The Manicurist's Daughter

Excavating history as a member of the "1.5 generation"

How do we excavate the lives and truths and secrets of our loved ones when they’ve been gone for years? What can we find, what can’t we find, and what do we do with what we do find? Those questions are at the center of Susan Lieu’s gorgeous and transportive new memoir, The Manicurist’s Daughter, which extends the work of Lieu’s popular one-woman show, 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, which grapples with Lieu’s mother’s death after botched plastic surgery. What a pleasure it was to talk to Lieu about doing that history work and the constant code-switching that accompanies navigating society as a member of the “1.5 Generation.”

I learned about this book because a reader emailed me to tell me it’d make a perfect Culture Study interview — if there’s a book on your radar that would be a good fit for the newsletter, you should email me too! (My full name at gmail)

To start, I’d love to hear from you about the reception to 140 LBS and how it led you to writing The Manicurist’s Daughter.

In the beginning, creating and performing my solo show was about redeeming myself with the disappointing adult I had become. My stint with stand-up comedy had been going great until a heckler at a charity comedy show just wouldn’t stop. I walked away from the microphone even though it was the very thing that made me feel alive. After I got married, I got mounting pressure from my father and aunts to have children. But two questions stopped me from even considering. The first was how could I tell them to pursue their dreams if I was a coward with my own? The second was how could I become a mother if I never knew my own? 

As I investigated my mother’s hidden past, my new discoveries were immediately ported to the stage, the audience joining me on my real-life journey to resurrect the past so I could finally live in the present. The fifth workshopped show was “140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother” as we see it today. Extremely talented designers helped my vision come to life, and quite honestly, the show exceeded what I thought could be possible. On opening night, after the stage went to blackout, I ran to my merch table and then was astounded at what I saw. Dozens of people were waiting in line to talk to me. They were flipping through my investigation exhibit stuffed with deposition pages and collages of family photos. No one was rushing out the door. They were there to tell me how my vulnerability onstage stirred up their stuff. They were there to tell me their story. 

The night was a blend of a wedding and a funeral. They were there to wish me well and I was there to offer my condolences. The emotional rollercoaster that they experienced during the solo show was what I deemed “therapeutic theater” – we were in it together to go deep and collectively release. Originally I had created this show to prove I wasn’t a coward. But it was the community that showed up, and continue to show up, who remind me that my work around intergenerational trauma and healing is for all of us. 

I remember the year before the world premiere I asked Cindy the Psychic if I should keep going. My mother spoke through her to tell me that my storytelling was “a mother’s love” and it was work we were doing together. After a sold out world premiere, I decided to produce my own 10-city national tour. As much as I wanted it, the idea was daunting. I was dragging my feet to sign venue contracts. I was scared no one would come and that I would lose money, eventually forced to return to Corporate America. But once I found out I was pregnant, everything changed. The procrastinator in me got a deadline. If I wanted a shot at this tour working out, I had a three month window to make it happen: my second trimester. 

I began booking cities, begging my friends to let me crash on their air mattresses, and shipping out posters to strangers on social media to plaster their city. Now I was terrified that my arts career would be over after I became a mother. I could be a strong candidate for postpartum anxiety. I needed to build as much momentum as I could before the baby was born. 

Little did I know that at my first stop, New York City, my future literary agent would be sitting in the audience to experience my craft. Within one year, I performed my show 60 times to more than 7000 people, garnering press in the LA Times, Washington Post, and American Theatre Magazine. It was unreal. The line would form night after night and I hugged strangers-turned-friends in almost every major city in America. 

And all that anxiety of how motherhood would impact my future as an artist? Well, I had the right to feel anxious: my son was born March 2020. The pandemic obliterated the theater industry overnight and now as an artist without maternity leave, my back was up against the wall. I needed to continue my journey as a storyteller and now, with a literary agent, writing a book in isolation seemed much more tenable in making money than putting on solo shows when public gatherings weren’t permitted. We worked on the book proposal throughout 2020, pitched in February 2021, and then I signed with Celadon Books March 2021. Now I just had to write the book. The only problem was that I had never taken a writing course in my life. I didn’t have an MFA, I had an MBA.  

The way you describe your family’s nail salons is so evocative and filled with love — I see it through your proud childhood eyes. Can you tell us what memories of it (aesthetic, tactile, action) have stayed with you the most? 

