Susan Lieu > Quotes

“Ba was forced to play a role he never wanted. A widow with four children and now the owner of two nail salons with no employees. He was forced to become the glue that only Má could be. It was only inevitable that everything would fall apart.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“She pushed us out of the store like I had done something egregious. I officially felt like a whale. The next two shops did the same exact thing. It was as clear as day: I failed at being Vietnam.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“What she didn’t realize was how her fixation on perfection would cut up her body, our family, and her future.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“For years, I have tried to come up with theories to explain her erratic behavior. She could have had an undiagnosed bipolar disorder. Then again, Má and Ba used to argue a lot.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“Má’s cardinal rule was never to waste anything, be it money, time, and especially food. Because we were immigrants, the odds were already stacked against us.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“The giddy smile I’d had the entire party sagged. My eyes started to sting. I didn’t know what to say. Was he jealous? Or worse, was he right? Was I actually the fool?”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“Once my sister and I finished our homework, there was always something more to do: arrange the nail polish in numerical order; carry the customers’ purses to the hand-drying station; feed the parking meters; fold the hand towels; straighten the magazines.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“was a jungle Asian through and through.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“When I am with my family, we talk about three things: how to make money, how to save money, and what we are going to eat next.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“Don’t work so hard. We get to experience life on earth because of the heavens. When you live a life always resisting, life becomes a struggle,” he said. His advice surprised me. I never took him for much of a philosopher, but I was intrigued. Which moment in his life made him realize this?”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“Neither of my parents finished high school. My shame turned to fury. I wanted to tackle these elitist brats. I got in fully on my own merit, but I couldn’t help but wonder: Was I the admissions office’s mistake?”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“American children asked the question “But why?” all the time. It was seen as charming curiosity, a sign of intelligence, the instinct for negotiation, and an annoying question parents have to tolerate for a few years. But Vietnam elders didn’t see that question as cute. It was seen as defiant and disrespectful. “But” was a word that divides, rather than deepens. The more I used it, the more I pushed my family away, and I was doing exactly that with my aunt.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“I wanted their judgment to stop. I wished someone would give me affection and reassure me that I was enough. I wanted to be loved. So I wrote down every piece of food I ate and every mile I ran, daydreaming for a prince-like boyfriend to save me.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“And twice a year, these episodes would be so bad I would have suicidal ideation but never acted on it. It was usually a boyfriend who eased me back to reality.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“But then, on a brisk February evening my junior year, I attended a free yoga class at the Harvard Divinity School Andover Chapel. I came in fully expecting to do cat, cow, and child’s pose. Our instructor, Nicholas, who was also a graduate student there, had us on our backs with taut abs, legs held in the air in a ninety-degree position, neck lifted off the ground, hands stretched above our heads. I had become the sleeping dragon. One minute in, my body was trembling. You can’t. I told myself I could. You can’t. I opened my eyes and saw everyone else peacefully holding their pose. This voice yelling at me wasn’t my own. So where was it coming from? You can’t. It was Hang telling me to dump my elementary school best friends who still played with toy horses at thirteen. He said I needed to be more strategic about my social ranking. You can’t be friends with them. My sister excluding me from her life when we became teenagers. You can’t hang out with us. Ba calling me pathetic when I told him I wasn’t pursuing med school. You can’t even try because you’re too dumb. I screamed, You can’t, right back inside of my head, telling all of them what I never had the courage to say. My body shuddered as the rage escaped my body like bats flying out from a cave. Hot tears fell from the sides of my eyes into the chapel carpet floor. And then I heard a clear voice inside of me speak. It was not mine, it was someone else’s. “All those times you’ve felt unloved or alone, you weren’t. God, through the presence of the body, has always been there for you.” Who was this voice? And how could my body be the key to loving myself? My body was always something I had seen as an inconvenience, a detached thing I had to fix. But tonight, I felt welcome to get to know my body.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“Bà Ngoại was usually in the kitchen cooking and taking menthol hits of green Eagle oil from her front pajama pocket. She wasn’t exactly the freshly baked cookies and milk kind of grandma. When I got a runny nose, she would scratch my back skin off with the edge of a quarter, leaving pink lines all over my body. And if I got really sick, she would scoop out some black liquid from a five-gallon glass jar she had at the top of the pantry that housed a giant dead black cobra. Tracing the smoke from a burning-hot incense stick up and down my back, she would spit the black mystery juice all over me as I lay face-down on an old ragged towel. After that, I much preferred taking a teaspoon of thick cough syrup, even if it made me gag.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“It made me realize we have to connect with our ancestors, our past, so we can move on to the future with more confidence and more closure.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“My blood started to boil. What was the point of probation if there was no accountability? My strategy to take him down was”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“remember that it was a privilege to have self-actualization crises instead of self-preservation ones, I could ground myself again. It was a miracle my family had even made it to America.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“At the shop, we labored hand and foot, serving Americans. And tonight, even if it was just for two hours, we weren’t the servers, we were the served.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“daydreamed we could sidestep our egos and acknowledge how we had hurt each other in the past. Reaffirm our love for each other. Reframe the narrative to turn our pain into power! Above all, I wanted his validation.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“Since I started telling my family story about my mother’s medical malpractice death, I learned about patient advocate principles: make a list of questions, bring a person to help support, ask for what I need. But even knowing all of this, having to insist on talking to my ob-gyn felt extremely uncomfortable.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“How did I come to distort my narrative over the years that I was so unloved? Ba and Dì Nhung were barely making any money at the nail salon, yet they bought me a cross-country ticket so I could choose between two Ivies. Ba made countless sacrifices for years so I could have that privilege.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“Over the years, I tried to cope with therapy, exercise, meditation, and supplements, but my family’s judgmental comments still rattled me and sent me spiraling.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“On my second trip to Việt Nam, right after I graduated college, I visited my cousin, one of Aunt #1's many sons, who had a rice paddy. My new red leather New Balance sneakers got a little muddy as I squatted down to pull a thin green blade of grass from the earth. At the bottom was a very tiny grain of rice. No wonder Bà Ngoại would lose her shit every time I didn't finish my bowl. It was literal backbreaking work to get it from the field to the dinner table.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“The doctor, like all humans, would have his karma served to him one day. In his Buddhist way, he was trying to give me some kind of assurance that there was a prevailing order of right and wrong in this chaotic world. That would be nice.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“My $14,000 lesson was that my spiritual home was inside me all along, inside my body. No one could take that away from me, and I didn’t have to pay another goddamn dollar to access it either.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“I became enraged at Ba, at Má’s life-ending tummy tuck, at the pure misogyny of needing to have a flat stomach to find a good husband or be beautiful.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“Ba, my father, stopped singing karaoke on Sunday mornings. My aunts and grandparents on my mom’s side moved out, so we had all these rice bowls we never used anymore. And nobody ever talked about it. Every year, on her death anniversary, we would light incense for her. Then we ate in silence”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter

“My name is Susan Liễu. I come from a line of courageous nail salon workers who are my heroes. Má was a manicurist, and Ba was a manicurist too. I am the manicurists’ daughter and, this is just the beginning.”
― Susan Lieu, The Manicurist's Daughter