#GeniusLabReads

[halfseoulco]

The women behind IF I HAD YOUR FACE: A review

Published Monday, January 23rd, 2023 — I’d been wanting to read If I Had Your Face for quite some time. After making appearances on some social media accounts I follow, I decided it was necessary to add it to my reading list, especially since I’ve been devoting my time to reading books by Asian and Asian American authors. A short yet powerful read, it opens up necessary discussions and delves deep into the inner workings of Korean society—it says things people might not want to hear—but it’s always been my belief that sometimes the hardest pills to swallow are the ones that necessitate swallowing.

Introduction

South Korea is wildly known for not only the accessibility of plastic surgery but also the necessity of plastic surgery to improve one’s station in life. Dubbed the “plastic surgery capital of the world”, some estimates suggest that a third of South Korean women between the ages of 19 and 29 have had plastic surgery—and some estimates suggest that the number is actually 50% or higher. The pressure to meet beauty standards is heavy, with statistics pointing to a greater ease of life for more conventionally attractive people—as is generally the case in many places.

Korean American author Frances Cha’s debut novel, If I Had Your Face, dives into this and other important topics in a split narrative format, following the lives of four young women in South Korea—Kyuri, Miho, Ara, and Wonna.

Four Women, One Story

Kyuri works at an exclusive salon room where she entertains wealthy businessmen who pay “to have girls like [her] sit next to them and pour them liquor” (page 3). She is highly sought after—and attributes her demand to the surgical procedures she had done to make her beautiful. Miho is a talented artist who studied abroad in New York before returning to Korea and entering into a relationship with her deceased friend’s boyfriend—who also happens to be a conglomerate heir. Ara is a full-time hairstylist who harbors an infatuation with Taein from the popular boy group Crown and has long since stopped speaking after an unfortunate accident as an adolescent. Finally, Wonna is a newlywed and newly pregnant woman living downstairs from the first three women; and who is also struggling with her worries concerning the future of her job and how she and her husband are going to afford having a child.

Although they each have their own story, the lives of all four women are intertwined: Kyuri and Miho are roommates while Ara and her roommate, Sujin—who is insistent on getting her own surgical procedures done after spending so much time looking at Kyuri’s face—live down the hall and Wonna just one floor down. If I had to pick a sentence to oversimplify the entire story, it would be: Things were okay... until they weren’t. The aforementioned topics are unveiled in the various conflicts presented in the story: the pressures to look beautiful, the way women are perceived in the workplace—the idea that companies shouldn’t invest in women by hiring them because they eventually get married and get pregnant and then have to go on maternity leave; and the fact that women in South Korea are paid 38% less than men, according to a March 2022 article in The Korea Herald (compared to the U.S., where women make about 17% less)—the knowledge that men can get away with certain things where women cannot (e.g. cheating, throwing public tantrums, using their money and influence to destroy a woman’s life, etc.), the people you idolize aren’t as perfect as their PR team would have you believe, and the realization that what society thinks is the best course of action for one’s life isn’t always the right one. There’s a sense of heavy disillusionment that starts to spread—and the only things holding them all together are the relationships the four women have with each other.

Art Imitates Life

With the level of romanticizing of South Korea that is currently taking place, If I Had Your Face is a good, long look at the reality of the country’s socioeconomic situation. While the culture certainly makes life in South Korea very different from that in the United States or other Western countries, the truth that many people enchanted with the idea of living in South Korea fail to realize is that due to its [much too] close relationship with the U.S., South Korea is also a capitalist nation with conservative ideals—especially in regards to gender. Rent is expensive, having children is expensive... and even Korean men—who are often placed on a very high pedestal by people who enjoy KPOP and Korean dramas for being perfect gentlemen—engage in behaviors such as paying for the company of salon girls and cheating.

So then what is the point of these four individual narratives that are happening concurrently?

The story ends with a chapter from Kyuri’s perspective: “Ara moves so that she is sitting behind her and takes the lady’s hair in her hands. She starts combing her fingers through it expertly. The lady lets out a sigh—a tremulous release of a long day—which makes me feel lighter too. [...] Miho walks up slowly, gives a familiar nod to Wonna, and then sits on the other side of me. She exhales, and I put an arm around her shoulders. [...] The raindrops keep falling more thickly now. So we all stand up to make our way upstairs together, as the sky starts crackling, taking aim at each of us and the drunk men stumbling by” (pages 266-268).

