New Skin

by Sarah Wang

Genres: Humor & Satire; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

A scalding, darkly humorous debut following an enmeshed mother-daughter duo, both best friends and enemies, and the plastic surgery addiction that warps their lives into a perilous spiral
 
At twenty-six, Linli Feng is still trying to escape her mother Fanny’s orbit. But after three years of estrangement, just when Linli has been accepted into a prestigious graduate program, she is dragged back by Fanny’s latest medical catastrophe and forced to return home. 

For decades, Fanny has been addicted to plastic surgery, getting bargain procedures in the basements of LA’s bootleg beauty industry. Now Fanny’s disfigured face is in dangerous revolt, infected and collapsing yet again from black-market injectables.
 
But even as Linli wades through the wreck of family finances and juggles her mother’s medical care, Fanny has another secret in store. Fanny has won a spot on America’s Beauty Extreme, a reality television competition in which botched plastic surgery addicts compete for reconstructive surgery as riveted audiences tune in. When Linli attempts to rescue Fanny from the sinister subculture that has already claimed her mother’s face, she must at last confront the corrosive reality of American success that is at the fraught heart of their relationship. 

Release date: May 12, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 304

Sample

The unveiling was to occur on a Monday morning. A woman with frizzy hair sat in front of us in the waiting room, an oxygen tank hissing beside her as she wheezed. On the television mounted to the wall above the restroom door, newscasters reported the latest mass shooting while the air-quality ticker scrolled orange, the smog warning: Unhealthy for sensitive groups, de rigueur for Los Angeles. The door groaned every time it closed, exhaling industrial cleaning fumes into our lungs.

“Fanny Feng?” a nurse with an open folder in one hand called into the waiting room.

As my mother stood up, all eyes in the room turned to look at her face, swathed from chin to hairline and ear to ear in clumsy gauze. She hadn’t wanted me to see her face yet, insisting on bandaging it alone this morning. The effect was lumpy, lopsided, mimicking the terrain I imagined lay below. I picked up her bag and followed as she shuffled to the heavy wood door held open by the nurse’s splayed feet.

The ritual commenced: weight, symptoms, allergies, vitals, blood.

“What medications are you currently taking?”

“Vancomycin, meropenem, Vicodin, Klonopin,” my mother listed. “And Zorvolex. Also: prednisone, Ancef, and loratadine.”

“Ancef and loratadine. Okay.” The nurse squinted at a computer screen and tapped the keyboard with her long acrylic nails painted in green malachite swirls. “Got it. Anything else?”

“Losartan, propranolol, Fosamax, albuterol.”

“Everything but the kitchen sink?” The nurse tittered and patted my mother’s arm. Her nails made a scratching sound as they brushed against skin.

“You’re new here?” My mother smiled through the lumpy gauze. She loved it when people pitied her. “I like your nails.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Fanny.” The nurse finished tapping and rolled her chair back. “You come around here often?”

“A lot.” She nodded. “This week, a terrible infection. A lot of pain, headache, fever.”

“Fever? Your temperature is normal.”

“That’s because I took aspirin this morning.”

“Forgot that one.” The nurse winked, rolling back to the keyboard.

“Hmm.” The doctor tilted my mother’s head from side to side. He frowned, squinting. He touched the tip of his own nose, bulbous with a spurt of black hairs, and pinched it in contemplation. In his other hand, a mask of bloody gauze and tape stared at me.

It hurt to look but I looked anyway. My memory of her pre-surgical face still overrode the face in front of me, my eyes refusing to accept what she’d done. Staring at its complex surface was like listening to techno music, signals combined from different frequencies to make a single track.

It was worse than I’d imagined. The tip of her nose was purple. It twisted inward as if it were trying to smell itself. A black scab the size of a silver dollar crept from the left side of her nose onto her cheek. One more rhinoplasty and it’s going to fall off, the responsible doctors had been telling her for years. The irresponsible ones always made promises of straight, thin bridges and elegant nostrils. Perfection was always one procedure away.

