An obsession with the body and, ultimately, love: mother and daughter, two new Bovarys. Introducing "New Skin"

There are mothers who leave their daughters everything good they possibly can; others leave behind examples that are like chasms, Fanny Feng (whose latest nose job went so badly that she has to keep leeches on it – on her nose) leaves her daughter Linli with an apocalyptic string of troubles: debts, never-ending worries and the terrifying theory that life, like your face, can always be remade to your liking if you don’t like it. New Skin (Foglio Edizioni) is Sarah Wang’s debut novel; the protagonist, Linli, isn’t even thirty yet, has freed herself from that monster of a mother and is finally about to leave Los Angeles. Why a monster? Because Fanny, who ends up in hospital yet again, has the ‘Mar-a-Lago face’ problem – the former ‘Instagram Face’, those identical faces that rich women have been sporting of late. Fanny is not wealthy, and she undergoes constant procedures, often carried out by quacks, and in this mess of fillers, clandestine injections and cut-price botched jobs, she’s ended up disfigured. But that’s not all, because she’s also been selected for America’s Beauty Extreme, the reality TV show for victims of cosmetic botch jobs, where contestants compete to win surgical repairs. The ‘anti-Popper’: television as a nurse, supposed to heal the damage caused by the entertainment industry via social media. Linli therefore returns to doing what she has always done: looking after her mother. Paying, accompanying and making amends. So Fanny can devote herself to her only passion: starting all over again.

New Skin is a novel that functions as a Madame Bovary for two; ultimately, the concept behind the mother and daughter remains the same: to attempt to intervene on the surface in order to see if anything can be shifted beneath it, in the realm of fate. Fanny is a Chinese-American immigrant from the generation that witnessed the processes of Americanisation at their peak, when people said ‘anything is possible’ and everything really was possible. Linli, on the other hand, has no ‘American dream’ – nor does she really believe in it all that much.

One of the achievements she boasted about was having weaned me off nappies at six months. Once, in the paediatrician’s waiting room, a worried mother had pointed at me. “You’ve forgotten to put a nappy on your daughter!” she had exclaimed. “She doesn’t need one. She already knows how to wee in the potty.” My mother smiled, proud. All the other mothers were watching us and chuckling amongst themselves. This woman’s mad, they probably thought. Placing a six-month-old on the toilet seat? Such claims were met with incredulity. During my early years, I recall feeling somewhat like a child prodigy: my peers were sitting comfortably amid fresh excrement while squabbling over their building blocks, whereas I went about with a dry, carefree bottom, free from nappies. It is regrettable that my therapist during my teenage years attributed the origin of many of my problems—both in my development and in my relationships—to that early potty training: a forced form of control when a child’s body is not yet ready to handle it. The “child prodigy” narrative thus transformed into a source of trauma. As an adult, I reviewed scholarly literature and found that in China and India it is common practice to teach children to use the potty at six months, whereas in the United States the practice is regarded as a potential developmental trauma. In China, it is simply the norm.

In my view, this is where "New Skin" becomes more compelling than the typical satires on our contemporary obsession with faces and bodies; Wang treats his two hapless heroines with seriousness, revealing a system in which achieving beauty at any cost comes to appear rational. Given that the market now values image a hundred thousand times more than in the past (so much for body positivity!), what is improving one’s image if not the most sensible economic strategy, the best possible use of money, the best return on investment one can give it? Beauty has never been so attainable, nor such a sure source of return on investment: in practical terms, how can one resist the (now achievable) desire to be more beautiful? Perhaps stunningly beautiful? Would I not give in as well if I were twenty? After all, that is what America sells: second chances. And when it comes to second chances, Fanny thinks, you have to approach them with a different outlook; you have to be better than you were before, to make the most of them. Naturally, it comes at a price. If you want a new face, you have to put money into it. That’s the other protagonist of the story: debt. Perhaps it is the very secret essence of the novel; it lies within the mother-daughter relationship in both directions, and you never think of that magic word of contemporary fiction: the horrendous toxic relationship. Fanny is exasperating and horrible; Linli is resentful, dependent and, at times, crueller than is necessary. Running through it all is that unclassifiable electric current that runs through families and which we call love because we don’t know what else to call it.