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Susan Lieu, The Manicurist’s Daughter: A Memoir, Celadon Books, 2024. 305 pgs.

The Manicurist’s Daughter: A Memoir is both a profound exploration and a courageous recovery of personal and familial memories and identities by playwright and creator of the one-woman performance show, Susan Lieu. The author transforms her acclaimed 2019 solo show, 140LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, into a deeply intimate and poignant memoir. The story follows Lieu’s decade-long journey to investigate and come to terms with the death of her mother, who died due to botched tummy-tuck surgery.

Interwoven into this journey is the lingering shadow of the Vietnam War, the refugee experience, intergenerational trauma, uprootedness, and resettlement in America—all set against the persistent violence of systemic racism, beauty standards, and the illusory ideals of the “American Dream.” These forces drag Lieu’s family into unrelenting cycles of uncertainty and turmoil—from chronic economic instability, a neglected childhood, trauma-induced stringent parenthood, and alienating family relations to Lieu’s mother’s obsession with beauty standards that ultimately led to her death. Lieu’s story sheds crucial light on the broader experience of first- and second-generation Vietnamese immigrants in America, whose lives are an ongoing struggle with war trauma, displacement, and the existential state of “in-betweenness” in cultural hybridity. The memoir is as much a courageous self-exploration of personal and familial identity as it is a significant Vietnamese American narrative of exile, loss, resilience, healing, and belonging.

The subtle nuances of private grief and emotional numbness are among the memoir’s highlights, echoing the broader loss of cultural and moral comprehension experienced by many Vietnamese refugees. Lieu’s mother, Hà Thị Phường—who also went by her American name, Jennifer—was a formidable, resolute matriarch of the Lieu family. A war survivor, a strong-willed entrepreneur with two successful nail salons, and a fearless risk-taker, Hà was at the helm of all family businesses. When she died from malpractice during a tummy tuck, Lieu’s family “was never the same” (17). Silence, internalised grief, and avoidance shattered the lives of all family members. Lieu’s father abandoned his leisure activities and assumed the burden of single parenthood. Her maternal aunts and grandparents moved out, while Lieu and her siblings endured an estranged childhood and adolescence under the weight of their mother’s death and their disintegrating family.

The chronic instabilities of exile life, compounded by the shock of Hà’s death, plunged the Lieus into turmoil, leaving them unable to grieve and heal as individuals or as a family. They grew numb and apathetic towards one another, their emotional paralysis anchoring each of them in isolated, self-protective, and bitter mourning. This private grief clashed within the family, deepening the fractures between them. Generational differences further entrenched the unresolved tensions, driving the Lieus further apart and eroding the familial bonds and shared love they once held for Hà.

Lieu’s story resonates with many Vietnamese refugees whose war and displacement continue to permeate their consciousness, morality, and family dynamics, unsettling their cultural and ethical grounding. The transmission of trauma across generations exposes the children of refugees to the enduring weight of war, exile, and resettlement. Lieu’s self-exploration as a second-generation Vietnamese American illuminates the struggle of navigating uprootedness, hybrid identities, and belonging against the structural forces of white supremacy, racism, and immigration-based inequality. Like Lieu’s own restless search for her family’s history, many second-generation Vietnamese navigate the complexities of diasporic life without a coherent familial foundation.

The unspoken, simmering pain led the Lieus to seek refuge in spirituality and religious beliefs. Lieu, consumed by grief, pursued solace in serendipitous signs—a bird, a thunderstorm, a yellow line across the gloomy sky on her wedding day—as well as in fortune telling, spirit channelling, and even joining a cult that exploited those in search of healing. The Lieus’ spiritual seeking reflects the deep Vietnamese cosmological belief in the power of ancestors and spirits to guide, demand, and connect with the living. While some of Lieu’s reflections on the supernatural feel speculative, they nonetheless underscore the significance of spirituality in re-establishing a trauma-ravaged sense of self and family amidst the uncertainties of diasporic life.

Lieu’s state of cultural limbo is further explored through food, a powerful medium of memory and identity. Her recollections of childhood and her mother are intimately linked to traditional Vietnamese dishes—canh chua cá bông lau (catfish sour soup), giá hẹ xào mực (sautéed squid with Chinese chives and bean sprouts), and bún nước lèo (fermented fish noodle soup)—as well as the allure of American fast food, from Sizzler steakhouses to all-you-can-eat buffets and fried chicken. For the Lieus, food was both a rare source of joy amid the chaos of exile and a symbol of American success. The duality of food as both a link to heritage and a marker of assimilation encapsulates the delicate balancing act of diasporic life.

The body—both literal and metaphorical—is a recurring theme throughout the memoir. Lieu explores her struggles with body image, from familial pressures to lose weight to the societal expectations of Vietnamese femininity. Her mother’s fatal plastic surgery underscores the dangers of unrealistic beauty standards within the Vietnamese American community. Cultural platforms like Paris by Night—a renowned Vietnamese diasporic entertainment production—perpetuate ideals of the female body to market beauty products and plastic surgery services, reinforcing heteropatriarchal norms that oppress both women and gender-nonconforming individuals.

As much as Lieu is deeply traumatised by her mother’s death, she is also haunted by the relentless beauty standards that contributed to it. Her own body dysmorphia is undeniably rooted in this generational trauma. Yet, paradoxically, this same trauma strengthens her, enabling her to stand up against body-shaming remarks from her father and relatives: “Má con chết vì mổ bụng. Dì Ngân có muốn con chết vì mổ bụng không?”—”My mother died from a tummy tuck. Do you want me to die from a tummy tuck?” (246). This moment encapsulates the paradox of self-hatred and self-acceptance that ultimately leads Lieu to the realisation that her body was her mother’s final gift. The epiphany that they both weighed “140 pounds” (174) serves as a poignant symbol of her mother’s presence and guidance, inspiring the title of Lieu’s solo performance, 140LBS.

Lieu’s story also exposes the racialised sexualisation of Vietnamese femininity. Her investigation into her mother’s negligent, uninsured surgeon, Dr. Moglen, reveals the exploitation of Vietnamese refugees—he marketed himself in Vietnamese media as a doctor who honed his skills on the battlefields of Vietnam. While the memoir does not fully explore the racial and colonial legacies underpinning this predation, it rightly prioritises the intimate, familial dimension of Lieu’s self-exploration, reflecting broader Vietnamese American experiences of cultural and moral ambiguity.

Lieu’s playful experiment with language also offers insight into her evolving Vietnamese American identity. She frequently uses “Vietnam” as both a noun and an adjective—”I’m Vietnam” (13), “Kang got us siblings all kicked out of Saturday Vietnam language school” (38)—illustrating her fluid, yet-to-be-defined, and ambiguous sense of Vietnamese identity. Her stylistic choices—using diacritics for “Việt Nam” while italicising English translations of Vietnamese phrases—serve as a proud assertion of linguistic authenticity, defying hegemonic Anglophone norms. This can be interpreted as an anticolonial act, a conscious reclamation of Vietnamese American narratives.

How to cite: Le, Thu. “Teetering Between Cultures: Susan Lieu’s The Manicurist’s Daughter.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 30 Jan. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/01/30/manicurist.

Thu Le is a PhD student in Human Geography at the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Melbourne. Her research explores the cultural-political geography of memory, emotion, and identity. Her research project uses storytelling, literature, oral histories, and sensory-based ethnography to explore how trans-spatial and trans-temporal memories of the Indochina Wars are experienced, felt, and constructed among former South Vietnamese people across various places and generations.