After a whirlwind of disastrous events has taken place, the four women take comfort in each other’s presence—the three younger girls comforting their newly acquainted pregnant friend—with plans to order fried chicken and eat it together in Wonna’s apartment. More than a novel on the negative effects of such a high-pressure society, If I Had Your Face is a story of women having compassion for other women—because “friendship” is too simple of a concept for this particular situation; rather, the coming together of women with little in common who provide support for each other because they all know what it’s like to be a woman living in South Korea.

Conclusion

You can choose to take away from this story that South Korea is a society so heavily dependent on plastic surgery and appearances to get ahead—but you would be doing yourself and the story a disservice if that’s all you take away from it. It is most certainly a criticism but at the heart of it is the importance of the relationships between women—because whether she believes it or not, every woman needs a group of supportive women behind her, even if it’s only to eat fried chicken together on a rainy day.

[halfseoulco]

Mobile Links

About — A short introduction to me and the site, as well as some additional links so that you can read more about me

Short List — A list I compiled of my best works to date, good for anyone trying to get a feel for my writing style

#GeniusLabBooks — A list of books I’ve read, am currently reading, and plan to read

#GeniusLabConcerts — A list of concerts I’ve attended over the years since becoming a KPOP fan

#GeniusLabListens — Comprehensive reviews of Korean songs/albums/music videos

#GeniusLabReads — In-depth reviews of Asian/Asian-American literature that I read on my own time

#GeniusLabStorytime — My SEVENTEEN x Hogwarts series (fanfiction)

#GeniusLabThinks — Think pieces about Korean culture, fandom culture, etc. expanded upon from the original pieces posted on Instagram, as well as wrap pieces

Ao3 (for those who prefer that format for reading my SEVENTEEN x Hogwarts series)

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Exploring MINOR FEELINGS: A review

Published Sunday, August 7th, 2022 — About halfway through Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, I felt a brief embarrassment at how I was almost desperately picking out passages that mirrored my own thoughts and experiences, quickly followed by a bout of indignation that I should feel embarrassed at all for being excited to find something I could relate to in someone else’s writing. After almost an entire lifetime of reading “classics” and bestsellers written by predominantly white authors, could I not enjoy this triumph in which both the author and reader could share? Is Cathy Park Hong going to appear in my bedroom and accuse me of grasping at straws for similarities between her life and mine?

Introduction

While confined to my home for about three months at the beginning of 2020, I swept through a long list of books but found myself unable to keep up the habit into 2021 and 2022—even though I was still buying books whenever I saw a title and plot synopsis that sparked my interest. Although I have always been close to my culture and have kept my Koreanness hugged tightly to my identity and sense of self, I decided that I would put my money where my mouth is and actively support Asian and Asian American authors by buying their books. At the beginning of July, discovering a new supply of spare time after starting to work from home, I gathered all of the books by Asian and Asian American authors that I had received as gifts or purchased over the past year and made a commitment to myself to read all of them. Gifted to me for my 27th birthday by a friend, Minor Feelings was among the nine books I had yet to read—and one of the shortest—so I started reading.

How Minor Feelings Sparks Some Not-So-Minor Feelings

The book follows what Hong calls an “episodic form, with its exit routes that permit me to stray” (page 104), which means that there is no glue holding a timeline together, only individual vignettes whose order in the fabric of Hong’s experiences may elude everyone but Hong herself. I often found myself nodding in agreement unconsciously at certain things Hong said or anecdotes she shared. She has a sense of humor that I quite like, a brash-bordering-on-inappropriate kind of funny that I myself don’t indulge in but like to hear in other people. Not too far into the book, on page 31, however, Hong includes a passage on how during the Korean War, her grandfather had been dragged out of his home by U.S. soldiers for being a suspected Communist collaborator—and I cried. I cried and I cried and I cried. My mother had been born the year following the Korean War’s end, which means that my grandmother and my mother’s older siblings had all lived during that time. It was hard not to imagine my grandmother in Hong’s grandfather’s place and it was some time before I was able to pick the book back up and keep reading.

