If I Had Your Face

by Frances Cha

I’m not sure who’s worse, them or the men. Just kidding, the men are always worse.

How funny, the wild variety of shit some people are worrying about in life.

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.

I laugh because I know that she will put on a full face of makeup just to have the nurses at the dermatologist’s wash it all off for her facials and treatments.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

“When’s the last time you ate?” I ask. Miho will forget about food when she is working. I get jealous because it is so hard for me to diet but she doesn’t even spend a thought on her weight and remains impossibly slender.

it looked so chic on the mannequin in the window. 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.

She looks so free. They all do—the gaggle of girls upstairs.

I wish I could invite one or more of them over, but that would require me to possess an entirely different personality.

I have no desire to stay past midnight every night for a company that treats me like an ant to be crushed by the heel of a shoe. But those who do, the ones with no families, those are the ones that get ahead. The career woman I imagine my mother to be—she is probably one of them too.

I don’t know where it came from—that drive of Kyunghee’s. She lived for praise and she was relentless in her studies.

I looked down at my plate of food. I hoped they noticed that I wasn’t eating very much. I always ate several cups of yogurt or a slab of tofu with soy sauce from the Asian mart before meeting them, to fill myself up.

She wanted to become a doctor, she said. But I think that’s because it was the only job we knew of at the time that made any money.

I saw and experienced things that I always assumed would be the rock bottom of my life. I lived and worked among people who were either so evil or so lost that they did not have a single thought in their heads.

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

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.

my hate is a heavy rock sitting in the middle of my chest. Every day, it sinks a little lower toward my stomach.

“You know, in America, they have three weeks of maternity leave. Or something like that. Anyway, I am sorry the situation is what it is.”

I cannot imagine having a child and you have to watch out for him or her and every moment of every day will be devoted to the child with no life of your own. I wonder how that transition happens and what it feels like when that instinct kicks in.

I always knew they were both cracked.