Cha, Frances. If I Had Your Face: A Novel. 2020. Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Edition, 2021. ISBN 9780593129487. 304 pages, $17.00.
Cover image: If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha. Image reproduced for purposes of review and commentary.
The title of Frances Cha’s If I Had Your Face immediately recalls Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970). In Morrison’s novel, Pecola Breedlove, a young Black girl, longs for the blue eyes she associates with the beauty of white girls. Cha’s novel does not directly address American racial stereotypes, but its title raises similar questions about beauty, identity, and the desire to possess a face that conforms to an externally imposed ideal. Originally published by Ballantine Books in 2020, If I Had Your Face centers on two distinctive features of contemporary South Korean society: the widespread practice of cosmetic plastic surgery and the culture of “room salons,” private drinking establishments where female attendants entertain male customers. Together, these subjects enable Cha to examine a society in which beauty, money, sex, work, and social status are often intertwined.
South Korea has become internationally known for cosmetic surgery. Both women and men undergo procedures to alter their appearances, sometimes in pursuit of romantic relationships and sometimes because they believe a more attractive appearance will improve their employment prospects. The ideal of beauty often favors larger, rounder eyes, sharper jawlines, and other features associated with Western appearance. Koreans sometimes compliment someone who is especially attractive by saying that the person has “Western features.” Such preferences are easy to understand in a society profoundly influenced by global popular culture, particularly the cultural dominance of the United States and Europe. Yet the desire to achieve an idealized appearance can also become destructive. Plastic surgery does not always produce the desired result, and repeated procedures can leave people dissatisfied with their own appearance.
Cha explores this world through Kyuri, one of four narrators. Kyuri is described as “electrically beautiful” (4), and she works as a room-salon hostess in Nonhyeon-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul. She previously worked as a prostitute in Miari, one of Seoul’s districts associated with prostitution. Although she earns considerable money in the room-salon business, much of it disappears into payments to madams, pimps, and “bloodsucking moneylenders” (91). Her repeated plastic surgeries have altered her appearance so much that she can hardly recognize her own face. Her story thus connects the two major subjects of Cha’s novel: the commercialization of female beauty and the commercialization of female sexuality.
Room-salon culture provides an even darker dimension to the novel. These establishments, which have existed in various forms for decades, are private drinking rooms where men purchase expensive alcohol and the companionship of female attendants. The women are expected to entertain their customers, listen to them, and provide the kind of emotional attention that may be difficult to obtain elsewhere, including their own homes. Cha does not present this world simply as an exotic curiosity. Instead, she uses it to explore the pressures and contradictions of contemporary Korean life.
The novel’s five central women are Kyuri, Miho, Ara, Wonna, and Sujin. Four of them narrate the story themselves, while readers encounter Sujin primarily through the narration of the others. The fourteen chapters are divided among Ara, Kyuri, Wonna, and Miho, with four chapters each for Ara and Kyuri and three each for Wonna and Miho. Each chapter bears the name of its narrator. This simple structural device is particularly effective because it allows readers to enter each woman’s consciousness directly rather than encountering her through an omniscient narrator.
The technique has precedents in Asian American literature, including Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) and Maija Rhee Devine’s The Voices of Heaven (2013), in which multiple perspectives similarly provide access to the experiences of different characters. In Cha’s novel, however, the device also emphasizes the contrasts among women who share the same city and culture but experience life in very different ways.
Ara, a hairstylist, shares a room with Sujin, who is determined to become a room-salon girl because of the money. Kyuri’s story takes readers into the commercial sex industry and the world of plastic surgery. Wonna reflects on childhood trauma, childhood poverty, marriage, pregnancy, family, and the lonely death of her grandmother in a hospital. She remembers her grandmother as an angry woman who fought with shopkeepers and was verbally and physically abusive. Wonna herself married because her husband had a dead mother, meaning that she could raise her child without interference from a mother-in-law. Her story reveals another side of contemporary Korean womanhood: the complicated intersection of gender inequity, marriage, family expectations, and independence.
Miho, meanwhile, has an international background. Unlike her roommate, Kyuri, she has natural beauty, which Kyuri envies. An artist-in-residence at a university who once lived in New York, she became acquainted with two Korean students, Ruby and her boyfriend Hanbin, who is an heir to a super-wealthy Korean business conglomerate. After Ruby’s suicide, Miho and Hanbin become lovers, but Ruby’s memory continues to haunt their relationship. Miho’s story therefore expands the novel beyond the immediate worlds of beauty salons and room salons to questions of wealth, privilege, friendship, suicide, and guilt.
One of Cha’s strengths is her ability to provide cultural information without turning the novel into a conventional sociological study. Her background helps explain this quality. A Korean American who grew up in the United States, Hong Kong, and South Korea, Cha graduated from Dartmouth College and Columbia University’s MFA program. She has lived and worked in both the United States and South Korea, including teaching at Ewha Womans University and Yonsei University in Seoul. She also worked as a travel and culture writer for CNN. She currently divides her time between Brooklyn and Seoul.
