Some thoughts after reading If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha (2019). Read in January 2021.
Sigrid Nunez, Lara Vapnyar, Sayaka Murata. These are the writers whose books rank high on my top 2020 books. Although each dwells with entirely different topics from one another; Nunez with grief and isolation, Vapnyar with loss and love affairs, Murata with alienation; I found they could fit under one sad umbrella: loneliness. Isn’t it lonely to not be able to reach out to another human being when you’re deeply grieving, not because you deliberately choose so, but because you were programmed to not be able to? When you can only flip page by page of you mother’s unfinished manuscript of a mathematics textbook to make sense of her loss, isn’t it lonely? And when you’re incapable to understand why people constantly tell you to not–never–be okay with who you are, isn’t it torturous? These women, the writers and their characters, compelled me to explore the realm of the loudest void we so determinedly, but would not publicly admit, wish to avoid.
I once tried to look for the answer to this question: why is it so bad to be lonely? Biologically speaking, humans are social. It is predetermined in our genes to need connection; evolutionarily, we wouldn’t survive without this program. But then from another view, the idea of ‘connectedness’ differs from one culture to another, a group of society and its neighbors, each family within a neighborhood, each generation of a family. But comes the perspective of psychoanalysis: we could be independent of that conception. That ‘hell is other people’ saying is amazing, it tells us that it is us who choose how others can hurt us; because ‘pain and pleasure exists only within our consciousness’, Csikzentmihalyi says, when we learn to control it (consciousness), we increase our chance to choose better. Good motivation to start cultivating your emotional intelligence.
I’d leave the task of figuring out the true answer to that question to scientists and philosophers.
With interest in exploring the topic of loneliness in mind, I picked up Frances Cha’s debut novel If I Had Your Face. In summary, this novel is a slice-of-life narrated by four South Korean women: Ara, Kyuri, Miho, Wonna. Ara lost her voice permanently because of an assault when she was young and now she’s working as a hairstylist who worships her K-Pop idol to help her get through it all. Kyuri is a ‘room salon girl’, a euphemism for prostitute or an escort I guess, similar to Japan’s Kabukicho’s host/hostess, and she’s living next to Miho, an artist who went to an art school in America with a scholarship and since then found herself within the circle of conglomerates. Lastly, Wonna is a woman with a husband she regrets marrying, though she initially thought he was the best choice out there because his mother had died.
Each of them faces battles unique and similar at the same time. Cha paints how the glimmering lights of a city as big as Seoul has creeping darkness that haunts especially the youths. Job competitions are heavily saturated with hierarchical disability. You better have a good face if you don’t come from a noteworthy family. This explains why a third of South Korea’s under thirties have gone through at least one surgery (eyelids or jaw cut). Heck, I think I would go under the knife too if I were competing within Seoul’s pool.
This book sheds light to the personalities and places that didn’t make the cut into Crush Landing on You or Goblin or Scarlet Heart. And for this reason alone I would look away from some of Cha’s flaws (short-lived promises. Some topics are put out there in the open and left just like that, while in my head I was screaming for MORE!).
The thing about our modern, fast-paced, globalized, extremely plugged world is everything feels temporary. Do you feel so, too? Because everything is available in an instant, but not automatically achievable, it leaves us feeling, at some moments, and this is the best way I can describe it for now, hollow in some places within our body. Or we feel nothing at all, for everyday is just another day of sorting through our infinite social responsibility checklists and the next day comes a fresh new batch. So, who cares where the electricity to charge our phones comes from, right? Or how breast implant silicone waste is processed. We need to make money.
Against that depressing backdrop is why the connection between these four women is, deeply from the bottom of my heart, worth reading. Nothing feels better than knowing that you are not in the battle alone. It could be, but doesn’t always have to, our biological family, our lovers, or the children we support through community work. This kind of connection, one that isn’t nurtured by painted words or flashy instagram updates, is rare. And I think we should look around us and see whether we have it with us all along, or if we’ve left it somewhere under a street lamp.
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Next book I’m going to write about is:
- Flow by Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi
- Anxious People by Fredrik Backman
