As Susan Lieu took the stage for her one-woman show, “140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother,” at Boston’s Pao Arts Center in 2019, I was riveted by her dynamic ability to act out 12 different characters as she told the story of her mother’s tummy tuck and its fatal aftermath. In front of a rapt audience, Lieu wrestled with thorny immigrant parent-child relationships, body image, impossible beauty standards, and the stony silence that surrounded her mother’s death when Lieu was just 11 years old.
This was the best kind of theater: honest, vulnerable, and engaging with universal themes of grief, family dynamics, and loss, while intimately specific to Lieu’s experiences. I had never before witnessed an Asian American immigrant-family narrative performed on stage, and something hopeful bloomed inside my chest as I alternated between doubled over laughing and weeping.
This March, Lieu’s memoir, “The Manicurist’s Daughter,” will hit bookshelves across the U.S., bringing Lieu’s powerful story into the hands of readers who missed her nationwide tour. In casual, confident prose peppered with self-deprecating humor, Lieu relays stories from her childhood, the fallout of her mother’s death on their large extended family who were employed in the family’s nail salons, and her quest to avenge her mother. From the mouthwatering descriptions of Vietnamese food to the hilarious-but-moving anecdotes of Lieu’s psychic seeking (which includes consulting spiritual mediums and inadvertently joining a cult), this highly-accessible memoir is filled with colorful storytelling and emotion-forward glimpses into Lieu’s hot-mess, earnest approach to life.
Family Secrets
It wasn’t a straightforward memoir-writing journey for Lieu. Her family — including her father, three older siblings, and several aunts — stonewalled every attempt she made to speak with them about her mom and her mom’s death. Throughout Lieu’s childhood, her mother had been a taboo…
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