One of the first few chapters is “Susan’s Nails” where I shepherd the reader into understanding my family’s habitat, hierarchy, and mores. First:

“Once Má pushed the back door kickstand down, we were supposed to enter the salon in single file. But I pushed past everyone, leaping over the ankle- level laser beam like a hurdle. It beeped whenever anyone walked into the salon so we knew when customers arrived. I swung the creaky restroom door open to see if I had to restock toilet paper, flipped on five light switches, and started sprinting down the long, narrow hallway. I zoomed past all the pedicure chairs and manicurist tables and then did a long jump toward the front door, where I leaned my entire torso into the front display window and yanked the metal beaded string, turning the neon-pink Open sign on. We were officially in business.”

Then, I talk about where people sit and didn’t sit, and how it established their role and relationship to my mother:

“Finally, at the last table was Ba, the Airbrush King. He wasn’t the lowest ranked; he was Má’s wild card. Most of the time, he was nowhere to be found, running errands that took him to Costco, the hardware store, and an hour south to Oakland for salon supplies. When it was especially busy, Má would page him on his beeper and he would magically appear, slinging acrylic fills at lightning speed like a shoot-out in a Western. His table also held the airbrush machine, which sounded like a loud jackhammer when customers wanted stenciled images of leopard prints and floating hearts. He only did acrylic fills and manicures. Like Má, he had a disdain for feet and the authority to deny them.”

I also wrote about how what we did when the customers weren’t around was indicative of our bloodline:

“It was time to play a round of Tiến Lên, a Vietnamese card game known as “attack,” “advance forward,” or “continue onwards”—the very thing Vietnamese were conditioned to do after a millennia of invasion.”

The nail salon was a battlefield and we wanted to be on the winning side. Every single day we fought so we could build a foundation for those living in America and those who never made it out of Vietnam. I tasted victory the first time we made one thousand dollars in one day. I was pining to go to a restaurant that I had only seen on the commercials: Sizzler. It was something my mother promised if we accomplished such a feat and together we unabashedly felt proud to be American.

There’s a difficult section of the book where you talk about how your mother could use food as punishment. “If I wanted to belong, I had to obey Má,” you write, “which meant I had to abandon my own inner knowing.” What effect did that abandonment have on other parts of your life? And how did you connect the dots between that vivid memory and that sort of equally vivid insight? 

The word from my elders was truth and all of their beliefs and desires became my “should.” Eat to show my appreciation for the cook but feel disappointed when my family would publicly body shame me. Allow them to force feed me because that’s how they showed they cared. Get slapped in the face when they said no one would ever love me unless I lost weight. Then the overachiever in me never felt enough despite getting a near full-ride to Harvard. I was in a constant samara, desperately seeking their unattainable approval. By the time I got to college, this meant I hadn’t developed the muscle to trust myself, which got me sucked in real deep in a Korean yoga cult. Even though love was conditional there too, the path to attain it was explicitly clear. Again and again, my intuition screamed at me to get out, but I stayed, deeply manipulated that their love was better than the love I didn’t get at home. This abandonment of my inner knowing also meant I stayed in destructive romantic relationships too long because that craving to be worthy cut deep.    

As a child I didn’t connect the dots between the memory and the insight — I just was terrified of the consequences of not obeying. It was through my numerous bouts of silent meditation retreats that I began to actually hear what my body had to say. I would be mortified when I would burp to signal I was full when there was still delicious vegetarian food still glistening on the plate. By the third or fourth day I would finally have the courage to compost the food and more mindfully scoop smaller portions at the subsequent meal. Obeying my body over my elders has taken and continues to take a bit of unlearning. 

“It was better to be busy than to emote.” You toss that down in the middle of a section where you’re ostensibly talking about how you and your family spend your mother’s death anniversary, but that description itself is nestled within a section of the book that describes your attempts to figure out whether you should be in law school or business school or working with your sister or doing what your father most ardently hoped — being busy.  What relationship do you have with busy-ness today? And how do you see that reticence to emote at work in others’ continued dedication to work, which is often….busyness that earns money?

I can’t turn off my “busy-ness.” My mind is always spinning, worrying, trying to figure out how to “succeed.” My worthiness is totally tied to productivity. I hope that if I finally “make it,” my father will give me the one thing I have never attained — his approval. I’m kind of the worst on vacations. Even though I schedule automated away messages on my emails, most of the time I respond. I like feeling needed and then when I am needed too much, I feel annoyed. It’s a running joke with my husband and friends that “I’m chill.” The irony is that even though I can immediately drop into relating to the emotions of others, granting myself the freedom of total presence and peace for myself is extremely difficult. Even after numerous silent meditation retreats, affirmation calendars, and positive thinking courses, my mind is always nagging me to do more. Daily meditation and regular exercise helps, but that incessant chatter is malicious. She doesn’t stop because she is worried about being forgotten or not having enough.

