Beauty and feminism in plastic surgery obsessed South Korea under the spotlight in If I Had Your Face
- Set in contemporary Seoul, If I Had Your Face focuses on four young women making their way in a world defined by impossible standards of beauty
- Author Frances Cha’s characters confront sexism and stereotyping in their own ways, putting a new face and look on an age-old literary theme
By Andrea Plate
If I Had Your Face, Frances Cha’s recent debut novel, tells the story of four young women struggling to succeed in cosmetically competitive Seoul, the plastic surgery capital of the world, where one in three people under 30 will most likely have had “work done”.
Cha’s heroines are defined not by their intelligence, personality or achievements, but by a kind of precision beauty – surgically sculpted facial features that make or break their futures.
Cha is truly cosmopolitan. Born and educated in America, now based in New York, a former travel and culture editor for CNN in Seoul and Hong Kong, she knows one, indisputable truth: all women, everywhere on earth, know the agony of seeing another woman and thinking, “If I had your face…”
Cha’s story unfolds in brief, easy-to-read chapters alternately told in the first-person voices of her principal characters. Kiyuri is an “electrically beautiful” 20-something fighter who swims from the low-life, low-class joints of South Korea’s red light district upstream to the high-class, high-cost service industry of room salons along the Beauty Belt in Apgujeong-dong, southern Seoul, where men pay dearly to drink alcohol in the company of beautiful women.