If I had Your Face ~ By Frances Cha
(Ballantine Books, New York, 2021, ISBN #978-0-5931-2946-3)
Review by Bill Drucker (Summer 2024)
The provocative title, hinting at feminine longings, is an effective one for this story told from the perspective of five young Korean women, Kyuri, Miho, Ara, Sujin, and Wonna, as they navigate their lives in competitive modern Seoul, including careers, relationships and personal dreams. The narrative explores Korean social mores, including beauty standards for women, and women’s roles in society.
Despite an image of a progressive nationhood, South Korea is still exists in a cultural pendulum swinging from aspirations of modern liberalism to the Confucian, patriarchal society that has sustained the country for thousands of years. The nation works toward prosperity, but still has a wide rich-poor gap that the South Korean leadership seems not to desire to change.
Author Frances Cha has produced an engaging story which examines modern Korea’s issues of gender, identity and status, social norms and attitudes through the voices of her characters. Kyuri is the enviable one, from a conventional perspective; she is described as a dazzling beauty who attracts the attention of men and the envy of other women. She works at a room salon, where her job is to entertain rich men.
Kyuri shares an office-tel (small apartment) with artist Miho. Miho is connected to society’s upper echelons through her artwork, but cannot participate in that lifestyle, and has a precarious relationship with a rich boy, Hanbin, heir to a conglomerate. It is a dizzying world of wealth and prestige, but Miho is very wary of material and social trappings.
Her friend Sujin wants what Kyuri has – money and attention. She believes it is all due to Kyuri’s beauty, and Sujiin is willing to undergo painful and expensive plastic surgery to be beautiful like her friend. Sujin is the voice of “oh, if I had your face.” Hair stylist Ara is Sujin’s roommate. While Ara tries to inject reason into Sujin’s obsession, she also has one of her own; she is a mad fan of a Kpop star.
Last is Wonna, married to a nice but fumbling husband and succumbing to a life of being a housewife and mother, or so she thinks at first. After several miscarriages, Wonna becomes pregnant. As her concern for her unborn child grows, her marriage starts to disintegrate
All of the characters are smart, if at times blinded by relationships, social pressures, and personal desires. All of the characters in their own ways are observing life at the top economic and social classes in Korea, although they are able to mix in that world only in a minor way. By the luck of their birth, they do not have the background to ever aspire to it.
Kyuri invests in her looks with expensive cosmetics, but she also saves her money, knowing that her life as a hostess cannot last forever. Once, Kyuri observes a woman who walks into the room salon and seems to own it. Kyuri can see that the woman is only average looking, but she seems to possess wealth and status, which gets the attention of the men around her. Kyuri admires that quality but feels she will never attain it.
Ara has a good job at a hair salon. She is worried that her Kpop star is becoming hugely popular and will soon leave Korea for a world tour. The price of a ticket is now far beyond Ara’s reach. At the hair salon, a clumsy new girl, Cherry, grates at Ara. At closing, Ara tells the manager she will clean and close up shop, but that Cherry should help. When Cherry does a poor job on the bathroom, Ara yanks Cherry’s ponytail and shoves the lazy girl’s face into the (purportedly) clean toilet.
At home, Sujin, still bandaged after her plastic surgery, tells Ara that she looks worse than her. Sujin gives Ara a ticket to see her Kpop star, as an early birthday gift. Ara stares at the ticket and starts to cry.
In the background, a solidarity of sisterhood galvanizes the group of women in this story as they encounter oppression and setbacks. They may slight each other, and be judgmental, but they are a tight-knit and loyal bunch. After working long days, they often meet for soju and food. Even Hanbin, rich son of a film celebrity, takes a stool in his expensive outfit. The women enjoy men’s attention, but can be hostile in response to unwarranted advances.
Cha underplays the men’s roles. Hanbin is handsome, well educated, and well heeled. He was the boyfriend of Ruth, an art dealer who committed suicide. After her death, he gravitates to Miho. When he can’t get his way with Miho, he scowls and retreats. The women observe this behavior with scorn, saying that since he is good looking and rich, he could not be nice as well.
Other men in Seoul are attentive and obsequious. At the cheap bars, the women get additional service, free drinks and food. Some men, rejected, walk off like petulant pups. Bruce, a frequent salon guest, when slighted by Kyuri, takes petty revenge. The owner slaps Kyuri in front of everyone to placate Bruce. The message is that Kyuri has to appear to know her place, as a show for the clientele. In fact, the owner knows Kyuri’s value as an employee and would not fire her.
Wonna, the married woman of the group, suffers a disastrous marriage breakup when her husband, after pressuring her to have a child, walks away when he loses his job and feels he can’t deal with a family.
In the course of the story, the women progress in their lives and attain certain degrees of maturity. Miho knows that she doesn’t need Hanbin to fulfill her artistic ambitions. Ara knows not to obsess anymore. Even Sujin, so desperate and willing go through the cost and pain to look pretty, realizes, like Kyuri, that this life won’t last. At a soju-jib (portable tent bar with plastic stools), she gets admiring looks from the men. Kyuri tells Sujin not to pay attention. Sujin replies “Let me enjoy this.”
The author describes the Korean obsession with surgically-enhanced looks, but refrains from ridicule. Instead, she describes the topic in a serious way. The obsession with cosmetic enhancements is a contradiction of the Korean appreciation of natural aesthetics. In a recent Miss Korea beauty pageant, nearly all of the contestants looked alike; similar versions of the perfect Korean woman’s face. Should one laugh or cry?
The narratives are witty, sometimes gritty, and grounded in urban Korean experience. Cha is familiar with Korean values, since she was born there, and western values, because she was educated in the U.S. In its tone, however, the novel feels very Korean. Cha does not interject any western feminist ideas into the story. The five young women struggle through work and the many complications of their lives in very Korean environment, showing that they are smart, capable, resilient and unfailingly supportive of one another.
Cha writes with a realistic feel for urban Korea. The five very different women characters provide the author with a wide variety of topics and voices. Though they are developed as social prototypes, the women are sympathetic representatives. Her treatment of each character is engaging and skilled, and her writing carries humor and pathos.
The author grew up in the U.S., Hong Kong, and South Korea. She attended Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire as an undergrad, and received her Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University, New York. She has taught in both American and Korean colleges. She resides in Brooklyn (New York) and in Seoul, South Korea.