Now her face was bloated, pulled, stretched; the surface was proofed dough that had been punched down and was beginning to rise again. A sharp pain stabbed my chest. My heart beat irregularly. I felt an immense weight on my sternum, a barbell on a paper drum.

“It looks like…” The doctor tossed the gauze into the trash, then crouched down and looked up my mother’s nose, aiming a small flashlight into the nostrils. The thin skin on either side of her nose glowed red.

“Necrosis?” I asked. Another sleepless night… in anticipation of the unveiling today, I had researched the range of scenarios in preparation, rabbit-holing into a spiral of gruesome body horrors and their referential histories.

I wondered what would be there on my mother’s face after it fell off. I pictured a big black hole, the locus of a void, where you could throw things in it and they would disappear forever. Murder evidence, bad things you’d done.

“Very gruesome, aren’t you?” the doctor said lightheartedly, chuckling.

“What is that?” my mother asked, her eyes darting from me to the doctor and back again.

“Never mind, Fanny.” The doctor shook his head. “I’ve good news. The nose is already on its way to healing. It will be fine, though not without some significant scarring. But this does call for some leech therapy.”

“Leech therapy?” I asked. “What on Earth is that?”

“Leeches will preserve soft tissue and extract some of the excess blood that’s collecting here. See?” He circled the little flashlight around the purple tip of her nose. “Slow blood flow into the veins. Leeches work well because they secrete peptides and proteins that prevent blood clots.”

“I had similar issues last time,” my mother said. “After the previous surgery.”

“What surgery?” I asked.

How much work had she gotten since I’d seen her last all those years ago? The differing aesthetic goals of myriad doctors had made her face a battleground of warring ideals. I scanned her face, the entire thing immobile from years of Botox injections. Useless. It was impossible to take inventory in a landscape that was constantly shifting.

This wasn’t my problem. She was an adult. It was her life. If she wanted to keep destroying her face, that was her prerogative. Yet here I was again. It wasn’t my problem but somehow I was responsible for taking care of it—for the next few days, at least. Then I would be gone again. Back on a plane to my real life. My own life.

“I’m going to leave you with my most excellent leech man. You’ll need to do the leech therapy for a week.” He paused, pinching the tip of his nose again. “By the way, do you see a psychiatrist? Therapist?”

“No, never.” My mother looked up at the ceiling.

“Would you like a referral?”

“I don’t need to see one of those people. I’ve had a terrible experience. There are horrible doctors out there doing illegal things to people. I’m sure you can see that this is a matter of medical malpractice.” She pointed at her face. “This is the worst infection I’ve ever gotten. I have a headache the size of America.”

My mother would rather be impaled on a rotating spit, skinned, and charred black before going to therapy. All my attempts to get her to go to see psychologists had been thwarted by some emergency or another. Food poisoning, a ghost haunting, lost keys. Our mantel could have been lined with gold statuettes, she was so dedicated to her performances.

“Infection is on its way out, thankfully.” He gazed at her with the neutral empathy of a professional. “I see you’ve done a Westernization of the eyes?”

She nodded.

“Rhinoplasty?” He gently pinched her inflamed nose. “You’ve had quite a few.”

She winced, squeezing her eyes shut.

“When did you start getting these, ah, types of interventions?” he asked.

“After I came to this country.” She peeled back three fingers, counting the decades.

“And how many have you had?” He leaned back and tilted his head.

She shrugged. Her face remained immobile. A poster of perky daffodils hung on the wall behind a biohazard bin full of discarded syringes. The fluorescent lights buzzed above, a small army of tropical insects.

“Hundreds,” I said, my voice creaking with insolence. “We’ll take that referral.”

With that, the doctor nodded. He shook our hands simultaneously, one hand for each of us, before throwing open the door. “Nurse!” he called down the hall.

