AFAReads discussion

Dear reader,

I stayed up much too late the night I began If I Had Your Face (Ballantine, 2020), our September AFAReads select. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt so compelled by a novel that I’m willing to ignore the clock, but Frances Cha’s tale about five young women navigating life in South Korea commanded my attention from sentence one: “Sujin is hell-bent on becoming a room salon girl.”

I was immediately curious. Who’s Sujin? What’s a room salon girl, and why would someone want to be one so desperately? Answers are slowly revealed via chapters that toggle between the five women: Miho, Sujin, Kyuri, Ara, and Wonna. In that way, the novel is like reading through a tantalizing prism: You glimpse one perspective, then soon after, another character offers a different, and sometimes competing, point of view.

Our understanding of each character deepens as the book unspools, as does their self-awareness. At one point, three of the women are traveling together, “each of us grasping at our own shifting versions of the past,” Ara says.

Most of those pasts are tinged with sadness. I couldn’t shake a feeling of concern as I read; it feels as if each of the women is tentatively balanced on a precipice, with no guarantee that she is going to make it through the world—and the book—safely and with her spirit intact.

As we journey with them, Cha—who grew up in the United States and Hong Kong and moved to Korea at age 12—tackles universal subjects: the power of female friendship, the way that beauty can dominate women’s lives, and the challenge in planning for tomorrow when you’re consumed by surviving your past and present.

These subjects are mixed with insights into South Korean life, such as the hierarchical nature of society and the generational clash between elders and the K-Pop generation. “One of my customers said to me once that the problem with a lot of my generation in this country is that we do not live for tomorrow,” Ara, a hair stylist, says at one point. Issues of class and social mobility gird each chapter—“for all its millions of people, Korea is the size of a fishbowl and someone is always looking down on someone else,” Miho says—and, at times, feel inescapably relentless.

But none of the women you meet in If I Had Your Face is powerless in the face of this pressure; they are all survivors. To reveal the ending would be wholly unfair, of course, but it’s a bittersweet one—the kind that the best novels deliver. I grew attached to these characters. I want to see their lives continue to unfold—I want to witness them learning to live for tomorrow.

Yours in midnight reading,
Aislyn Greene
Senior editor