THE MANICURIST'S DAUGHTER

A Chinese Vietnamese woman uses performance art to grieve her mother’s death.

When Lieu—playwright and creator of the one-woman show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother—was 11, her mother, a successful business owner and Vietnamese refugee, died while getting a “tummy tuck.” In the ensuing years, the author’s family, including her three older siblings, refused to talk about their mother, let alone answer questions about her untimely death. As an adult, Lieu began creating performance art; during an acting class, she unexpectedly found herself exploring the impact of her mother’s story. Later, the author tried to contact the family of the surgeon whose malpractice led to her mother’s death, pore over the depositions from the trial that followed, and traveled to Vietnam to find someone who would finally answer her questions about what her mother was really like. Lieu’s research uncovered the ways in which her mother’s perfectionism and warped body image—conditions she shared with Lieu—contributed to her decision to undergo the procedure. Most of all, though, the author obsessed about her mother’s death because she wanted to feel less detached from her family. “I believed that once they validated my experience,” she writes, “I could finally free myself from the haunting journey of going through Má’s death alone.” Unexpectedly, Lieu got what she always wanted during a “postshow Q&A” where, in front of an audience of 140 people, the author’s siblings finally gave her the answers and validations she spent years seeking. While parts of the first half of the narrative lack focus, the second half—about the author’s investigation of her mother’s death—is fast-paced, vulnerable, humorous, and empathetic. Lieu’s compassionate epiphanies about her family’s reasons for silence are particularly poignant.

An intimate Asian American memoir about family, memory, and grief.