Painful and poignant, debut novel If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha gives us a window into the distressing lives of women in modern day Seoul.
Although set in today’s world, the world Cha paints is so unlike our own, it is unrecognizable. In If I Had Your Face, women are mistreated in ways incomprehensible to a progressive 21st century mindset. Life is bleak, with no way to truly get ahead and achieve happiness. Women are expected to marry and have children, but they know that even if they can find a man to fall in love with them, that man will inevitably cheat on them. Women are also expected to work and make a living, even though there are still very few jobs available to them. And above all, women are expected to be stunningly beautiful, beautiful in such a way that plastic surgery has become a necessity, meaning women often have to put themselves deeply in debt to make themselves look acceptable to others around them.
Ara, who has been mute since a mysterious accident in her teen years, is a celebrity-obsessed hair stylist with one goal—meeting Taein, a boy-band singer who she idolizes.
Sujin, Ara’s roomate, is an orphan with an ugly face, determined to work at a room salon, which is basically a bar where attractive women pour drinks and have sex with the customers. However, she can’t achieve that goal without rebuilding her entire face.
Kyuri, already completely transformed by surgery, works at a room salon, and she has always taken a cold, clear-eyed approach to life, but when she makes an impulsive mistake with a client, it could destroy her life’s work.
Miho, a talented painter who spent some time in New York City, is confident in her abilities, but feeling insecure in her romantic relationship with the rich heir to one of Korea’s biggest companies.
Wonna is newly married to a man she does not like or respect, trying to become pregnant, but she is becoming increasingly worried about how she will afford to raise her child in such a vicious, unforgiving economy.
The lives of these five women are largely separate for most of the book, sometimes entwining for brief periods (except for Ara and Sujin, who are roommates), and it is largely a slice-of-life style book, with no overall plot or change to tie it together or move it along, which is not something that you see very often these days. On the whole, I enjoyed it, but readers should know that it is slow-paced and that you shouldn’t expect big action, because it won’t come.
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The characters were also hard for me to connect to, and at times, I even didn’t like most of them, but I still found their tragic lives compelling, and to me, that speaks highly of Cha’s writing.
The writing in this book is one aspect that stood out to me; it was written beautifully with brutal honesty, which is quite a feat. I loved her prose, which included so many short, scathing lines that cut down to the soul in such an effective way. One of my favorites comes from Wonna, about her husband: “I married him because I was tired and it was already too late for me, even though I was still so young.” This novel certainly shows a dark side of humanity, so there is a decent amount of drinking and sex involved, although no starkly explicit scenes.
This novel is dark, deeply sad, thought-provoking, and one that might not make you feel warm and fuzzy inside, but is certainly worth the read.
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