Nothing Less Than a Perfect Beauty
"Daaad~~"
A beautiful daughter came running toward me.
Was it because she was wearing a Japanese-style school uniform that prized fashion over function? For the first time, the thought that struck me wasn't how cute she looked — it was how beautiful she was.
That's right. My daughter was an adult now. The time had come when she ought to be beautiful rather than cute. It was as if a flower that had spent its days diligently cultivating itself inside the bud had bloomed right on cue.
My daughter didn't wear makeup. I had never asked her about it, but it made sense. She didn't need to. Skin like white jade. Monolids, yet with an eyeline of unbelievable depth. Dark eyebrows she had inherited from me. And a high, well-defined nose to finish it.
Makeup, as a rule, was something you did to brighten a dull complexion, or to emphasize eyes, a nose, or lips whose character was too faint to hold a face together. These days, even the double-eyelid surgery they dressed up as a "procedure" was mostly about deepening the line of the eye. Just that alone could bring a person's face to life.
Why did I know all this? Because a woman I had been friends with since university was a plastic surgeon. A best friend I had met in medical school, and one whose grades had always sat in the top ranks right alongside mine.
Unlike me, though, that friend had never had a dream of her own. She had even gone to medical school because her parents wanted her to — something that would make decent money, but nothing too shabby. That was how she had settled on plastic surgery. Her family was wealthy, so she had been able to open a clinic without taking on a single won of debt.
Unusually, she hadn't set up shop in one of those districts packed wall-to-wall with plastic surgeons. She had opened in a commuter town instead — a place drowning in apartment complexes. It was close to the orthopedic clinic I ran. She was a friend who could have opened a glittering practice in the heart of Seoul if she had felt like it. She hadn't.
"As long as I can make enough to get by, that's fine."
A bedroom community on the outskirts of Seoul, where most of the residents did little more than sleep and commute into the city. A plastic surgery clinic was never going to thrive in a place like that.
"Thanks to that, I get to grab a drink with your ass, so it's not all bad."
She had no patients, and she didn't care. But that woman was no empty shell. Beneath the easygoing exterior sat a fierce, stubborn pride. Her skills were the real thing, and she never stopped working at them.
"Hey, now what? I think I gotta cancel today. Patients have been pouring in lately."
Maybe that was why. Word of mouth spread about her clinic, and before long you had to wait over three months just to land an appointment — an impressive feat by any measure. I told her that while she was at it, she ought to expand the place and bring on a Pay Doctor, but she was far too proud a friend to take that kind of advice.
"Hey. What's my clinic called? Oh In-joo Plastic Surgery, right? I stamped my name on the damn door. If I'm not the one holding the scalpel, what's the point?"
She was a friend I liked precisely because she refused to live her life calculating every angle. Everything I knew about women's makeup, I had learned from her over drinks.
"How's life treating you? Park Ah-young... that bitch. You doing alright since you split? Raising a kid alone isn't easy, is it?"
I had divorced my wife. And I was raising my child alone. In-joo was a staunch advocate of never marrying — a career woman who made the same argument every time we met.
"I can barely take care of my own damn self. How the hell am I supposed to raise a kid too?"
How miserable must my life have looked through her eyes? Not that I thought of it that way, of course.
"I know what you're thinking. But I'm happy. I'll pass on that kind of evaluation."
"That's why I told you we should stay unmarried together."
"I don't even want that kind of monk's life."
"Tainted by the mortal world — please save this lost soul."
Grinning at each other, we clinked our glasses and knocked back another round.
"Because of the kid that Ah-young bitch walked out on, even a thoracic surgeon from the great Hanguk University Hospital ends up quitting and running an orthopedic clinic in this backwater."
It left me with a strange feeling. How to put it? On the surface she was looking out for me, but underneath, it didn't feel that way. It was more like she was taking comfort from the sight of me. Yeah. Maybe this friend had secretly hoped I wouldn't be happy. And now, with a failed version of me sitting beneath her, she was savoring the taste of superiority.
I was not a failure. There had been a time I had thought I was — but not anymore. And that was because of my daughter. Because Min-ah was here.
It would have been nice to have a wife. But having someone who was a failure as a wife was a problem in its own right. The child was growing up the right way — upright and straight. She listened to me. She always wanted to be at my side. She was still in high school, but whenever I came home from work she would throw herself into my arms the way a puppy greets its owner. I was a member of the finest family there was.