The doctors had debrided the dead tissue at the tip of her nose in the emergency room. Now we could only wait and hope that the rest of the tissue would receive enough blood flow so that the remaining flesh survived. What it would look like, though, after the swelling subsided and the stitches came out was unknown. Then there would just be a reprise of what had come before. My mother would need more surgery to correct the problems that had resulted from the last surgery. A contemporary ouroboros.

When the leech man arrived, he was nothing like I had expected.

“Hello there!” A young man in scrubs carrying a small red cooler backed into the room, pushing the door open with his butt. He had extremely white, straight teeth. “Just sit back and we’ll get started.”

The leech man pulled purple latex gloves out of a box affixed to the wall and snapped them on. He ripped open a small packet and dabbed my mother’s nose with an alcohol wipe. Opening the cooler, he plucked a small black leech out of a plastic container half filled with water. Its glistening body wiggled around between his fingers. He placed the tapered mouth on the tip of my mother’s nose, where it instantly attached, the rest of its slimy body hanging, undulating, then body-rolling as the nectar began to flow. Bloodletting in action, pleasingly anachronistic.

“I’ll be back in ten minutes.” He grinned widely. “Don’t be alarmed if it falls off. When a leech is done feeding, it will detach. If that happens, just come to the nurses’ station to find me.”

The door shut softly with a click.

An email arrived from a booking site, prompted by a recent hotel search. I was starting grad school in the fall and planning my first cross-country drive from where I currently lived in Washington state to New York. After packing my car full of what little I owned, a few boxes of clothes and books, and saying goodbye to my colleagues at the nonprofit, I would drive east, stopping in Chicago to visit the Museum of Surgical Science and eat cracker-crust pizza with giardiniera. A road trip across America. I’d always hoped I’d have the chance to do it.

I watched the leech sucking my mother’s blood. She sat with her eyes slightly crossed, looking down at the lucky parasite. The night before, I’d had a strange dream about sleepwalking to the refrigerator, taking out a pot of soup, placing it on the floor in the kitchen, pulling my underwear down, squatting above it, and peeing.

My mother turned to me. The leech swung from her nose, feasting on the buffet. I thought of ancient Rome: bloodletting, vomitoria, leprosy—the oldest disease in the world. The scab on her cheek was meaty and thick, like beef jerky. If it got bigger, if it grew until it covered the entire territory of her face, we could peel it off and there would be a new face beneath it.

“The saddest thing about betrayal,” she said out of the corner of her mouth, “is that it never comes from your enemies.”

“Who, exactly, has been betrayed?” I was offended.

“We’ll take that referral,” she mocked my shaky voice. “Ever since you were born, you’ve been keeping me from happiness. The fortune teller warned me against having a baby.”

Sitting there with a huge scab on her ruined face, the leech sucking blood from her twisted nose. She had thrown her face away. The biggest shame of all.

“I didn’t do this to you. If I were keeping you from happiness, you’d be happy by now.”

“What kind of daughter abandons her mother? You disappeared.” She hyperventilated; the leech held strong. “They cut me open to take you out. You tried to kill me. But I fought back. I survived.”

I cracked my neck, my knuckles. Left. Right. I was a boxer and it was only the first round. They put me here to get knocked out. I didn’t want to fight. I was only a ringer.

“I left to get away from you,” I said softly. “I think we both know that.”

In the womb, I’d twice wrapped my umbilical cord around my neck. My heart had stopped beating. This, my mother claimed, had caused her to almost die too. I’d never known if it was true. But I believed it. Forty-nine hours in labor, followed by an emergency cesarean section. She wore the scar above her vagina like a badge.

“When I’m here, I keep you from happiness,” I said. “When I’m not here, I’m abandoning you.”

“Anyway, you can’t leave now.” She crossed her arms over her chest and lifted her chin. The leech sucked away, its ridged body growing tumid with her blood, contracting as it fed.

“Why can’t I?”

