I always noticed them… I just didn’t care very much.

For part of my working week I am in an office, and have to make regular visits from my desk to the printing room. Behind the main printer someone has installed a large pane of glass; I am not sure what its purpose is, and have never bothered to ask, but it’s not a mirror...

Every time I walk into the room, one, two, or more, of the younger women in the organisation will be crowding for their reflections. Touching up strands of hair, layers of make-up, and practicing different expressions, from different angles. I squeeze past them, say hello (they all seem to be called things like Joy or Ruby or Sunny) and leave them to it – as if they are playing a sport that I don’t know the rules to, and am not very interested in learning.

Of course I still judge them! Tragic, hopeless, and just a little intimidating, it is one of the few wonderfully acceptable prejudices to still hold. They steal eyes, and dominate space, polished and perfect; humming with vigour, their hard work has its payoffs, if only small.

Then I would leave the printing room, and my mind would move elsewhere, my self-consciousness would fade and I would forget about my face; they wouldn’t! Back in their own offices, in meetings, or talking with clients, they would slowly fizz with a growing anxiety, constantly fingering hair and clothes, and stealing glances into anything that offered a reflection.

I never saw any of them, in their fraught, and excruciatingly long, morning transitions – “fall[ing] apart yet again this week in front of our bathroom mirror, agitated and despairing”.

Unfortunately Frances Cha’s novel, If I Had Your Face, lends itself to cliché. It didn’t need much more than the title (this is Cha’s first literary effort) to make it an instant ‘best seller’; if that term still means anything. Without glancing at a single page, most readers will instantly feel that they understand the whole book. It’s personal to everyone, in some way!

The Korean fascination with feminine beauty, plastic surgery, dumb glamour and K-pop, isn’t really that ‘Korean’ at all. But it is the current high-water mark of this degrading impossibility. So pay no attention to the pre-order numbers, or the second, third, fourth editions already published only a month after its first release. Don’t believe the hype and excitement, this is not the book that you think it is… it’s much better!

And you can see clearly where the change happens – drawn firmly after the second chapter – where Cha puts aside the thick, wieldy, paintbrush for a thinner, much more delicate, option. The concept steps back from the page, and the author takes over. It is subtle, and it makes every bit of difference.

All the heavy, expected, themes are there from the first two chapters. Hair shops, nail rooms, motherhood, SKY (Korean Ivy League) universities, K-pop and celebrity culture, marriage and men, money, the lack of money, the best plastic surgery hospital in Seoul (the ‘Cinderella Clinic’), and the constant longing for a different shape, a different beauty, and all the possibilities it would bring – “I would live your life so much better than you, if I had your face.”

Then, from a novel about “electrically beautiful girls” and “asshole” men, Cha leaves everything behind and writes a pleasingly complex look at morality, universal injustice, and personal agency.

If I Had Your Face bleeds the stories of four women – Kyuri, Ara, Miho and Wonna – all connected through a fifth voice that we never hear directly from, Sujin, who is digging into debt and pain for new eyes and a new jawline; a new life. She wants what Kyuri has!

‘Room salons’ are a Korean bridge between child-like entertainment, stripping, and prostitution. An odd, parochial phenomenon where groups of men book shared rooms equipped with karaoke machines. They also book young women to sit on their laps, flirt with them, and pour drinks. This is the legal side. Soon the men develop relationships with their hosts, and for a new price, everyone is looking the other way as “round 2” starts and the salon becomes a brothel.

“10 percent” salons only hire the “prettiest 10 percent of girls in the industry”, and for someone who hugs their vices tight as their only virtue, it’s either K-pop and the quintessential celebrity lifestyle, or this. These are the swirling, gaseous years of ambition, where junkies brag unashamedly about the size of their addiction, convinced all along that those drugs are also their ticket to stardom and success.

But before anyone gets in the 10 percent, they need surgery, of some kind; there is always something to be fixed or improved upon. Sujin bides her time – post-reconstruction – polishing nails at a different kind of salon, face covered by a mask, eyes down on the job at hand. Waiting impatiently for her “stubbornly swollen” face to find its new bone structure, and hoping that just enough of the sensation returns so that she doesn’t need a mirror “to check if food or drink were dribbling down my chin.”

Either way, “you get used to it”! You battle on with your confusion, and your hopelessness!

Inappropriately, it is Ara’s voice that we hear first, small, delicate, of violently strong will, and mute – even her “laugh is soundless”. In a merry-go-round of futility and desperation, Ara is easily the most sympathy-inducing of the characters. Her mistakes are easier to understand, her fascination with K-pop tickles upon a childlike quality, and her everyday plight – as she struggles to express herself on a notepad – sets off explosions within the reader’s protective instincts

Her face then changes, and brutality verging on cruelty becomes the problem-solver that her voice cannot be, cold, sudden, and familiar. She doesn’t need our help after all. None of the characters do: the soft artist in Miho turns suddenly to revenge, the heavily pregnant Wonna chews-up her husband like the Korean mothers-in-law that she hates so much, and Kyuri shifts from social climber to love struck schoolgirl, and then on to careful diplomat. (The minor characters all get this same treatment, in their own way.)

Through the crisp and careful prose, the well-constructed empty spaces, and delicate pacing, there is always going to be the tendency to over simplify If I Had Your Face. But if it must be pinched-small, then it’s a war novel – full of carnage, absurdity, and constant struggle. Each day fighting and failing, each day dirtied and beaten, no-one leaving the trenches un-scarred or sane.

It is also a refreshingly honest look at victimhood... as a celestial pre-requisite for life. The weak are stronger than we give them credit for, and the social elites are fragile in what should be obvious ways, suffering through their days like the rest of us. There are no lazy pats on the back here or empty categories, just pain, hurt, and the clear truth that to call oneself a ‘victim’ is an unbearable act of indulgence and egoism – “Korea is the size of a fishbowl and someone is always looking down on someone else”.

We are all, to some degree, in abusive relationships with our own appearance and the world beyond – but with every punch, bruise, insult, degradation, and injustice, there is also, mostly, happiness! A battle-torn camaraderie, a joy in the blood and the fight. 

This is what I missed about those women, consumed by the mirror in our office. The endless maintenance and dollification is still a losing battle, as we all breakdown slowly toward “imminent expiration date[s].” But there is still laughter and strength; smiles and an uncommon lightness that is hard not to admire.

Just like Frances Cha’s female characters, I also live in a terrible apartment complex in a wonderful neighbourhood. On the same morning that I finished reading If I Had Your Face, I walked into the elevator to leave for work and was chased down by a young lady, racing to catch the closing doors. She jumped into the small space, excited, loud, and in deep conversation with herself.

She then saw her reflection in the glass panel on the back wall, leaned closer to examine her face, and let out a deep breathless moan. The ride down to the ground floor became a panicked lesson in the retouching of make-up, to a rising soundtrack of guttural, disappointed sighs.

When the doors finally opened – announced by a loud bell – she instantly peeled away her sadness, perked upright, smiled at me with an exaggerated wave goodbye, and leaped out of the elevator with the same bounce and glee that she entered with. No hesitation or backward steps – and formidably alive – the world didn’t know what was about to hit it!

I turned, catching a quick peep in the glass, and noticed that I had been unconsciously twisting my fringe through my fingers – something that I am sure I do a lot, without ever realising it. I walk out of the terrible apartment and into the wonderful neighbourhood, a little slower, a little heavier, a little more cautious and weak.