It’s a very workaholic country, where everyone is obsessed with education, and all these things blend into one another. The articles themselves were very extreme, because contemporary Korea is all these superlatives that I bring up in the book, both good and bad, from having the lowest birth rates to the highest suicide rates in the world. I was interviewing people as a Korean in Korea, but contextualising the story constantly for the international audience.

That kind of daily writing trains you to write on command, which is really hard to do if you’re a fiction writer. In retrospect, I realise that was the best kind of training for fiction writing because I was assigned an article or two every single day, while working on a longer piece at the same time. I started writing this book in grad school, but once I went to work for CNN, I would occasionally try to write, but that was a full-time job so I put it aside. How did you go about writing this book and how do these characters represent what you experienced in contemporary Seoul? Author Frances Cha, whose debut novel offers an intense view of modern South Korea (Photo: Illooz) What they have in common is that the measures they take to fit into the world into which they were born seem not only justifiable, but necessary. Ara, a mute hairstylist, harbours dreams of meeting her favourite K-pop singer while Sujin, another friend, wants to follow in the footsteps of Kyuri. Miho is an artist who discovers the family of her wealthy boyfriend disapproves of her background. Kyuri, whose face has been altered to fit an ideal picture, works in a room salon, a private bar where men pay for the company of beautiful women.

If i had your face frances cha