“Minor feelings” are, as Hong says, “the emotions we are accused of having when we decide to be difficult—in other words, when we decide to be honest. When minor feelings are finally externalized, they are interpreted as hostile, ungrateful, jealous, depressing, and belligerent, affects ascribed to racialized behavior that whites consider out of line” (page 57). Racial oppression is, to put quite bluntly, not a competition; and all people of color acutely feel the experience of being told that they are too much when they speak up against a system that seeks to only benefit those who created it. But the truth—or at least my truth—is that Asians are the only ones deemed still safe to mock, still safe to harass, still safe to attack in public and get away with it. Being Asian in America means being cast to the side because our supposed white adjacency affords us a protection that other minority groups don’t have, when the truth is that we are working far too hard to please white people who don’t care about us at all. The same way that many Asians align themselves with whites for the benefit of their nonexistent protection, the result of that misplaced trust is that now we are being targeted and blamed by other groups eager to no longer be the most hated people, not realizing that their behavior is not earning them protection from whites either. And I think that there are people—quite a lot of people, in fact—that may find it distasteful for me or anyone else to say so out loud. “Why do you hate white people, Liz?” is a question I get often—and all I have to say is “Why aren’t you more upset about the fact that the system created by white people makes it difficult for the rest of us to succeed?” White people, particularly white men, can pass off mediocrity as the standard and thrive—but people of color, we will always be fighting tooth and nail for the chance to have our work recognized. (For the record, I feel it’s important to state that I don’t “hate white people”, but I find that the question is also a reaction to me sharing my minor feelings because the other person is uncomfortable with how comfortable I am in refusing to stay put in the boxes that the system created by white people would love to keep me in.)

Minor Feelings and the Current Sociopolitical Climate

With the shared trauma of being the scapegoat for the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Americans and other Asians living outside of their home countries are experiencing a reclamation of their cultures, their identities, their Asianness. We’re showing a renewed interest in our parents’ language, food, and customs—a desire to travel to our home countries, immerse ourselves in the culture that we may have taken for granted in our youth. But Hong brings up an excellent point: As artists, as filmmakers, as writers, does all of our work have to be framed as “the Asian experience”? Can my stories simply be stories and not “stories about the Asian experience”? Can I write without having to worry about whether white people understand where I’m coming from or whether I’ve hurt their feelings with my criticisms? Can my value as a writer come from the quality of my writing and not how well I can translate “the Asian experience” into something that is palatable and inoffensive enough to be popular?

The last two chapters of Minor Feelings were particularly difficult to read, opening up space for discourse on topics that people would rather avoid. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, a thirty-one-year-old artist and poet, was raped and murdered in New York on November 5, 1982. And while her work was celebrated and continues to be celebrated, her homicide received minimal media coverage and neglects to also be labeled as rape. I’ve been told that Asians don’t suffer as much as other minority groups in the United States, that we have good lives here—but that’s just what the majority wants people to believe. Sexual assault among Asian women is severely underreported and therefore statistics, let alone accurate statistics, are hard to come by. Internalized shame as a result of trauma is so culturally rooted that we refuse to speak up and then in turn, the rest of the world turns a blind eye. “She was just another Asian woman,” Cha’s close friend said when asked why there was no media coverage of her rape and homicide. “If she were a young white artist from the Upper West Side, it would have been all over the news” (page 176). To this day, no one wants to talk about Cha’s death for fear of overshadowing the impact of her work, but in doing so, we are making it easier to pretend that these things don’t happen—that they don’t exist—and therein does the rest of society make it acceptable for us to be targeted without repercussions. “From invisible girlhood, the Asian American woman will blossom into a fetish object. When she is at last visible—at last desired—she realizes much to her chagrin that this desire for her is treated like a perversion. [...] [But] the Asian woman is reminded every day that her attractiveness is a perversion, in instances ranging from skin-crawling Tinder messages (”I’d like to try my first Asian woman”) to microaggressions from white friends” (page 174-175).

Hard Pills to Swallow

Hong’s work can be taken for what it is: a series of written episodes about exploring what it means to be Asian American and how it can differ from person to person. It talks about the negative truths that we must acknowledge and the silly things we later learn caused us more stress than they were worth, the sadness we carry as a result of our feeling like outsiders and the joy we savor when we make progress in this messed up universe. We’re all still carving out our identities and our places in this world, in this society. “Even if we’ve been here for four generations, our status here remains conditional; belonging is always promised and just out of reach so that we behave, whether it’s the insatiable acquisition of material belongings or belonging as a peace of mind where we are absorbed into mainstream society” (page 202). In the end, neither she nor any other Asian American writing about similar topics is trying to convince you of anything. You either get it or you don’t. Contrary to what racial fetishization and general ignorance might have you believe, being Asian in America is not so much an enigma as it is one of those things that gets swept under the rug because our minor feelings have been internalized for so long. I didn’t need to read Minor Feelings to know this, but reading it made me more tangibly aware of it. Being Asian in America means being treated poorly and then being told to be grateful because we could be getting treated much worse somewhere else—and by the way, if you don’t like it, then why don’t you go back to where you came from?

