If I Had Your Face

by Frances Cha

WHYYYYY

I don’t know at what age men become assholes—boyhood, teenage years? When they start earning some real money? It depends on their fathers, and their fathers’ fathers, probably. Their grandfathers are usually the biggest assholes of all, if mine are any indication. Men these days are actually much better than previous generations—the ones who used to bring mistresses into the house and make their wives feed and care for their bastard children.

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.

What makes her… this mad tho..

I don’t know if she was born like this, or if my grandfather’s early death had made her go a little insane.

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.

You see, I have long understood what most women learn by fire after they are married—that the hate mothers-in-law harbor toward their daughters-in-law is built into the genes of all women in this country.

“Rich people are fascinated by happiness,” she said. “It’s something they find maddening.”

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.

“I think you can see things very clearly that others can’t because they are so easily distracted.”

I just hope that whatever calamity she has coming her way, it strikes sooner, rather than later.

It’s basic human nature, this need to look down on someone to feel better about yourself. There is no point in getting upset about it.

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.

Wtf

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 want to tell them I was given up by my mother too.

our roots are what make us who we are and he wouldn’t change the hardships in his past for anything, because they are what inform his lyrics and music and even his dancing today.

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.

“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.

“No matter how dark things get for me, the memory that I saved a life—that my life has mattered—has been something I can cling to,”

the best art comes from an unbearable life—if you live through it, that is.

“The adults there never think ahead about our future—to be fair, they’re busy putting out fires, with girls like me—but that’s why those of us out here are constantly looking for information for the younger ones. That’s how I got that salon job too, an unni from the Center called me. I mean, the job was gruesome, but at least it got me here!”