If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha

October 21, 2021

If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha

Modern Korea is a world of impossibly high beauty standards - the closer you conform to the standards, the more likely you are to get a good job, a successful husband, a nicer apartment. Four young women try to navigate the waters of work, beauty, K-POP, and marriage in 21st century Seoul.

One works as a hostess at an exclusive gentlemen's club; she has had plenty of plastic surgery already and is constantly having her face tweaked so that she can keep her job. But she makes a serious mistake when she runs into a regular client at an expensive restaurant. Another is an artist who received a scholarship to study in New York, but struggles when she returns home. She becomes involved in the shady dealings of a wealthy client. The third woman is a hair stylist who is mute; she is a wonderful stylist but she is treated poorly because of her disability, and she spends a lot of time worrying about her roommate, an ordinary looking girl who is obsessed with a K-POP group and is saving up to have extensive plastic surgery on her face. The fourth woman is a newlywed who wants to have a baby, but she and her husband have ordinary jobs and they have no idea how they will be able to afford to raise a child in super-expensive Seoul.

Before I read this book, I had only a vague idea about beauty standards in Korea and the pressure to fit into a single look. I knew that women in Korea are crazy for beauty products from a blog that I follow - the blog's author has a friend who travels to Korea frequently for work and brings back beauty products to try. Even though I'm not Asian, I actually fit the Korean beauty standard pretty well (fair skin, oval face, small high nose, large eyes, visible eyelids) - I knew there had to be some place I fit in!

But there are too many stories, too many characters, and too many important topics here - the author should have picked one or two and saved the others for another book. The woman who works at the gentlemen's club is the only one with a real storyline. While the other three girls are involved in the Korean beauty world, the married woman's life has a totally different direction that is nothing to do with the beauty industry and doesn't have anything to do with them, other than she lives in the same apartment building as two of them.

This is how rigid the beauty standard is in Korea