If I Had Your Face: A Novel: A Novel by Frances Cha

Author:Frances Cha [Cha, Frances]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780593129470
Google: Xv-lDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0593129466
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2020-04-20T23:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

IT WAS SO SMALL that it felt like everyone in town knew us: the Loring Center kids. Orphaned, disabled, or delinquent. Our abandonment scared people, as if it might be contagious. Upon meeting any of us for the first time, people were amazed if we had our faculties intact, as so many did not, and shunned us regardless. In our city, the word “Loring” was synonymous with “retarded.” “Isn’t he Loring?” or “You look so Loring!” By the time we were in high school, the word was so embedded in the local vernacular that many kids didn’t even know it wasn’t a real English word.

“Can’t wait to get out of this shitty backwater hellhole,” my friend Sujin used to shriek whenever she’d come home to the Center after getting in trouble with her teachers. I was lucky: the teachers in my arts high school liked me, but Sujin had been branded a mischief-maker at her school, and we no longer had Miss Loring behind us. She was years dead by then and the directors at the Center changed almost yearly.

I never expected Sujin to actually make it on her own, but she left the first chance she could. She carved out a little life in Seoul, sliver by sliver, reporting back to the rest of us that the word “Loring” meant nothing to people there. Two of the other girls also left for Seoul not long after she did, but I was the first to come to America. Without being adopted, I mean.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.