The author’s debut novel, New Skin, explores plastic surgery addiction and a complicated mother-daughter relationship.
New Skin begins with the narrator, Linli, seeing her mother Fanny’s bandages removed after a “gruesome” plastic surgery. Where did that image originate?
It comes from growing up in Los Angeles. It’s always been around me. I became obsessed with the TV show Botched, and I didn’t know all the crazy things that can happen to a body from cosmetic surgery. You just never think of the things that can go wrong. A friend told me about their mother who insisted on getting a face lift and my friend couldn’t look at her anymore. That moment informed my novel, and it became a metaphor for what happens when a parent prioritizes something else over you.
You seem both repelled and fascinated by the subject of plastic surgery.
I’m really interested in extremes of the body, so this kind of horror of your own body—almost mutating yourself to where you become unrecognizable—has a lot to do with my concerns about immigrant women and marginalized people who are marked by gender, sexuality, race, even class. These populations are hyperaware of how they’re marked by their body. Sometimes the only agency we have is with our own bodies, so it can feel empowering to have that jurisdiction over your body as a site of aspiration, reinvention, class mobility, and identity.
Could you talk more about American beauty standards, and what you wanted to say about their effect on people?
Growing up, I was conditioned by a beauty industry that deeply shaped and continues to shape a lot of young girls and women into a form that would make them valuable in society. WeightWatchers was a big thing, the ThighMaster—all these things are along the same capitalist lines of training young people to conform to a certain beauty standard. Cosmetic treatments are more common than when I was growing up. Advertising and media contribute, but it’s also generational in families.
How difficult was it to tap into such a precarious mother-daughter dynamic as the one between Fanny and Linli?
It became both the easiest and hardest thing because it’s my own life experience. I grew up with a single mother and we were very close, as is typically the situation between a Chinese immigrant single mother and their daughter. In a sense, it was easy to tap into Linli’s emotions because I’ve had the same ones: feeling like my mother was the closest person in my life, but within that closeness also came extreme feelings of betrayal and misunderstanding. It was also hard because I had to step back and portray both characters
differently from my own situation.
Fanny and Linli continue picking at each other despite all they’ve been through. Do you believe there’s ever a way for a bickering mother and daughter to get along?
By the end, I think the reader will see that some things can indeed change but also some things never change, as much as you want them to. A slight shift in yourself is often the best you can hope for. Healing, repair, reconciliation with the person you love the most in this world who has also betrayed you—all of that takes work and takes time, but it can happen.
