Francesca Carington
The irresistibly titled If I Had
Your Face is the debut novel from Frances Cha. Swathed in praise from Oprah and Vogue, there’s a millennial buzz around the book, which takes an eviscerating look at modern Korean society – and four women’s place at the bottom of it.
Living in the same apartment block are: the cosmetically enhanced Kyuri, who works for a “room salon” (a sort of brotheladjacent party lounge); her room-mate Miho, an orphan who scored a rich boyfriend after an art scholarship in New York; Ara, a mute hairstylist obsessed with a K-pop star; and Wonna, who’s pregnant with a baby she and her husband can’t afford to raise.
There’s not much in the way of plot; rather, each chapter is a snapshot of a woman trapped – by narrow and exacting beauty standards, by debt, misogyny and the rigid hierarchies instructing every level of society. The rich kids in Manhattan place each other by which school they went to, while the “prettiest 10 per cent” of Seoul escorts sneer at red-light district sex workers. As Miho thinks: “For all its millions of people, Korea is the size of a fishbowl and someone is always looking down on someone else.”
Cha’s women do it too. For all the fondness and protectiveness that gels them together, they’re deeply judgmental of each other, in a spot-on dissection of female friendship. Proud “natural” beauty Miho thinks Kyuri is “painfully plastic”, while Kyuri thinks Miho is stuck-up. But their scorn is mainly directed outwards, expressing things they’d have done differently if the odds weren’t stacked against them. The “if ” of the title is threaded through their thoughts – “If I lived there”, “if I had known”, “I would live your life so much better than you, if I had your face”.
It’s powerful stuff, but doesn’t quite make up for the slightly flat characterisation of the girls, Wonna especially. Cha’s depiction of Seoul – its chaos and its cruelty – is electrifying; but in the end, it’s not just the city that lets these women down. by Frances Cha