“Your ma is dying. I can feel death in my bones. At night, ghosts circle my bed.” She mimicked crying. Her mouth fell open, releasing a whimper.

“My return flight is in two days.” The thought of my road trip in three and a half weeks and my new apartment a few blocks from campus lifted me out of the depressing exam room.

She turned her face toward me again, expectant. I didn’t know what she wanted me to do.

Something had changed since I’d left three years ago without notice and moved to Olympia. My mother’s emaciated body retained none of the defiance of previous years. She slept most of the day until the sky turned dark. I’d been back for four days and we’d been to six different doctors. Every day, I belonged less and less to myself.

Copies of a glossy brochure were stacked on a small table. “Good Health Is the Greatest Business of All.” How easy it was to forget that hospitals were businesses. I feigned interest in it for a minute before putting it back on the table. I opened a book I’d assigned for a workshop I led. A piece of paper fell out. A student loan letter from the bank.

There was so much to do before I left for New York: bank documents to send, plants and furniture to be sold. Wrapping up the twelve-week course for my Wednesday women’s group.

A curtain of longing fell over me. I was anxious to get back to my job. I’d been working at a nonprofit for the past two and a half years where I led workshops with incarcerated women who had been indicted on federal charges. They were in various stages of criminal cases: awaiting trial or post-conviction and pre-sentencing. All the women who participated in our workshops had experienced abuse, most often complex trauma throughout their lives since childhood, and epigenetically, even before birth. The situations they found themselves in at this stage of their lives were a result of everything they had gone through. My job was to help them begin to find a language for it all by reading stories about what other people had undergone and relating it to their own lives.

Studying psychology in grad school would be the next stage. For the first time, I felt like I knew what to do with the rest of my life.

I stared at the poster of daffodils on the wall opposite my mother. I took out my notebook and made a list of things I needed to do.

After ten minutes, the leech had expanded to five times its original size, the body both girthier and lengthier, dangling down, hovering above her breast. Maybe it could work on reversing her inverted nipple next.

The leech man returned as promised—stopwatch around his neck beeping as he reentered the room—nodded, satisfied, and plucked it off. Back into the cooler it went.

“How do I look?” my mother asked, raising her chin.

“Perfect,” the leech man exclaimed.

I gave the leech man a dirty look.

The tip of my mother’s nose had turned from purple to deep red, a slight improvement. But it was constricted at the nostrils, swollen at the bridge, knobby at the tip, and twisted to the left, where it stared menacingly at the scab. She grinned at the leech man. For the first time since my arrival, my mother looked happy.

“Linli!”

Piles of clean laundry surrounded me. The cloying scent of detergent clung to the air. I’d fallen asleep. The laptop on the coffee table in front of me had finished uploading images of the furniture I was selling. Bookshelf, nightstand, sofa, bed frame, kitchen table, and chairs. Everything must go. I hit PUBLISH, feeling accomplished for getting a head start on my to-do list.

“Liiiin-liii!”

“What?” I shouted back.

“Come here!”

I heard the sound of crying from the bedroom. A guttural moan that grew higher in pitch before dropping down again, sending mercury coursing through my veins. I closed the laptop.

In the darkness of the room, the curtains drawn to maintain her vampire den, she lay on her bed in a strange position. Her arms were splayed out perpendicular to her torso. Her legs were straight, one leg pinned to the other leg in a crucifixion.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, my heart rate spiking.

“I can’t move my body.” Her eyes peered at me from her unmoving head.

“Why are you lying like that?” Walking over to the foot of her bed, I touched her socked toes like I’d seen neurosurgeons do during brain surgeries on television. “Can you feel this?”

“No,” she wailed. “I am paralyzed.”

Holding on to a big toe, I squeezed. “You can’t feel this?”

“I can’t feel my body.”

I squeezed harder.

“Ouch!” she cried.

“I thought you said you can’t feel anything.”

