me and I feel like I am liquid in his arms, I wonder if anything else in my life will seem real after this. It is as if I traveled beyond the earth and reached out and touched a burning star, and it is both unendurable and terrifying.
I AM GLAD, then, that I will never love someone again in this way. I would not survive a second time. In America, one of my professors said once that the best art comes from an unbearable life-if you live through it, that is.
So I went to Hanbin and drew him down with me and lay beside him on his bed, which smelled like sweat and tears and musk and sorrow, and I comforted him with my body, and when we were entwined it seemed like the most natural thing in the world.
Afterward, it was as if I had been suffocating all my life and only then was I able to breathe.
It is an easy thing, keeping elders happy. All you have to do is smile wide and say hello and thank you and goodbye with deep earnestness.
This is something many of my generation-and my chosen vocation-do not understand.
He is doubly happy for me because, in the past year, he has offered several times to introduce me to gallerists that he knows through his mother, and I have constantly refused. These offers do not come lightly from him, I know, because my accepting a favor like that would mean his family would then owe these people a favor, and his mother would hear of it and she would be, at the very least, wild with fury. I am trying to do this all on my own, and I know that is the way to actually keep him.
No matter what her wrongful assumptions are, she is, at least, a friend who cares, and I know how rare that is. Which is precisely why I cannot paint a Kyuri series right now.
"The worst that can happen is that things stay the same," Miho said.
IN A WAY, I think I am now experiencing true freedom for the first time in my life. That is the way to think of this-that this is karma, and also absolution.
HE WAS ALWAYS offering things. I shrank from accepting because I thought that was the way to show my love for him, to show that I loved him beyond material things and the world he represented, the connections that could launch a career in the time it took to sneeze.
BUT BEFORE he sees her in my work, I will suck everything I can from him. I will be wild and unleashed. I will now take from him what I can. I have not heard Kyuri's philosophies on men all this time for nothing.
"She liked you because you were talented and pretty," says Sujin. "I never used the art room. She only liked kids who were special in some way because it made her feel good about looking after us. Like Yunmi in the grade below us. Miss Loring liked her because she was so beautiful and she could sing.
Ara
It was only recently that I understood they were now worried that no normal man would marry me. The idea that I would never experience motherhood was so distressing that it unleashed a separate wave of guilt for their not having given me siblings. "We thought we were too old," said my mother, twisting her hands. "We were selfish, and now you will have no one when we die."
OFTEN WHEN I am in a place that is crowded and loud, I look around at all the people who are talking and I think about how much of their being is concentrated in their voices, and how I am living a fraction of that life.
I must transform myself, that is immediately clear.