If I Had Your Face

by Frances Cha

Writing down words by hand feels more akin to speaking.

I mean, why doesn’t she just get surgery? Why? I really don’t understand ugly people.

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.

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

“There is no greater sorrow than not getting married!” she says. “The thought of you alone in life, no children, that is what is making me old and sick.”

I am terrified of her dying. When my mind wanders, I think about her tumors spreading poison throughout her body.

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.

I think people watch so much TV because life would otherwise be unbearable.

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.

It was not something I missed or craved or even noticed.

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

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.

Kyuri doesn’t drink Starbucks.

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

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.

It’s basic human nature, this need to look down on someone to feel better about yourself.

“Hundreds of children in an enclosed dark space.” I shudder. “Sounds like a horror movie.”

“Why would you want to bring more children into this world so that they can suffer and be stressed their entire lives?

“Who will take care of you when you are old?

I will never have the capacity to shoulder the responsibility of another life when I am scrambling like a madman in my own.

The things I do for her.

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.

“I’m sorry, but getting married in your twenties is just ridiculous,”

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

I WILL NOT come out of this with nothing.

the problem with a lot of my generation in this country is that we do not live for tomorrow.

But as long as I am trying, doesn’t that mean something?

I understand what it would be like to think only about tomorrow, instead of just today.