When I was a child, my mother and I used to get into screaming fights over small things I said that weren’t meant to hurt her, but did. “That’s not what I meant,” I would sob.
“It doesn’t matter what you meant, that’s what I heard,” she’d say.
My mother was the last person I ever wanted to hurt. I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. I loved the smell of her armpits and hated the prickly feel of the razor stubble on her legs. I wished she wore makeup, because I wanted to wear it too, and I begged her to pin my hair up at night so I could wake up with curls like hers. She taught me how to be in a body, and how to wrestle with the layers of shame that cover women’s bodies as surely as skin.
Perhaps this cycle of misunderstanding and pain, which took us decades to break, is what made me a writer. The desire to bend language to my will, and launch it like an arrow or spread it like a balm. The desire to make myself understood, which is perhaps all any of us ever want.
In Sarah Wang’s fiercely intelligent and wickedly funny debut novel, New Skin, these dynamics play out on the big screen, literally, as mother-daughter duo Fanny and Linli Feng are drawn deeper and deeper into the funhouse mirror of plastic surgery, reality TV, and whatever scraps are left of the American dream. Wang’s work goes further than the cosmetic ramifications of what family therapist Terry Real might call “normal familial hatred.” In direct conversation with Chinese-American art collective Shanzai Lyric, which researches aberrations of language written in English and printed on t-shirts produced in China , New Skin sets a blistering focus on the Chinese diasporic experience and the underground economies and aesthetics to which this gives way. Wang and I connected via Zoom to discuss the inherent unknowability of mothers, the feminist politics of having an autonomous body, and the manifold failures and possibilities of language.
Sarah Wang is the author of New Skin, which was named a 2026 best book by NPR and Apple Books, and was featured in Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, People, and Bloomberg. She has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the London Review of Books. Wang is a MacDowell Fellow, a Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow, a PEN America Writing for Justice Fellow, a Sewanee Writer’s Conference Tennessee Williams Scholar, a Tin House Scholar, and the winner of a Barbara Deming Award. She teaches creative writing at Barnard College.
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Sarah Bess Jaffe: From the opening pages of New Skin, we’ve got a leech hanging off of a botched rhinoplasty. At another point, Fanny is telling her daughter Linli, “They had to cut me open to take you out.” There’s so much here about beauty and motherhood as surgical interventions and the violence and horror intrinsic to that. What were you marinating in as you were writing?
Sarah Wang: Body horror has always been something I’m interested in. I’ve loved the director David Cronenberg forever. I delight in bodily stuff—my own bodily stuff, or hearing about other people’s bodily stuff. Some people are repulsed by it. I can watch all that squelching meat and laugh, totally delighted. But it’s intellectual for me as well. I’m interested in this idea of what it means as a woman and an immigrant to have a body, and what you do with that body, and how that body’s perceived. So part of the research was academic. And part of it was binging Botched.
SBJ: The idea of beauty and power and dominance and the idea of reinventing the self both literally and figuratively—especially in terms of an immigrant family—is explicitly political.
SW: I was born here, so I’m diasporic, and I have always wondered: what would my life and my subjectivity have been like if my parents had never left Taiwan, and I’d grown up there with people all around me who were just like me? Because being diasporic, and especially being second generation, one is defined by that loss, difference, displacement. Because that’s formed so much of my subjectivity, it’s something that I think about as the Sliding Doors reality of another possible life. I’m sure I would have other insecurities and difficulties, but what would they be?
For my mother—and all of my family, really—being an immigrant is hard. You can be an engineer in your motherland and then you come to another country and you work in a grocery store, or you’re undocumented. You’re still that person who has an engineering degree or whatever, but there’s a real sense of loss. The book is hugely informed by my curiosity about what transpires in the gap between the past and the present, the past and the future, the old world versus the new, east and west, and in the gap between generations as well.
SBJ: The book made me think deeply about our mothers outside of their role as mothers, and how fundamentally unknowable they can be as people despite this tremendous intimacy. It’s fiction, obviously, but, as a writer who has living parents, that’s such a sticky subject. Has your mom read this book?
SW: No, and that’s kind of interesting. I think it’s always a concern, writing about people, fictionalizing people, writing autofiction. What if my parents or so-and-so reads this? But I was never concerned with that, because my mother’s English language skills are not at a level where she can read literary fiction. She’s literate, but she couldn’t read this book. So that always gave me the freedom to just write whatever I felt like writing. If I’d wanted to, I could even lift conversations we’ve had verbatim. However, the other side of it is that in some ways I do think this book functions—as a lot of writing does—as a letter. This occurred to me only after I finished writing it, not while I was writing it. We say in teaching writing that there’s always an addressee. Who are you addressing? Who is your audience? In some ways, I think this book is everything that I could never say to my mother but that I’ve always wanted to. So, while there is a certain freedom that I’ve experienced in the writing of this book, that I can just say anything, in another way, it’s a huge loss. Because it’s about her, and in some ways for her, and she’ll never be able to read it.