“Then be grateful that you live here. [...] I bring up Korea to collapse the proximity between here and there. Or as activists used to say, ‘I am here because you were there.’ I am here because you vivisected my ancestral country in two. In 1945, two fumbling mid-ranking American officers who knew nothing about the country used a National Geographic map as reference to arbitrarily cut a border to make North and South Korea, a division that eventually separated millions of families, including my own grandmother from her family. Later, under the flag of liberation, the United States dropped more bombs and napalm in our tiny country than during the entire Pacific campaign against Japan during World War II. [...] My ancestral country is just one small example of the millions of lives and resources you have sucked from the Philippines, Cambodia, Honduras, Mexico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, El Salvador, and many, many other nations through your forever wars and transnational capitalism that have mostly enriched shareholders in the States. Don’t talk to me about gratitude” (page 193, 195).

Conclusion

Hong writes about a former friend, “This was the most Korean trait about her, her intense desire to die and survive at the same time” (page 146). In that line, I found solidarity. In Hong’s writing, I found solidarity—and if there is anything that I think should be taken away from Minor Feelings, it’s that we are going through a shared experience, a collective trauma but also a collective movement towards loving ourselves for who we are and recognizing that we deserve to exist wherever and however we choose to exist. I shed more tears during the reading of this book than I expected to, but shared trauma brings people together in many ways. I think that Minor Feelings is meant to both comfort and discomfort, to hit you in all the right places and all the wrong places. For every Asian person out in the world who felt that they couldn’t be someone, that they couldn’t do something—for every Cathy Park Hong who felt like they shouldn’t write a book just like this, though our experiences may differ, there are some things we all share; and we must be our greatest allies.

[halfseoulco]

Crying while reading CRYING IN H MART: A review

Originally published on Wednesday, April 28th, 2021 for Instagram

Updated Sunday, December 19th, 2021 — I first heard of Michelle Zauner before I knew her as Michelle Zauner, or Japanese Breakfast, under which she now performs. During my college years spent listening to midwest emo, indie rock, and various other genres for which the lines are blurred into but wisps of a suggestion, I came across a band called Little Big League, of which Zauner was a member before her mother was diagnosed with cancer.

Introduction

Fast forward to 2018 and I stumbled upon Zauner’s essay, “Crying in H Mart,” in The New Yorker, which would soon become the first chapter of the now best-selling memoir by the same name. I had pre-ordered Crying in H Mart as soon as I was made aware that I could; and when the book was released, I selected it as my book club pick for the month to read with my coworkers—even though, selfishly, the contents only held that deeper something for me.

The Many Sides of Michelle Zauner

At first, it was difficult to decide how to approach the memoir. Would I read from the perspective of another writer? Another half-Korean? Another musician? There were many aspects to consider, but in the end, it really was a culmination of my collective perspectives—as the book is also colored by her collective perspectives. Not long after diving into the memoir, I realized that I understand Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast differently than I understand Michelle Zauner the writer—Michelle Zauner the writer was closer to being a person I might have known, might have even been friends with, would have been grateful to know during my most formative years when I was thinking that no one else on the planet was going through the same identity crises I was.

Crying in H Mart? No, Just Crying. Period.

It’s hard to find a piece of writing of any kind that feels as if it was only written for you, so that you can greedily cling to it like a manifesto, whispering secrets only you and the writer know, trading heart-to-hearts back and forth across the gliding of pages and ink-pressed words. Crying in H Mart is a book that I will probably only ever read once, because I can only bear to read it once—because maybe I feel like I know Zauner a little too well and she feels like heartbreak.

Zauner is particularly adept at penning lines that feel like they could have been about my own life: "Growing up in America with a Caucasian father and a Korean mother, I relied on my mom for access to our Korean heritage.... While she never actually taught me how to cook... she did raise me with a distinctly Korean appetite." These words, especially, brought me back to when I would try to sit in the kitchen and watch my mother cook, only for her to kick me out because she couldn’t stand to have me watching her. (My mother thinks she’s a terrible cook. I wholeheartedly disagree.) Korean food is by far my favorite cuisine; nothing can best it, and the food made by my mother’s hand is the food that tastes as close to home as a taste can reach. The way Zauner uses food to feel closer to her mother curls close to my being—food is one of the easiest ways in which people can connect, no matter how much or how little they know each other before they share a meal.

In between crying breaks, lunches of freshly cooked rice and spicy Korean barbecue pork with kimchi, and a running stream of Japanese Breakfast albums (starting from the most recent release to the oldest one), I found bits and pieces of myself scattered throughout her poignant memoir. There were times I had to stop reading, the tears blurring my vision so wholly that I could no longer make out the words on the pages. At times, I wondered if she was describing her relationship with her mother—or mine.

