Susan takes the reader back to her family's history; after five failed attempts, they escaped by boat from post war Saigon, and landed in California in 1980. Susan's mother was the leader of the family, and on her own, she set up two very succesfull nail salons, where Susan and other family members who where brought over from Vietnam to the USA by her parents worked, a true family run business. Until that horrible day when Susan was eleven years old, and her mother's tummy tuck operation went horribly wrong, with a fatal ending. Susan was cross with her mother and told her she hated her, the next day, she was in coma she never came out of.
After that, what's left of Susan's family falls apart. Her father is a broken man after the death of his wife. But her family isn't that into talking about feelings, so they don't talk about her mother's death at all. But Susan is left with so many feelings, questions, intergenerational trauma and questions; why did her mother want to change her body? Body image was important for her mother, the mother who demanded what Susan ate, but criticized her daughter's weight on the other hand too. The surgeon who performed the tummy tick was known to prey on Vietnamese women for patients, and advertised in papers read by the Vietnamese communities in the USA and he continued his malpractice altough he didn't have any malpractice insurance. Susan realizes that she never knew anything about her parent's past in Vietnam. Susan travels to Vietnam to learn more about who her mother was, and who she discovers, never truly knew. Susan is an artist, and she created a theatre show with the the loss of her mother as topic, to cope with it and as a mechanism to connect with her mother.
I found this a beautiful written and very moving memoir. My heart broke for Susan, whose life never was the same again after the sudden passing of her mother, and she had to deal with all these complex feelings, and find a road to healing on her own. A road with a lot of bumps, where Susan seeks inner peace in a questionable and money demanding yoga cult. I found it sad to read that her relationship with her father and sister was strained and complex, because they where not into talking about the death of her mother, which was so important for Susan's grieving and healing process. Both a coming of age story and a research for her mother's past life, this book is very moving, emotional, tragic but also inspiring. A book that will the fans of the memoir Crying in H-Mart will certainly like. This is a memoir I truly recommend!
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