Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Author Frances Cha on achieving the feminine ideal
NEW YORK — Frances Cha was a precocious child.
She was 8 years old when she began writing novels while living outside Seoul in South Korea.
But the protagonists, she said, were usually white with blond hair and blue eyes — a far cry from the little girl she saw in the mirror.
It took Cha more than 25 years to flip the script and write a novel about four young women navigating early adulthood in modern-day Seoul. The result is If I Had Your Face, an unflinching look at how a quartet of friends, who live in the same apartment building, and do not come from wealth or status, pursue their dreams and ambitions in the fiercely competitive South Korean capital.
In the novel, Brooklyn-based Cha confronts South
Korea’s social norms, including its impossibly high beauty standards, rigid social hierarchies and its old-boy culture where business deals are done in “room salons,” private establishments where attractive women serve men drinks.
The power of If I Had Your Face is in its depiction of the unforgiving reality of Kyuri, Miho, Ara and Wanna’s lives — namely that self-acceptance often comes at great cost and beauty is the ultimate commodity.
Q: What inspired you to write a book about contemporary South Korea?
A: I wanted to write about the people I encountered every day in Korea. I have read The Joy Luck Club so many times that both my covers have fallen off. And reading it, I realized it was possible to have an Asian protagonist and explore themes like filial piety. I wanted to write a story about young women that is very specific to modern Korea.
Q: Since there are four main female characters, is it fair to say your book is a Korean Sex and the City?
A: Unlike Sex and the City,
which I loved, my narrators are not at all preoccupied with love. Their main preoccupations are survival and providing for their loved ones. Filial piety is what really drives two of the characters to transform their faces with elective plastic surgery.
Q: What is the connection between filial piety and elective plastic surgery?
A: Filial piety — “hyo” in Korean — is the age-old historical and traditional virtue of deep respect and support and love toward one’s parents and elders. To say “he is a hyo-ja” or “she is a hyo-nyeo” means someone is a good son or daughter, exhibiting and living by respect that is born of gratitude to your parents.
In Kyuri’s specific case, her driving motivation in life is to provide for her aging, ailing, widowed mother, and the way that she opts to do it is to get a better job in the room salon industry the only way she knows how: by undergoing more surgery to become more beautiful. But she is a hyo-nyeo — a very filial daughter — and her mother is the source of her drive and her anguish.
Q: The cosmetic surgery industry is practically its own character in your book.
A: When I tell people I’m Korean, people always ask if I’ve had plastic surgery. Plastic surgery runs very counter to American and Western ideas about remaining true to yourself — that you shouldn’t have to change anything about yourself because of anyone’s judgment.
But in South Korea, there are very real and practical reasons people have plastic surgery. I ask readers to reserve their judgment on that. The reality in 21st-century South Korea is, how you look does matter, especially if you don’t come from wealth and status.
South Korea … is the world’s most educated country, according to the World Economic Forum, but there are very few jobs that are well paying, and a lot of households go into a lot of debt to educate their children. It has the world’s highest suicide rate, the world’s highest internet usage rate and the highest per capita rate of plastic surgery.
Q: Tell us more about room salons and why you make them a central part of your character Kyuri’s plot line.
A: They’re nothing like a strip club. The women are fully clothed. Every group is in a private room, which is like a very luxurious karaoke bar. The women are there more to facilitate conversations. Their business objective is to get the men to drink.
But the existence of room salons is very much a detriment to women in Korea because it’s where so many business deals are taking place, and women are not invited into this male space. In general, the women who work there are considered frivolous, a perception I think is unfair and very unfortunate.