Sarah Wang’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Harper’s Bazaar, n+1, and BOMB, among other publications. Now, her debut novel, New Skin, has hit the shelves at bookstores.
Following a mother and daughter trapped in a toxic cycle of love, resentment, and reinvention, New Skin is a scalding, darkly humorous debut novel about plastic surgery addiction and the false promises of the American Dream. When Linli Feng returns home to care for her estranged mother after another botched procedure, she is pulled into the dangerous world of black-market beauty treatments and exploitative reality television, forcing both women to confront the damage that obsession and survival have inflicted on their lives.
We asked Wang to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
My mother used to read me these comic books called Lao Fu Zi, written in Chinese, starring Old Master Q and Big Potato, a bumbling bald duo who schemes to get hair and runs into trouble in the afterlife. They time-travel, have trouble communicating with westerners, criticize the Chinese Communist Party, and—as aging men with traditional values—clash with contemporary culture and the evolving world around them. It’s a riot. As a kid, I loved sitting on my mother’s lap and flipping through the pages with her as she read. The hilarity and mischief were addictive, as was our mirth.
What book helped you through puberty?
I found a copy of The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer when I was in junior high. It was on the floor in front of my locker. Someone must have dropped it. I hadn’t watched Twin Peaks and didn’t even know the show existed. For me, the book was a standalone. I was terrified by it and also darkly fascinated. There were pages missing intentionally as part of the book’s layout. Laura was only a few years older than me, but a universe away from my reality as a bespectacled second-generation Chinese kid in the suburbs of Los Angeles. She was into BDSM, riding motorcycles, and would sneak out to go to a bar called One Eyed Jacks. Later on, when I was in high school, I had a friend who was just like Laura Palmer: blonde, a cheerleader who would sneak out at night, meet strange men, and black out after drinking stolen handles of Jack Daniels. It was scary, but since I had already been introduced to this character in fiction, she felt somewhat familiar to me. I think I understood, unconsciously, the freedom of being young, feeling limitless, the bond of teenage female friendship, and the thrill of having another life beyond school and your parents.
What book do you wish 16-year-old you had read?
A book, written in Chinese by my grandfather, whose title my mother translated as Young Girl’s Feeling. It’s about girlhood; teenage secrets and private thoughts; first love; the virtues of making a date at dusk; and what to not do in matters of love. The preface warns against the pursuit of perfect love, which my grandfather writes is what people are wont to pursue. In July of 1964, he was invited to speak on “Love Between the Sexes” at a youth training camp in Taiwan, which is the origin of the idea for this book.
I wish I had read this book when I was young not only to think about the philosophy of love but also because it was written by a Chinese psychology professor from a Taiwanese perspective. I’m diasporic. The Taiwanese prioritize the community and family over the individual. How do these values translate to girlhood and puberty? What is universal and what is specific to Taiwanese culture? Does a Taiwanese young girl want what a Taiwanese American young girl wants? As an American-born second-generation immigrant, I’m always yearning for this other part of what belongs to me but that I am estranged from.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School. The way that he writes about language and all the ways it can be deployed, used as material, is a masterclass in this kind of fiction—which should have a name if it doesn’t already. Does it? Please let me know if there is one.
Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick for a lesson in abjection as jouissance and failure as a way to begin. She’s also a rare writer that makes me laugh.
Nuar Alsadir’s Animal Joy for autotheory and psychoanalytic repositioning.
Ariana Reines’s The Cow, a brilliant book of poetry that’s also devastating.
Sergio de la Pava’s A Naked Singularity. There’s a section of the novel that I actually do teach in my fiction workshop on how to write a scene using only dialogue. This court scene is perfect in every way. Funny, precise, polyphonic, and absolutely scathing.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
Carceral Capitalism by Jackie Wang. It’s about mass incarceration, debt, and policing. Intergenerational debt and the debt economy are major themes in my novel. I think Jackie wrote it when she was living at a punk house and writing a blog. The book really takes you through the ways in which the carceral state is intrinsic to the structure and function of capitalism. The characters in New Skin are subject to the carceral state—which includes ICE—and when you’re arrested for a crime as a poor person or disappeared by immigration enforcement, the stakes are much greater. I once went to watch arraignments in Manhattan’s criminal court at night. They have arraignments until 1 a.m. because that’s the only way they can get through all the arrests. Do people know this? What’s more unbelievable is that when I was there, I saw a man who was arrested for jumping the turnstile and then after he was released on his own recognizance, he was given a free Metrocard, which the court hands out to people who can’t afford a ride. If you’re outraged, then read Carceral Capitalism and then New Skin to understand why debt and prisons—including immigrant detention centers—are essential to the capitalist state’s profit model.
What books are on your nightstand now?
I’m reading Larissa Pham’s Discipline and Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s Superfan. Colm Tóibín’s new book of short stories The News from Dublin and Jared Jackson’s forthcoming collection Locals are next. So are Natalie Adler’s Waiting on a Friend and Annakeara Stinson’s Nerve Damage. I am addicted to nonfiction audiobooks, so I always have a queue going. Right now, Arabelle Sicardi’s The House of Beauty is playing. I just finished Nina St. Pierre’s Love is a Burning Thing, which I loved so much it hurt.