SBJ: That strikes me as really lonely for the human part of you, and maybe liberating for the writer part of you.
SW: I was thinking a lot as I was writing about the different ways in which we communicate, and the inability to communicate, and how we are forced to communicate. There’s a line in the book, something about a mouth shaped in Taiwan making English sounds. I’m also dealing with that language and feeling and experience kind of extruded through a foreign die. Or another die, an unconscious die. A lot of what people are trying to express through dreams and unconscious acts is also a form of speaking. Sometimes the addressee is oneself. Perhaps incomprehensibility is in the form itself. With one character who actually speaks gibberish, it’s not necessarily trying to decipher what she’s saying that’s so important, because maybe it’s not actually gibberish. I do think that she is actually communicating something, but what is it? The message may be in the form itself. What is she expressing through this kind of chaotic nonsense? The way people behave is also a form of speech. Like, if you’re going around getting wasted all the time, getting into car crashes, getting into trouble, what are you actually doing? Why are you doing that? You’re trying to express the way that you’re feeling or something that happened to you. Maybe it’s a message to someone else. For the character speaking gibberish, maybe what she’s expressing is distress. Or maybe something else, something beautiful. Maybe it’s resistance. Maybe she’s like, I don’t have to speak like you, I can speak my own language, and if you don’t understand me, that’s your problem.
SBJ: I’m now thinking about Fanny through that lens of behavior as communication. Is there a direct correlation between her constant reinvention of her face to get to this unreachable ideal and her experience as an immigrant, that she’s constantly trying to reinvent herself but can never get reality to line up with her imagination?
SW: Since we’re all a little more fluent in what is possible with plastic surgery and cosmetic interventions, and what’s possible and who’s getting what and why, it’s entering a more widespread, global dialogue. This is partially thanks to technology, and partly Korea’s influence or soft power. But it’s interesting to see how the age-old issues that have always been there, are still there. Why do people want to look the way that they look?
Self-presentation can arrive through many different venues, excuses, reasons. The surface of the body can function as a fantasy destination for where we would like to be, or the people we would like to be. Everything is on a spectrum. So, wanting to look a certain way can be going out in sweats and flip-flops because that’s how you feel. Or, at the other extreme, you might want to get double jaw surgery. And I mean, Clavicular? Can we talk about Clavicular? Pummel your face with hammers and take meth? He’s said that he takes cocktails of prescription drugs for different reasons, but one of them is to manage his social anxiety. It’s a genuine question: How do I become less awkward in public, and more able to make friends, be cool, and not be so anxious and afraid? It’s easier to invest in, “Well, I’ll just hit myself in the face with hammers for a few weeks, and then I’ll be okay,” than to really sit with the question of how to feel more confident and accepted. What is the answer to that? There’s no easy answer. Or there could be a lot of different answers, but those are very difficult and deep-seeking, and maybe have to do with your life’s biggest heartbreak and trauma, and your family. Quick fix, late-stage capitalism wish-making: I will have the life that I want. I’ll be accepted if I (for me, when I was in junior high) have this cool Stussy shirt. I’ll be like everyone else, and I’ll finally be cool. As things become more accessible, especially with the internet, where you and I could be watching the same Instagram videos as an eight-year-old about how to modify your face, or these travelogue videos of going to Korea and getting everything from cadaver fat injections, to salmon-skin DNA, to skull shaving. It’s a unique time in our culture to locate who we’d like to be, how we can be those people, and how we can eradicate all of our fears and insecurities.
SBJ: I’ve been obsessed with this idea of beauty as soft power, both in its being exported from one country or culture to another as you mentioned, as well as the idea that beauty does grant some kind of power. But it might be one of those fairy tale trades where it’s not necessarily a clean kind of power. If we can change what we look like on a fundamental level, what does that mean?
SW: So, I just finished watching The Beauty, which I’m convinced is the best show ever. It’s basically picking up where Cronenberg left off with body horror after eXistenZ. In The Beauty, people get an injection that will remake them into younger, beautiful versions of themselves. They form a cocoon, and then they’re rebirthed into the perfect hottie. One woman is a kind of genius FBI agent. When she gets the beauty and she’s reborn, she’s like, “Wait. People just treat me like an object, and want to use me and fuck me and degrade my intelligence.” It’s contextual. Yes, beauty may have its own power universally. If a drop-dead hottie walks into a room anywhere, yes, we’re gonna pay attention. But also that kind of beauty and power is going to have more value in some places versus others. I know plenty of people who have a lot of power and are the coolest people in the room because they’re smart, or because of the incredible books they’re written. Maybe in some of my circles if there’s a very beautiful person that walks in, but they’re not that intelligent, nobody would want to talk to them. There’s different power to be had with different values, in different contexts.
