Jessica Fein: Welcome. I'm Jessica Fein, and this is the “I Don’t Know How You Do It” podcast, where we talk to people whose lives seem unimaginable from the outside and dive into how they're able to do things that look undoable. I'm so glad you're joining me on this journey, and I hope you enjoy the conversation. 

Welcome back to the show. Before we get into today's episode, I want to take a second to thank every one of you who has been reaching out after reading my book, Breath Taking. Every single review that's posted or email that I get means the world to me. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And if you haven't read it yet, you can get Breath Taking wherever you love to get your books in whatever format you prefer. Printed, ebook, audio, whatever you want, you [00:01:00] can get it that way. 

Now on to today's show. My guest today, Susan Lieu, is a self described multi-hyphenate storyteller.

And boy, does she have a story to tell. Susan has long been searching for answers about her family's past and about her own future. Refugees from the Vietnam War, Susan's family escaped to California in the 1980s after five failed attempts. When they got here, Susan's mother was their savvy, charismatic North Star, setting up two successful nail salons and orchestrating every success until Susan was 11.

That year, her mother died from a botched tummy tuck. After the funeral, no one was ever allowed to talk about her or what had happened. For the next 20 years, Susan navigated a series of cascading questions alone. Why did the most perfect person in her life want to change her body? Why would no one tell her about her mother's life [00:02:00] in Vietnam?

And how did this surgeon, who preyed on the Vietnamese immigrants go on operating after her mother's death? Sifting through depositions, tracking down the surgeon's family, and enlisting the help of spirit channelers, Susan uncovered the painful truth of her mother herself and the impossible ideal of beauty.

Susan writes about all of it in her memoir, The Manicurist's Daughter, which is about grief, trauma, body image, strength, and shared culture, and finding your place in the world. The Manicurist's Daughter was an Apple Book of the Month and has been featured in the New York Times, NPR Books, Elle Magazine, LA Times, The Washington Post, and many, many other places.

Susan's also a playwright and performer who took her award winning autobiographical solo show, 140 Pounds, How Beauty Killed My Mother, to New York. on a 10 city national tour with sold out premieres and accolades from Los Angeles Times, NPR, and American Theatre. I could just go on and on, but instead, [00:03:00] without further ado, I bring you Susan Lieu.

Welcome, Susan. I'm so happy to meet you. 

Susan Lieu: Oh, I'm so honored to be here. 

Jessica FeinWell, I have to tell you, I just returned from vacation. I was in Sault Ste. Marie, Canada, on the beach, reading your book, The Manicurist's Daughter, that was in the most beautiful place and like so enthralled and underlining and putting sticky notes and then taking a break only to like hop in the canoe for a little bit.

So it was very idyllic. And also, thank you. 

Susan Lieu: I mean, were you ugly crying on the beach though? 

Jessica Fein: I am not much of a cryer, so let's just start with that. But there was a lot that I was like, Hmm, I gotta know more about that. And the best part about doing this is that when I read a book and I'm like, oh, I wanna know more about that, I can, I get the opportunity to, okay.

Let's just start by sharing that this is a deeply, deeply rich [00:04:00] story. We've got a family story that is dealing with grief, generational trauma. Immigration, body image, beauty standards, and ultimately, how we find our place in the world. That's a lot that you've packed in there. 

Susan Lieu: A little something for everybody.

Jessica Fein: Little something for everybody. So tell us a bit about the book. 

Susan Lieu: You know, I never intended to talk about my family tragedy because actually I was never allowed to. So this book is about how the American dream goes terribly wrong. When I was 11 years old, my mother died from a botched tummy tuck. And for the next two decades, my family has never spoken of her ever again.

And anytime I asked questions, they were like, You're being too emotional. You're stuck in the past. And for two decades, I believed them. Until it came to a head when I was getting a lot of pressure from my dad and aunts to have kids after I got married. And then I thought, how can I become a mother if I don't know my own?

And so I had to confront [00:05:00] all my demons, the demons of me, of my body, image issues, of my family, so that I could become a mom. 

Jessica Fein: I was so struck by the fact that nobody talked about it. You would even be at the anniversary of her death at her grave and not be allowed to talk about it. And you even wrote that it made you feel like your mother was dead.

But in a sense. You were, too. Talking about her was just off limits. And you wrote there was nothing you could do to change that. Yeah. And yet, you spent many, many years trying to get to the bottom of what happened. Right? You joined a cult. You tried to track down your mother's killer's family. You sought justice through spirit channelers.