Conclusion

This year, my birthday fell on Mother's Day, as it has done twice already in my lifetime. I spent the weekend with my mother and told her that I had read a book about a woman who is half-Korean and whose mother died recently. I didn’t have to say much more for my mother to understand why I was bringing it up. It’s hard not to cry thinking about it now, more than seven months after first reading Zauner’s memoir. As a writer, it makes me question whether a memoir needs to wait until old age to be written, or whether the impact of what is left behind is in its contents—in the memories themselves.

[halfseoulco]

You all know a woman like KIM JIYOUNG, BORN 1982: A review

Originally published on Thursday, September 9th, 2021 for Instagram

Updated Monday, January 10th, 2022 — New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year for its deep dive into what it means to be a woman in South Korea even to this day, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 exposes the reality of the working woman’s situation.

Introduction

After being forced to leave her job to raise her children and support her husband, Jiyoung begins to impersonate the voices of the dead. Not even the (unsurprisingly male) psychiatrist can determine the cause of this strange phenomenon, but a thorough retelling of Jiyoung’s life from birth up to the point when she had her first child reveals preferential treatment towards her younger brother during adolescence, being turned down for promotions at work in favor of male colleagues, and being forced to become a stay-at-home mother for her children—even though she was a well-educated woman with a college degree.

The short novel favors the kind of back-and-forth stream of consciousness that doesn’t make sense but does, creating ties from past moments and connecting them to moments in the present. There isn’t a woman alive today, even in seemingly thriving first-world countries who would not be able to find something in these pages that they relate to. First published in mid-October of 2016, the book describes a situation not far off; although the characters and scenarios are fictional, the truths they draw from paint society in South Korea in a deeply unflattering light—a society in which young girls are suspended for noticing that a man is exposing himself to them, sons are not expected to ever lift a finger although daughters learn quickly to fend for themselves, and expecting mothers aborted daughters well into the early 1990s.

Why This Story Should Bother You

In Euny Hong’s review of the novel for the New York Times, she writes, “I hated reading ‘Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982,’ the debut novel by Cho Nam-Joo, which is the opposite of saying that I hated the book itself... [It forced] me to confront traumatic experiences that I’d tried to chalk up as nothing out of the ordinary. But then, my experiences are ordinary, as ordinary as the everyday horrors suffered by the book’s protagonist, Jiyoung. This novel is about the banality of the evil that is systemic misogyny.”

Author Cho Namjoo describes a harsh truth that some may not want to face—that even a country that has come a long way in order to modernize and compete with other world powers still yields to the time-held tradition of the patriarchy, as well as gender inequality, misogyny, and sexism. Much of what is revealed in this short yet substantial novel is reminiscent of the social climate in many Western countries. More than just an interesting read, it is—per my own personal opinion—essential for anyone who may be viewing South Korea through the rose-colored lenses of someone who has only ever seen the country through dramatizations and music videos.

But on the other hand, it also brings another point into sharper view—that other comparable first-world countries such as the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and others have also yet to achieve the kind of gender equality that leftist parties are championing. In the present-day era of KPOP and Korean dramas, it’s easy to think of South Korea as some kind of magical place where everything is just simply better than anywhere else. The education is better, the health care system is better, the technology is better, the food—arguably—is better; but a 2015 analysis of the labor market in South Korea by Kim Yeongok found that women who had children returned to the work force in jobs that paled in comparison to the ones they held prior to giving birth, especially when it came to pay. That same year, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, women in the United States were making only 79.6% of what men made working full-time year-round in. And does America not call herself the greatest country in the world?

Conclusion

Yet another truth we must face is that no one country has solved the issue of gender inequality—not South Korea, certainly—and that truth should make you angry, not only because you may be a woman or a feminine-presenting individual; or because you’re a man with a wife, a sister, a mother, or a daughter; or because you have an interest in Korean culture that stems from your enjoyment of Korean media and entertainment. That truth should make you angry for every woman in every country of the world who has ever been groped at a bar or on the subway, sent to the school office for a too-short skirt, told to smile more, turned down for a promotion in favor of lower-performing male colleague, neglected by parents because they were too busy fawning over a brother, or subjected to the other countless injustices that haunt women for the rest of their lives, warping into a lingering trauma that hangs over their heads like a dark and heavy storm cloud. And if you’re not already angry, then it is my strongest suggestion that you pick up Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 and arrive at the realization that you know more Kim Jiyoungs in your own life than you may even suspect.