If I Had Your Face

by Frances Cha

“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?” She studies herself in the mirror, tilting her head to the side until I right it again. “Are they perverted?”

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

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.

I married him because I was tired and it was already too late for me, even though I was still so young.

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.

“He’s an international project manager, you know,” she said. “They couldn’t have a baby girl where there are wild animals in the jungle!”

There is something about happy people—their eyes are clear and their shoulders hang lower on their bodies.

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. The bile festers below the surface, dormant but still lurking, until the son becomes of marriageable age; the resentment at being pushed aside, the anger of becoming second in their sons’ affections. It was not just my grandmother; I have seen it time and time again.

I then proceeded to betray her in the worst possible way, by loving and taking Hanbin, and I know that in the next life, I will pay. But for now, I can’t help it, I cannot stop going down this path, even though I know the wreckage that it will leave of my heart.

All of this—Hanbin, my job, my frenzied productivity—is very temporary, I know. All I can offer her is proof she haunts me still, every day.

Years? How am I supposed to wait that long? What will I be living for? I need to see him. I need to.

I like yoohaksaeng because they tend to be more experimental with sexual positions because they’ve watched a lot of American porn. It is apparently very ridiculous and intense but often focuses on women’s pleasure, which is measured by how loud she moans.

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.

I have to admit that it makes me feel warm all over, to embark on this parallel journey with Taein.

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.

What makes me sad is that my mother thinks this is the best my life can be.

You will not be able to save your money because there will never be enough of it. You will keep doing things you never expected to do. You will be affected in ways you could never imagine.

I’m okay. I have survived the day, again.

“I wish I had a talent that had decided my vocation for me,” she says. She sounds aggrieved. “So that there never was a choice. Of doing anything else.”