That journalistic experience is evident throughout If I Had Your Face. Cha is attentive not only to major social issues but also to the linguistic details of Korean culture. For example, “after” is used as a noun in room-salon culture, referring to an activity that takes place after the evening’s primary entertainment. Because Korean lacks the English /f/ sound, some Koreans pronounce the word more like “apter.” Likewise, unni, literally meaning “older sister,” can function in room-salon culture as a euphemistic term for a female attendant. Such details give the novel the quality of an investigation into a social world that many outsiders would never otherwise encounter.
Upon its publication, the novel received considerable critical attention. The Guardian described it as a “compelling, icily cool exposé” of the pursuit of self-advancement under difficult economic circumstances. CNN Travel praised the book for its immersion in less familiar aspects of South Korean culture, while Esquire emphasized its portrayal of female friendship and its examination of the social and economic pressures facing Korean women. These responses help explain the novel’s appeal to international readers: it offers a glimpse behind the increasingly familiar global image of contemporary Korea.
That aspect of the novel is particularly significant at a time when South Korean popular culture has become influential around the world. K-pop, Korean television dramas, cosmetics, food, and film have helped create an attractive image of Korea for international audiences. For some outsiders, particularly young people, Korea can appear almost entirely through the lens of its successful cultural exports. Cha’s novel offers a necessary counterpoint. Beneath the polished surfaces of Gangnam and the glamorous images associated with Korean popular culture are poverty, sexual exploitation, commercialized sex, alcoholism, workaholism, academic pressure, loneliness, suicide, and economic anxiety.
After the end of the novel, Cha discusses her research with novelist Kevin Kwan. When Kwan asks what she investigated for the book, Cha points to a number of social problems she encountered during her journalistic work, including high suicide rates, workaholism, alcoholism, declining birth rates, a twenty-four-hour culture, and Internet gaming culture (279). This conversation helps clarify the larger project of the novel. Cha is not simply interested in telling the stories of five women; she is examining the social environment that has produced their particular forms of anxiety, ambition, loneliness, and desperation.
It would be easy to moralize about the behavior depicted in the novel. The room-salon industry, prostitution, mistresses, excessive drinking, and the relentless pursuit of physical beauty provide ample material for condemnation. Yet such a response would miss part of Cha’s achievement. Her characters are not merely representatives of moral failures. They are people caught in social and economic systems that often leave them with limited choices. The novel’s darkness comes partly from the recognition that material prosperity has not entirely eliminated suffering. A country can become wealthier, more technologically advanced, and more globally admired while many of its people continue to experience profound loneliness and insecurity.
In this respect, If I Had Your Face is best understood as a social or sociological novel, even an investigative novel. Cha reveals a side of contemporary South Korea that is easy to overlook when the country is viewed through its cultural and economic successes. Her transnational background gives her a perspective that is both intimate and observational. She knows Korea from the inside, but she also has enough distance to examine aspects of Korean society that insiders may take for granted.
The novel is not without limitations. Its world is overwhelmingly bleak, and there is comparatively little that is affirming about the society it portrays. Readers looking for a balanced portrait of contemporary Korea may therefore find the novel one-sided. Nor should the experiences of Cha’s characters be taken as a comprehensive representation of Korean life. They inhabit particular social worlds, especially those involving beauty, sex, wealth, and economic insecurity. Nevertheless, precisely because the novel concentrates on these worlds, it succeeds as an exposé of realities that deserve attention.
Ultimately, If I Had Your Face asks readers to look beyond appearances. Its title suggests the desire to possess another person’s beauty, but the novel gradually reveals how complicated such desires can become. The face that appears beautiful from a distance may conceal anxiety, debt, exploitation, loneliness, or regret. Likewise, a country that appears prosperous and glamorous may contain social problems that remain invisible to tourists and consumers of popular culture.
For readers who have developed an idealized image of contemporary South Korea, Cha’s novel can therefore serve as a useful corrective. It does not deny Korea’s remarkable cultural and economic achievements; instead, it reminds us that cultural glamour and social suffering can coexist. Beneath the beautiful face is a much more complicated human reality, and that reality is what Frances Cha asks us to see.
Revealing what is not visible to the casual eye is one of the novelists’ essential tasks. Good novelists are not merely storytellers. In addition to creating engaging plots, they serve as perceptive observers of the human condition. They do not necessarily offer solutions to societal or existential problems, because they are neither preachers nor policymakers. Instead, they portray reality in vivid, concrete terms, allowing us to see these problems more clearly. Lofty language, such as that used by epic poets, is not suited to this kind of exposé; plain yet incisive prose, as illustrated in Cha’s novel, is.
About the Author
Professor of English and Creative Writing and Associate Dean of the School of Humanities and Theology, Missouri Baptist University
John J. Han, PhD, is the author, editor, co-editor, or translator of 38 books. His forthcoming book, Echoes from the Hills: Critical Essays on Ozarks Literature (co-edited with C. Clark Triplett), will be published by the University of Arkansas Press. He has also published more than 3,000 poems, primarily haiku, in a wide range of journals and anthologies. In addition to his long tenure at Missouri Baptist University, he has taught at Kansas State University, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Nebraska Wesleyan University, and Washington University in St. Louis. He has also served as a visiting scholar at Georgia College & State University and the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.
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