SBJ: But I think the appeal of the power that comes with beauty is that it can be obtained. It can be bought.
SW: I don’t know if you feel this way, but I’m newly on social media. I just joined Instagram less than a year ago, so I’m still looking at all of this stuff as though I’m just arriving in the room. But it seems to me, as a kind of observer, that beauty can be obtained now more than ever before. You see these photos of Korean actors or K-pop stars, before and after, and they look totally different. I even question how real those are. Is that really who they were before? Is that really a photo and not AI? If so, wow. Anybody can look like a K-pop star.
SBJ: How can we ever know what we’re looking at is real? Fanny is not only a revisionist about her face, but about her life. There’s a scene in the book where she’s being interviewed by reality TV producers, and she drops this lore about her daughter Linli and then when Linli asks her about it, she’s like, Oh, I made that up. But it’s never really clear what’s true, what’s not true.
SW: Maybe part of growing and getting older and examining your life, as hopefully people do—especially men, they need to do this—is questioning these rigid scripts that read, This is what happened, this is who our parents were, this is why I am the way that I am, this is why they did this to me. And hopefully you slowly start to question and unseat yourself from these things you think are absolutely true, because there’s room for different possibilities, uncertainties, different perspectives, different truths. What are stories? Stories can be true, stories can be absolutely false, stories can be false memories, stories can be a performance.
SBJ: There’s a little section kind of early in the book where Fanny and Linli are talking about a Chinese knockoff Harry Potter series, and Fanny says: “The original is not important. This version is superior, much more imaginative and fun. That’s what we Chinese do, take something and make it better. Things are always changing, becoming different. Consider evolution. There is no original in nature. Nature is innovative. A story doesn’t belong to one person. Anyone can take a story and reshape it, cut off an arm, and sew a leg in its place. That’s how we free ourselves from control.” How far can something go from the original before it isn’t that anymore? And where is the line between reinventing and lying?
SW: There’s a project by these two women in New York called Shanzai Lyric. They work with bootleg gear and mistranslations on t-shirts, or who knows if it’s even a mistranslation. Maybe it’s its own language. But to us, it may be funny or illegible. I was thinking about Shanzai Lyric when I was writing the book but of course this kind of stuff, especially in Chinese culture, has been around forever. In Chinese culture, it’s not about the original. I bring up Shanzai Lyric because in their research, they went around Guangzhou, and they were like, This is wrong. This is nonsense. What is this trying to say? And the shopkeepers selling these t-shirts said, What is this trying to say? We don’t care. It looks cool. That’s all we care about; it looks cool and that’s fine. Fake Chanel bags, for example. Maybe people believe they’re real, but maybe people just think they’re cool bags and not really so concerned with the original. My mom was telling me that she got a designer bag. And I said, what designer? And she goes, I don’t know, it’s just designer. So, for her, there was an aspiration towards attaining something that’s of value, but she didn’t really exactly know what. It’s not important. It’s just important that it’s designer. It’s interesting to think about how other cultures may think about this question of what we want and why, and what it means.
SBJ: This is a perversion of that point, but it made me think of MAGA face.
SW: These are different cultures. You and I probably would not aspire to have a MAGA face, but for people living in South Palm Beach, maybe that’s how everyone looks down there, and so the more you see something, the more you want it. I had a friend who went to South Korea [a few years ago]. He’s Taiwanese-American, so he’s Asian, but he’s definitely not South Korean. When I asked him how it was, he said, Oh, everyone kind of dresses the same there. There’s this uniformity that one would think, going there, I’m not going to ascribe to that uniformity because I don’t even live there. But he said that once he got there, it felt really embarrassing to not be like everyone else on the street. My friend had bright yellow shoes that he was too embarrassed to wear there. When he was packing, he might have thought, I’m gonna wear my cool yellow shoes I love that look good with this outfit. But when he got there, there was a total paradigm shift, where he thought, I’m so humiliated to wear these, I couldn’t possibly wear these. What you think you might want or not want, or what your values are, can be completely different once you are surrounded by a certain culture. And so the culture and the language that people are speaking through MAGA face—maybe if I were in the midst of it, I would want some of those things, too. For me, being Asian and seeing all these Asian people on my screens who have a certain kind of K-pop beauty look, I’m naturally more drawn to that, because it feels like something people who resemble me are doing to their appearances.
SBJ: Linli mentions so many times throughout the book that she misses her mom’s real face. Mother-to-daughter features are hereditary, or can be, and to have that broken does something really strange to our idea of belonging. What we do to ourselves as an individual, we’re also kind of doing to the people around us.
