If I Had Your Face(26)

I wish I could share this sort of wisdom with Sujin but for now I’m avoiding her. She is wild-eyed these days because her nail salon has been flailing and her boss told her that she will probably have to let her go soon. It’s only been two months since her surgery and parts of her face are still inflated and she talks funny because she can’t open her mouth very wide, but she’s already hounding me about next steps to getting a job at a room salon. I have told her to just look for another nail salon job for now where she can wear a dust mask and no one looks at her anyway.

The problem is that Sujin feels obligated to take care of Ara. Yes, Ara is handicapped but she also has a job, even if the hair salon probably doesn’t pay much. But when I tell Sujin she should learn to look out for herself before worrying about anyone else, she tears up and says Ara cannot adjust to the real world and must be protected and Sujin has to make as much money as she can for both of them.

What she doesn’t understand is that I am trying to save her. Once money exchanges hands and you step into our world, things turn bad really quickly.

One minute, you are accepting loans from madams and pimps and bloodsucking moneylenders for a quick surgery to fix your face, and the next minute the debt has ballooned to a staggering, unpayable sum. You work, work, work until your body is ruined and there is no way out but to keep working. Even though you will seemingly make a lot of money, you will never be able to save because of the interest you have to repay. You will never be able to get out of it entirely. You will move to a different shop in a different city with a different madam and a different set of rules and times and expectations, but it will still be the same, and there is no escape.



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I WOULDN’T HAVE made it out of Miari myself if it wasn’t for one of my oldest customers—a balding, stooped grandfather, who fell in love with me and actually gave me the money that I needed to pay off my debts—fifty million won cash. The owners of the place I worked, they would have tried to scam me into working there even after taking the money, but the grandfather was a retired lawyer and he made them sign all these documents confirming that I was debt free. The mixture of the two—cash and fear of the law—was the reason they let me go.

The grandfather still comes around every few months, but I always make sure my roommate, Miho, isn’t at home when he does. All he asks is that I do a little show removing my clothes and then stay naked during our time together so that he can touch me and look at me. He doesn’t even want to have sex or a blow job. He’s too old to take that kind of excitement, he says, adding that he doesn’t want to die on top of me. I don’t know if that’s out of consideration for me, or to save face for his family. It’s nice to have him look at me so fondly and call me “art,” without me having to do anything.

He doesn’t know, though, that I’ve started racking up debts again because of my recent touch-up surgeries. They’re just small ones here and there but they add up. I’ve decided not to tell him. He thinks I am going to school to become a teacher. He is so proud of how he has changed my life, and often, his eyes water when he looks at me. He loves the story that he saved me.



* * *



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WHEN NAMI FIRST came into that place I worked in Miari, I tried to tell her not to take money from the pimps. That money was never the casual gift they always made it seem. But she had already started and like the rest of us, she couldn’t stop.

She was just a kid, one of the youngest at that joint, and she looked even younger because of her dumpling cheeks and buck teeth. I think she was thirteen or fourteen when she first showed up. She wasn’t attractive at all back then, just a chubby kid with no breasts whatsoever. But men would choose her again and again because of her age, if nothing else.

I don’t know why I took a liking to her. I usually don’t like the girls I work with, but Nami was so homely and so young that it was hard not to feel for her. It bothered me, the fact that she sat with no smile on her face and she would just stare at us, the girls and the men. And I could tell that the men who chose her were the types who wanted to punish her for looking like that.



* * *



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WE BOTH LOOK so different now, Nami and I. Sometimes she says she wishes she had a photo of us from those days. “Are you joking? Why would you want any evidence?” I say, appalled. I would kill someone and rot in jail before I’d let them see what I looked like pre-surgery.

Now that I’ve been working for a few years in Gangnam, where everything is so chic and subtle and the goal of every surgery is to look as natural as possible, I cringe to see some of her recent choices. Her breasts, for example, are cartoonish, jutting out like grapefruits on her otherwise boyish body. The entire effect makes people ogle openly or look away in embarrassment, especially when she has that hangdog expression on her face, her mouth slightly open as she stares at everyone around her.

“I want them to think I’m stupid,” she said to me once. “No expectations is nice. It gives you a lot of time to think.”

Well, you’ve certainly got everyone convinced, I wanted to tell her.

My roommate, Miho, joins us around 10 P.M. Our rooms were originally one bigger office-tel with one side the “office” and the other side the living quarters, connected with an adjoining door that was locked so that they could turn it into two small, separate apartments. Before Miho, a creepy thirty-something man used to live next door, and at night, I would hear his whimpers when he jerked off. I was relieved when he moved out and Miho moved in a few weeks later. I invited her over to drink a few times and she invited me over to see the paintings she was working on. I personally do not care for her style of art—the world is depressing enough already. There is no need to add more freakish misery. Meanwhile, Miho thinks all my regimens are a waste of time and money. But there was something to be said for staving off loneliness, and to have someone there to respond to. So after a few months of getting to know each other, we asked the building to unlock the connecting door between our apartments.