I try to keep an open mind, really, I do. But like Fanny Feng’s visiting daughter in “New Skin,” I struggle to understand the allure of cosmetic surgery. Especially on a repeated basis.
But Fanny is determined — and a survivor. In quintessential L.A. fashion, the victim of multiple botched procedures ends up on a reality show about extreme beauty makeovers. The big prize: more plastic surgery.
Appropriately enough, Sarah Wang’s debut novel introduces us to 26-year-old Linli and her estranged mother during a post-surgery bandage reveal. Even though Linli has braced herself, she is horrified to see her mother’s deformed nose and witness the leech therapy her doctor prescribes to reduce pooled blood.
A Taiwanese immigrant who overstayed her student visa decades earlier, Fanny began her dalliance with plastic surgery when her daughter was young and never stopped. Linli tells the doctor Fanny has undergone hundreds of cosmetic procedures — that she knows about.
“How much work had she gotten since I’d seen her last,” wonders Linli, who moved away three years earlier. “I scanned her face, the entire thing immobile from years of Botox injections. Useless. It was impossible to take inventory in a landscape that was constantly shifting.”
Reluctant return
Linli is on the brink of moving from Washington state to New York for graduate school when she is summoned back to Fanny’s side. Soon she’s sucked into her mother’s medical dramas: She cooks for her and watches “America’s Beauty” with her. Before long, she is driving Fanny to shadowy San Gabriel Valley establishments that provide black market beauty treatments to Asian clientele. To pay the bills, Linli begins working for a nonprofit near La Brea Tar Pits.
Over the course of the novel, we learn more about her childhood and Fanny’s scrappy beginnings in America. When Fanny becomes a contestant on “America’s Beauty Extreme,” the drama escalates to a near fever dream. Linli makes a series of questionable choices; among other things, she ingests an unknown drug at a Laurel Canyon house party. I didn’t fully buy her behavior at times but did share her growing appreciation of Fanny’s resourcefulness.
L.A.’s horrors and charms
Linli’s descriptions of her mother’s macabre body horrors may remind you — as it did me — of “The Substance,” but Wang’s book is centered on a milieu freeways apart from Hollywood. At its heart “New Skin” is a story about immigration and the sometimes-fractured bonds between mothers and daughters. I ended the book with a smidge more understanding about Fanny’s addiction to cosmetic makeovers.
As for its setting, L.A. readers will surely appreciate Linli’s affection for speeding north on the Pasadena Freeway and visiting Little Dume beach in Malibu, not to mention omnipresent jacaranda trees and bountiful bougainvillea. The mother and daughter are deeply rooted in the San Gabriel Valley’s sprawling Asian diaspora; “New Skin” benefits from the author’s intimate knowledge of the area and what it’s like to be a second-generation immigrant raised by a single mom.
“Writing about Los Angeles always puts me back there in a way that’s embodied and visceral,” Wang, who teaches writing at Barnard College, recently told L.A. Review of Books. “My friends and family in L.A. know me in a way that I’ll never be known by anyone else.”
My caveat
Reader beware: “New Skin” is a compelling read but not for the faint hearted: Linli frequently describes her mother’s procedures in bracing ways. “Very gruesome, aren’t you?” the doctor remarked when she asked about the possibility of necrosis on Fanny’s infected nose. And the fraught relationship between mother and daughter may upset sensitive souls. But take heart: even while sparring, they are deep-down symbiotic, bonding over episodes of “America’s Beauty.”
Observes Linli: “My mother could still make me laugh harder than anyone else.”
“New Skin” by Sarah Wang, Little, Brown, available now.
Originally published on my Lititude substack.