Now as a mother myself, I have to consciously remind myself: enjoy this. Stop trying to rush to the next thing. Find the present in the now. It’s an ongoing struggle for sure. This all stems from my mother’s untimely death and being the child of refugees. Survival is always on the brain, even a generation later. 

You make a stylistic decision with the book that I appreciated: when you describe a conversation you had with your family in Vietnamese, you write it out in Vietnamese, and then put the English translation afterwards. For example: 

Through the crack in the window, I heard Ông Ngoại say, “Bà ơi, rồi mọi chuyện sẽ qua thôi.” Old woman, all of this will pass. 

I’ve read other books that do the same, but I’ve also read many where the conversation is just rendered in English, perhaps with a “she said in Vietnamese” afterwards. There’s a substantive difference in reading experience, and I’m hoping you can talk a bit about how you arrived at this way of rendering the conversation and any conversations you may have had with editors or other readers about it. 

I have been code switching all my life. At home, I’m too Western with my individualistic ideas of feelings and “following my calling.” Outside my front door, I’m too Vietnamese. My English is so “surprisingly good” and I can see disgruntled reactions whenever people ask me where I come from and responding “the Bay Area” is just not sufficient for them. When I’m with my elders, I am live-translating in my brain as I struggle with my broken Vietlish to convey complex ideas. I’m constantly in navigation mode, pivoting across contradictory cultural expectations to appear respectful and worthy. That’s what it’s like to be the child of immigrants. It’s exhausting, it’s work, and I wanted my reader to experience how complicated this non-stop othering has been in my life. If I was going to let my readers in, they would have to go all the way.  

Initially my editor was a bit shocked at how many lines I needed help with translating. I wasn’t sure how much would be kept since we were still in the throes of editing. She said that usually one line was common but pages of translation were unusual. I didn’t know what was standard. All I knew is it would feel cheap to not call a dish its true name or have an elder express their joy in translated form. After one conversation, my editor asked me to send my pages of Vietnamese text and that got sent to a translator. I ended up working with three translators because my family’s Vietnamese language is so specific to our region. We’re Southern, my parents didn’t finish high school, and they left Vietnam in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s. Plus, the language is so poetic and colloquial that the words had to be precise. 

Wrapping up the translation was by far one of the most stressful and final parts of the editing process. Part of preserving the struggle of my identity, which is deemed the “1.5 generation,” is to capture the limitations of my Vietnamese by having incorrect Vietnamese printed, but always making sure the elders’ Vietnamese were crisp and truly reflected the snapshot in time of where the Vietnamese language was then. The language continues to evolve and I had to resist incorporating modern phrases into the elders’ speaking to reflect their migration experience. The things I do to honor my ancestors! I would recommend listening to the audiobook, which I narrate, to hear the playful melodies that Vietnamese can be when it’s spoken sweetly–and with defiance.   

The book is based on this idea of trying to recover who a person was, many years after their death, when your own memories are that of a child — and the people who were closest to that person cannot or will not speak about her. I think this will be familiar to many people reading this interview, even if they’ve never even thought of writing a book. What felt hardest to access when it came to figuring out who your mother was — and what do you still feel like you don’t know? 

This is going to sound strange since my mother died from a botched tummy tuck, but I don’t know what my mother was insecure about nor do I know the mundane details of her life that make a person. Yes I understand she wanted to be thinner, but I don’t know what triggered her, what would get her out of moments of depression and anxiety, what she was afraid of. I don’t know what annoyed her about her husband, parents, and siblings. I don’t know the things she would gab about to her girlfriends. I don’t know what her younger self dreamed to be. I can make educated guesses, but I wasn’t embedded in the recesses of her psyche. It’s these details of who she was that makes her a whole, complete person. For so long, she was this larger-than-life figure who always knew what to do. I wanted to know these types of details because our humanity is made up of all the things we do not say. To this day, I wish I could know these answers. I outline so many of the mundane things I wish I knew about her in the “100 Questions,” that I performed in my second solo show.

The hardest thing about accessing these details is that they probably exist with my father and, for his own reasons, he cannot share them with me. It’s devastating to know someone’s boundary and have to respect it when it’s preventing me from getting the very thing I’ve wanted for decades. It’s a strange parent-child position to be in, but it’s a thing I have to respect. ●

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You can follow Susan Lieu on Instagram here and buy The Manicurist’s Daughter here.