If I Had Your Face

by Frances Cha

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.

Unless you are born into a chaebol family or your parents were the fantastically lucky few who purchased land in Gangnam decades ago, you have to work and work and work for a salary that isn’t even enough to buy a house or pay for childcare, and you sit at a desk until your spine twists, and your boss is somehow incompetent and a workaholic at the same time and at the end of the day you have to drink to bear it all.

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.

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.”

They pinpoint where you are on the national scale of status, then spit you out in a heartbeat.

Our abandonment scared people, as if it might be contagious.

And with that, the three of us hop on our creaking, frozen bicycles and start off toward the Loring Center, each of us grasping at our own shifting versions of the past.

In America, one of my professors said once that the best art comes from an unbearable life—if you live through it, that is.

Mari, who is a good ten years older than me, is a bit of a wild card. She is near forty, divorced and overweight, which renders her entirely invisible in the eyes of Korean men of every generation.

I REMEMBER MY AUNT telling my cousin Kyunghee and me, when we were small, that my grandmother had died of anger. She had choked to death on han—the rage and resentment and despair—seeing her parents die before her eyes, having served her mother-in-law as a body slave until she aged long before her time.

If there was a marriage handbook of do’s and don’ts, the first chapter should be titled “Buy a King-Size Bed.”