If I Had Your Face

by Frances Cha

SUJIN’S PET NAME for me is ineogongju, or little mermaid. She says it’s because the little mermaid lost her voice but got it back later and lived happily ever after. I don’t tell her that that’s the American cartoon version. In the original story, she kills herself.

“Sometimes I just can’t stop thinking about how ugly she is. I mean, why doesn’t she just get surgery? Why? I really don’t understand ugly people. Especially if they have money. Are they stupid?”

Her cousin still couldn’t feel her chin and had a hard time chewing, she said, but she had gotten a job in sales at a top-tier conglomerate.

IN THE ORIGINAL STORY, the little mermaid endures unspeakable pain to gain her human legs. The Sea Witch warns her that her new feet will feel as if she is walking on whetted blades, but she will be able to dance like no human has ever danced before. And so she drinks the witch’s potion, which slices through her body like a sword. What I want to say, though, is that she danced divinely with her beautiful legs, even through the pain of a thousand knives. She was able to walk and run and stay close to her beloved prince, and even when things didn’t work out with him, that wasn’t the point. And in the end, after she said goodbye to her prince and flung herself into the sea, expecting to disintegrate into sea foam, she was carried away by the children of light and air. — ISN’T THAT a beautiful story?

It says something about my frame of mind that I wanted to talk to them at all. Neither of them was particularly interesting to look at, nor did they seem to have interesting jobs or relevant hobbies or anything like that. No, what struck me each time I saw them was how close they were—how companionable and comfortable they were with each other.

“You will both have a better life than a housewife daughter-in-law,” she said to us growing up. “I would rather you not know how to cook at all.”

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.

Most people have no capacity for comprehending true darkness, and then they try to fix it anyway.

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.

The one time we almost got into a fight was a few months ago, when we were drinking together on the weekend and she accused me of feeling superior to her because I was pretty without having surgery.

“You know, you’re just lucky that your kind of face is trendy these days,”

“That was about Jeon Seul! You agreed with me!” I said. “You said her new nose looked like Michael Jackson’s!” “No, I know,” she said, slumping onto her side. “I know what you think. You’re a stuck-up bitch.”

BUT I DO have to admit I feel a pinch of pride when someone asks if I have had surgery and I can say no.

You have to wear something really expensive. It’s more about your attitude when you wear it. You have to have that confidence you get from wearing something that costs too much.”

And my heart would rise and I would nod a little too enthusiastically, and later in secret writhe with self-loathing.

She had alluded to these things, but I had not asked for more, and I knew that that was how I had failed her, by not asking for more details, by not telling her repeatedly about how her life was so spectacular compared to mine. I assumed she knew that, I assumed that she felt lucky compared with me, that that was why she kept me around as a friend. I should have told her more stories of my own sorrows.

All I can offer her is proof she haunts me still, every day.

The thing is, I remember how I used to be even worse than Cherry when I was young, back when I had my voice and my confidence. My friends and I, we terrorized the streets and knew no fear of money or the future. I know how she thinks. And that’s the problem. Because I know there isn’t anything that can change her except time and inevitable misfortune. Those girls I used to roam with, they all live with despair now, I can tell you that.

He’s one of those shrinking, gawky types that knows he doesn’t have a chance in hell with me, which is the only way I like them.

One minute, you are accepting loans from madams and pimps and bloodsucking moneylenders for a quick surgery to fix your face, and the next minute the debt has ballooned to a staggering, unpayable sum.

It’s nice to have him look at me so fondly and call me “art,” without me having to do anything.

He is so proud of how he has changed my life, and often, his eyes water when he looks at me. He loves the story that he saved me.

bothered me, the fact that she sat with no smile on her face and she would just stare at us, the girls and the men. And I could tell that the men who chose her were the types who wanted to punish her for looking like that.

“I want them to think I’m stupid,” she said to me once. “No expectations is nice. It gives you a lot of time to think.”