On any other night I would have let it slide with a noncommittal yeah. But why was it? Strangely, I wanted to brag. That I was happy. That my daughter was growing up so well.
I slipped a hand toward my wallet.
"What's that?"
"Wanna see my daughter?"
I pulled an ID photo from my wallet. Min-ah was in it — a picture she had given me not long ago.
"What's this?" I had asked her then.
"Um...! It's the photo they took when I got my national ID...! There was one left over!!"
Tap. The photo was pressed into my hand.
"Just pull it out whenever you miss me!"
...That was how it had ended up in my wallet.
"Uh... uh?"
My friend's face stiffened, then smoothed out again.
"What the hell is this, you old bastard...? You into that uncle-fan shit?"
"Huh?"
"Ten years ago they at least dressed that up as being an 'uncle fan'! These days it's just pathetic — straight-up pathetic!"
......
Ah.
Right now this friend was looking at my daughter's ID photo and mistaking her for a celebrity.
"It's my daughter."
"So please just stop... wait... what?"
"That photo. That's my daughter."
"...What? Isn't this that girl who's been all over TV lately?"
Mouth half-open, my friend studied the photo with real care.
"It really is... wait, no."
She stared at it so hard I thought she might burn a hole through the paper, and then a faint smile crept onto her face. Looks like she had found something to pick at.
"Come on, they overdid the retouching on this. This is edited. Totally edited."
Now it was retouching. What was I supposed to do here? Get angry? Or...?
That's it. I remembered. I started rummaging through my phone. We had gone to the beach not long ago, and I had taken pictures.
"It's not retouched. Look at this. I took this one myself."
I handed her the phone. On the screen was a photo of me and my daughter with the ocean behind us. This one had no retouching. I knew that because I was the one who had taken it.
"Hmm......"
She looked back and forth between the photo and my face several times. That's right. She was hunting for it — proof that it had been edited. It had to have been edited. But there was no retouching, and my friend had no choice but to admit it.
"That bitch at least left you one hell of a parting gift."
"I feel kind of bad now."
"And here I am, called a god in my own right. A god who turns ugly faces into beautiful ones."
"Your hands have been pretty skilled since university."
"Once I got to the point where I could custom-sculpt every patient's face to suit them, that's when it really started to shine."
She knocked back the soju in one go. Her movements had grown a little heavier.
"But you know this? When I first opened, the trend was different. People preferred the factory-stamped, one-size-fits-all look."
"Mm."
"Whatever... anyway."
The alcohol must have been hitting her; filler was starting to crowd her sentences. She drank again, then set the glass down with a clack.
"Your daughter's really pretty. This Oh In-joo!! The woman they call a god among the women of this district! I acknowledge it! I'm jealous!"
That's right. She was that kind of woman. Someone who could say she was jealous when she was jealous. A trustworthy person who didn't snipe from the shadows behind your back.
"She's perfect. No matter how you look at it. When I first saw the photo I thought it was retouched because it was just too perfect."
She picked the picture up and looked at it again.
"Skin like white jade, monolids but with an eyeline of unbelievable depth. Dark eyebrows she got from you, and a high, well-defined nose — it's all perfect. Your daughter doesn't wear makeup, does she?"
"Yeah. That's right."
"I figured. Girls like this honestly don't need makeup. Makeup would just ruin their skin. They shouldn't."
True to form for a plastic surgeon, the moment her specialty came up, the words poured out of her.
"These days, even the double-eyelid surgery they dress up as a 'procedure' is mostly about deepening the line of the eye. Just that alone can bring a person's face to life."
"Mm... I don't know exactly what that means, but if you say so, I guess that's how it is?"
"If you don't get it, just remember this."
She poured a drink and raised her glass.
"You lucky bastard! I'm so fucking jealous!"
Our glasses met with a clink.
And so my beautiful daughter Min-ah — who had received the highest praise from a plastic surgeon known as a god among women — came running toward me with a cup in her hand.
The women's restroom. On a weekday evening, the amusement park bathroom was empty.
A glugging sound of liquid being poured began to issue from inside a stall. A click, then the rush of a toilet flushing.
"Phew."
Min-ah stepped out of the stall. In her hand was a small, opaque bottle.
"Hmm-hmm~~ hmm~ hmm~~"
She washed the bottle with liquid soap at the sink. With every rinse, the liquid inside sloshed audibly against the plastic.
"Now I just need to buy a slushie."
She smiled quietly to herself.
She tucked the bottle into the crossbody bag at her hip, and, humming once more, Min-ah left the restroom.