New Skin

Wang debuts with the spectacular and wrenching story of a woman contending with her mother’s plastic surgery addiction. Linli Feng, a nonprofit worker who assists incarcerated women, reluctantly visits her mother, Fanny, in Los Angeles after a three-year estrangement. Fanny’s latest botched procedure, after a lifetime of risky facial alterations, has become infected and she desperately needs help. Though Linli only anticipates a short stay, Fanny’s fanatical surgeries, skin bleaching, and black-market Botox injections place Linli on high alert. Tricked and guilted into putting her own life on hold, she extends her visit to ensure her mother’s well-being. But things soon spiral out of control when federal agents entangle Fanny in an investigation involving illegal cosmetic treatments, and she then becomes a contestant on America’s Beauty Extreme, an outrageous new reality TV series that pits plastic surgery addicts against one another. Wang raises the tension to remarkable heights as Linli is torn between protecting her mother and maintaining the boundaries she needs to keep her sanity intact. Along the way, Wang takes candid stock of Fanny’s plastic surgery disasters (her purple, post-rhinoplasty nose “twisted inward as if it were trying to smell itself”) and the pressures of generational trauma. This bracing tale goes much more than skin deep. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (May)