She moaned, a deep mournful howl originating from seven thousand miles across Earth, from our ancestral home in Hubei, from where her family had immigrated to Taiwan. A stream of drool that could solve the city’s drought crisis flowed from the corner of my mother’s mouth.

“How long have you been like this?” I sighed, wiping her chin with a pillowcase hem.

“A long time.”

“Are you sure you can’t move?” I walked to the side of the bed and picked up an outstretched arm. Slack and heavy, it bounced back onto the bed, deadweight, when I let go.

“I think I’m paralyzed.” Short inhalations of breath replaced her crying. Her eyes rolled from one side to the other, following me. “Seriously.”

“Maybe you’re taking too many painkillers,” I said, flipping on the bedside light.

“I might be quadriplegic.”

“From the leech?” I walked around to the other side of the bed. “I have heard that they carry disease. Poison the bloodstream.”

“They do?” She lifted her head to look at me.

“You can move your head,” I said, leaning in close to her face. I could see where the torn flesh on her nose had melded together, the enjambed pores on either side of the junction like polka dots on a cheap shirt where the seams didn’t match up. Cupping her jaw, I slowly moved her head from left to right. “Good mobility.” I nodded approvingly.

“I’m paralyzed.”

I sat on the edge of the bed and stroked her forehead. Leaning in, I moved my face in closer to hers until we were almost kissing.

“Get out of here.” She winced and squeezed her eyes shut.

“All right.” I shrugged, standing up. “I’m calling 911.”

“Why?” Her double eyelids widened.

“If you’re paralyzed, then we need to call 911. I can’t carry you to the car. I don’t think you should even be moved. This is serious. We need paramedics. You might have to be hospitalized. For a long time. Paralysis is a symptom of imminent coma. I still have power of attorney, right?”

She stared at me. Her chest rose as she breathed through her mouth. The way her nose was shaped made it look as if someone had pinched it, given it a good twist, and then it had stayed that way, like clay. The bruises around her eyes were fading into blooms of yellows and greens. I reached for the phone. I hit 9-1 and paused, finger hovering. On cue, she lifted her head.

“You’re a terrible daughter.”

I smiled. “Am I?”

“You’re going to call 911?” She huffed, rolling her surgically sculpted eyes. She brought both hands into a prayer at her chest and pointed her toes. “How dare you?”

It would never end. I had to get out of here. Deep breath in. Out. Slow exhale. Sometimes people came in to lead meditation sessions before workshops. In, out. In, out. My flight was the day after tomorrow. I could do it. We stared at each other, unblinking, double to mono.

The most popular surgery in Asia, the creation of eyelid creases gave you younger, more innocent-looking eyes. Promotions in Chinese advertised this promise on flyers left on the counters of beauty parlors and printed on paper placemats at restaurants all over San Gabriel Valley. The only beauty treatment more widespread than double-eyelid surgery was skin bleaching. The bottle of skin bleaching cream in my mother’s bathroom smelled compellingly like sour milk.

When I was in elementary school, my mother made me wear strips of adhesive eye tape to simulate double eyelids. Like her, I was born with monolids. My eyes were two slits, which she would mimic, squeezing hers nearly shut and peering at me stupidly. If I wore the tape, according to the box of double-lid eye adhesives, eventually the creases would become permanent. They hurt my eyes. I rubbed them during class, despite being warned by my mother, unable to help myself. After numerous eye infections, eyelid cuts, and trips to the school health center, the nurse shined a small silver flashlight on my swollen eyes while I lay back, my knees dangling off the edge of the exam table. “What did you put on your eyes, Linli?” She called my mother immediately and forbade her to stick the tape on my eyes again. “If you don’t want to help yourself, that’s your problem,” my mother had scolded when we got home, tossing the box of beauty adhesives into the garbage.

She closed her eyes, laced her fingers, and placed them over her stomach. Had I aged out of child abuse? A bar of sunlight streamed in from beneath the window shade, illuminating dust particles sus. . .