As if there’s a chance Nami is thinking about the future! She hasn’t seen her parents since she ran away at twelve. She lives one night at a time. Anyone with half a day of real life experience would be able to see that in a heartbeat. But Miho also thinks working in a room salon is something I do because I want to make a lot of money. She could never imagine the type of place Nami and I started in.

I don’t know, I have half a mind to move to Hong Kong or New York like a few of the older girls I used to work with, who told me they found jobs in room salons there. Apparently the standards of beauty are very low in those cities and people walk around with all kinds of ugly faces.

Who knows? Maybe someone will marry me if I move there. A foreign man who will think I was born beautiful, because he cannot tell the difference.

Now that I have it on, I can see that the fabric is cheap and the ends are unraveling already. Like everything else in my life, the impulsive choice—the wrong choice.

I don’t want anything to do with boys—I just want a tiny little girl, to dress up in soft, chic beige and pink and gray dresses and bounce in my lap.

Where is she going, looking like that? I turn after her and watch as she skips away down the street. She looks so free. They all do—the gaggle of girls upstairs.

Then perhaps I would have been as free as they are. I would love to be on my own, living with a roommate, ordering noodles at 2 a.m., waking up deliciously alone, with no one to ask what my plan is for the day. I wish I could invite one or more of them over, but that would require me to possess an entirely different personality. I wish I could tell them that I empathize with them, that we are the same. I want to tell them I was given up by my mother too.

Getting pregnant is not the issue, it’s that these babies keep on dying. I read somewhere that miscarriages are babies self-terminating when they know there will be a problem. It hollows me out, the way that they would rather kill themselves than be born to me.

When I think of my grandmother, though, I understand my mother for leaving. If I’d had any backbone as a child, I would have run away too. She is out there somewhere—my mother. Whenever she sees a baby, she is thinking about me.

In a way, I will be glad when we are almost home and the scenery will turn into rice fields and farm plots, and I will be reminded of how far I have come, instead of what I cannot reach.

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. And then I play a useless game with myself—would it have been preferable to have lost my hearing or sight instead? The sickening self-pity sharpens when I actually listen to what people are talking about.

“Look who it is! Ara! Pink hair! Oh my goodness! And you gained some weight!”

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.

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.

But now, I think perhaps that’s precisely why he likes me—I am a welcome change because with me he can play the role of the provider. There is a limit to how much Korean men are willing to endure female money, especially if they are wealthy themselves.

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.

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.

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.

I know her tactics. I know her caustic, embittered mind. If she wasn’t such a raging bitch, I would feel sorry for her.

I HAVE TO admit that I have no idea what your younger years will look like, other than some very vivid visions of me holding a beribboned, swaddled you in my arms. In these visions, the curtains are drawn but light is seeping through them—it must be your nap time, and I must be trying to put you to sleep in my arms. You are squirming and perturbed, but your gaze is locked on mine and I know just how to soothe you. In my visions the concept of time is hazy, and soon, or perhaps it is hours later, you are quiet and still and slumbering. You will have things I did not when I was growing up—like cherished photographs and birthday cakes and days spent at the beach. What I daydream about most is an older version of you. You are a young woman, perhaps the age of those girls who live above me—not that much younger than I am now. But unlike them and unlike me, you have a perpetual smile lurking at the corners of your mouth because you’ve had a happy childhood.

And I will pull you inside, saying come in and sit down and tell me more slowly and fully, and I will cry because the process of raising you will have made me sentimental, and I will wrap my arms around you and marvel at how beautiful you are, how tall and strong and shining. And all of my memories of you will dance in front of my eyes as I thirstily listen to all that you have to say, laughing and holding my hands and leaning on my shoulder, or perhaps putting your head in my lap the way you would do as a child.

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. Still, I know you will always come back to me. And that will be the only wish I’ll have ever known.

Grimacing in pity, she told me that because of the shape of my nose, all the money that would flow into my life would flow right out again. And she told me that I had the weakest luck in love—that it would be best to marry late, if at all. She said I had the same saju as a famous historical commander, who went to war knowing he had nothing to lose because he knew the fortune of his later years, and he died with honor and glory. It is easy to leap if you have no choice.