If I Had Your Face

You see, I have long understood what most women learn by fire after they are married—that the hate mothers-in-law harbor toward their daughters-in-law is built into the genes of all women

He loves the story that he saved me.

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.

“Rich people are fascinated by happiness,” she said. “It’s something they find maddening.”

IT’S NOT an original thought perhaps, but I think people watch so much TV because life would otherwise be unbearable. Unless you are born into a chaebol family or your parents were the fantastically lucky few who purchased land in Gangnam decades ago, you have to work and work and work for a salary that isn’t even enough to buy a house or pay for childcare, and you sit at a desk until your spine twists, and your boss is somehow incompetent and a workaholic at the same time and at the end of the day you have to drink to bear it all.

But I grew up not knowing the difference between a bearable life and an unbearable life, and by the time I discovered there was such a thing, it was too late.

He is a person who expects people to be kind because he is kind.

I would live your life so much better than you, if I had your face.

A poor man cannot help me when he cannot help himself.