SW: I’m not a parent, so I can only imagine, but what is your responsibility as a parent to your children? You’re your own person with your own body. Should you be able to do whatever you want with it? When you have a child, that becomes complicated. Is it wrong for Fanny to have done what she’s done to herself by way of her own bodily autonomy? Is it fine for her to do anything she wants, whether it’s mutilation or self-sabotage, or suicide? That’s also making a choice with your own body and your life. I have a friend who took their own life in 2020 and I was talking to my psychoanalyst about it, and he said something that surprised me, which is that suicide is ethical. It made me think again about bodily autonomy and what responsibility we have to ourselves and to other people. I did not like it when my friend did that. But it’s not for me to say whether or not it was right for them to do it. The best I can do is be sad and miss them and respect their decision. I would have preferred if they didn’t do that, of course, but what do I know?
SBJ: There’s so much we miss when we’re communicating with each other, especially for mothers and daughters.
SW: I wonder what you do with that. When you’re younger, it can be the source of a lot of frustration, because there’s only so much that you can understand. You still don’t even know who you are, much less how people communicate, and how you’re being perceived. What does that mean in terms of our relationships with our parents when we get older? I think some people may never move beyond that place where it’s like, wait, no, you’re not listening to me, no, you’re not hearing me, and there’s an impasse. And that’s understandable. My hope is that I can move beyond that, but how far can we move beyond that? What’s realistic in terms of two different people from different generations, maybe from different countries? Because the way that I understand what’s correct, polite, desirable, appropriate are totally different from my mother. What can we do with this difference, with this gap? For me, this gap is filled with longing. A longing to be understood, a longing to be heard, a longing also to understand. But that longing comes up against a perimeter, a border, a wall. There’s only so much that I can understand because I’m still ensconced within my own thinking.
SBJ: There’s another gap between what we say to ourselves, who we think we are, and what we show the world.
SW: Someone like Linli, who has a really different personality than her mother, might not be able to say everything or much at all, even, of how she’s feeling and what she wants, and maybe she doesn’t even know herself. Her whole being is structured differently, and I think this inability, or lack, shapes and determines a lot of what we decide to do with our lives. Why are we writers and not ICU doctors? I was a very quiet child, and I feel like I also wasn’t allowed to speak that much. I could never really say what I wanted to say, and so maybe me being a writer is about wanting to do those things that I couldn’t do when I was younger. Linli obviously couldn’t ever really help her mother in the ways that she wanted to, or tried to, or was asked to. What do you do with all of that? I think the best thing that we can do with our time and with our lives is to try to do those things we wish we could do. Maybe Linli couldn’t help her mother, but she can help other people, other marginalized women.
SBJ: I’m thinking about the impact that our environment has on us, the impact that Linli’s environment has on her, and the environment of this book. This story feels like it could not take place anywhere but LA.
SW: It’s my first book, it’s where I’m from, it’s where I’ve spent most of my life. So, using LA as material for making what I wanted to make was kind of the only choice that I had. But it’s also really important because the Chinese immigrant diaspora community in LA is like no other place in the US, and the places where they go and hang out and the communities that they belong to are very ensconced in diaspora. I think people who aren’t from LA have this idea of what LA is, as I’m sure I have ideas about what New York is. But it’s different for someone who’s on the outside and for someone who’s a native.
SBJ: It’s funny, because you as the author and as a person have this palpable love and affection for Los Angeles. And it does this interesting thing in the book where Linli claims to hate it—I can’t wait to leave, I need to get out of here, this place sucks, it’s killing me, it’s trapping me. But there’s a distance between what she’s saying and how lovingly that world is inhabited.
SW: Strangely, it might be a little hard for me to talk about LA in this way, because it’s just the air that I breathe. It’s kind of like someone else is walking into your apartment, and they’re like, hmm, what’s that smell? And you’re like, what smell? There’s something that happens in your body that’s activated in this idea of home. Whether it’s a place, whether it’s the way the sun or the light is, whether it’s a food, or the face of a family member. My mother has some cognitive issues now, so, a lot of times when I’m talking to her, she’s like, I don’t know, I don’t remember. However, when I take her to this one rose garden where she was a volunteer for 10 years, everything comes back to her, and I can just see how in her brain, everything is connecting, and the synapses are firing, and she starts telling me, Okay, you know about this rose, this rose is like this, and smell that one. That one has never before been…, and there’s only… roses in the world… and see there how they’ve been trimmed? It’s because it’s this season right now, and next week, they’re probably gonna come in and start deadheading, and then… Then she remembers the past, too, and everything starts coming together. It’s like in Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, where he talks about something beyond language and beyond feeling and meaning that happens when you see or are with the person whom you love. And so I think for me in writing about LA, something happens that cannot happen with any other place.