And you put on a touring one woman show about your family tragedy. All of that. And you wrote a book. So first of all, I'm wondering what made you get from the place of there's nothing you can do about it to, Oh, I'm going to do something about it? 

Susan Lieu: Yeah. I [00:06:00] mean, this situates us back to when I am at business school.

I went to Yale School of Management. It's my second year there. And the teacher is saying, you can do what you want in life. The world is your oyster. And I'm sitting there reflecting, going like, I'm the children of refugees. And yet, I am in this unique position, to be so educated, I went to Harvard, I went to Yale, but the man who killed my mother, at the time he was on probation, 19 lawsuits against him, didn't have malpractice insurance, walked away, never paying my family a dime, how does that injustice exist?

And now that I was so educated, had so much privilege, I was like, This is the time to avenge my mother's death. Like, there's no other moment except for right now. And so I said, I'm gonna go find him. And I'm gonna make him pay. And so, I started researching him. He was still practicing on probation. And I was like, great.

I am going to, like, send him targeted Facebook ads. I'm gonna pay for a billboard by the freeway exit by his clinic. I'm gonna [00:07:00] get a journalist to write an exposé because I felt like now, as an adult in my 30s, I could do something. I could do something that my family, who had such limited English at the time, could not ever do.

But then I tracked him down. I was talking to my lawyer friend, and I was like, Can we do a class action lawsuit? Can I contact all the other women he had hurt? And then she was like, Susan, he died last month. 

Jessica Fein: I couldn't believe it when I got to the point and you wrote at that point, something like now with the enemy gone, who is there to rail against?

This might sound weird, but that resonated with me because I have a lot of loss and my listeners know I've been through a tremendous amount of loss and some really insidious diseases and I can think of those diseases as the enemy. And I have a couple of friends who have experienced real loss where there wasn't a clear cause.

And I always think, without that enemy, where do you direct the anger? Now, you knew exactly where you were directing your anger, and you were ready to, like, go actually confront it in person. How [00:08:00] did finding out he had died change things for you? 

Susan Lieu: Oh, my God. I had hit a wall, you know? I mean, really, my family could really only offer me this closure around this unresolved grief around my mom.

They wouldn't talk. They've shut me down for decades. I find this other figure that could possibly give me that salvation. Boom. He's gone. So it was terrible because it led me back eventually to my family, right? Which is like the very structure where I felt so small for so many years, where I felt so shameful that it was always my fault for bringing up the past.

And here I was being like, man, the thing that could have been brought me out of it, slipped through my fingers. 

Jessica Fein: Well, you go to your family, but you go somewhere else too, which was so fascinating to me, which was spirit channeling. And you said when you were growing up, that was like a normal part of your family.

So first of all, let's bring everybody to the same page in terms of what is spirit channeling? Like, what does that look like? Cause you gave some pretty vivid descriptions of it. [00:09:00] 

Susan Lieu: Yeah. So I mean, just to ground us all, we all watched the movie Ghost. Whoopi Goldberg has Patrick Swayze come through her and start giving messages to Demi Moore, right?

And she doesn't know what's going on. And eventually Demi Moore's like, whoa, my late husband is coming through you. Okay, so a ghost takes over your body and expresses messages. And growing up, my dad spirit channeled. And it would happen sometimes on the weekends. And I want everyone to understand that he's a very introverted man.

He does not want attention, but there are times after he lights incense that he, I would say like there's like a rhythmic rocking back and forth, there may be wailing, there may be crying, and then messages will come through. Sometimes it's people we know, sometimes it's people we don't know, and my family will hold space to see if we're getting messages from the ancestors.

Jessica Fein: Okay. I mean, I don't want to take us like too far down a path, but I have a hundred questions about that. Sure. First of all, it's interesting. You said sometimes on the weekends [00:10:00] see Spirit Channels. Is that like, you know, he's doing something else during the week, but that's like weekend time to see who's out there.

Susan Lieu: I mean, my family worked at the nail salon seven days a week, so we're working, right? And on the weekends, like on Sundays, we would light incense and honor our ancestors and have a few hours to watch Paris by night. Right. Right. We would just have a little bit more family time and I believe that when my father would light incense There is a communion with the ancestors and I'm not saying it happened every weekend It was a thing that happened once in a while But my family on the weekends we would drive an hour to go get nail salon supplies get our Vietnamese groceries and go see local spirit chandlers, psychics. It was mediums. It was just a part of our culture 

Jessica Fein: I am fascinated by that and I would like to meet your dad and I want this whole spirit channeling thing. 

Susan Lieu: Yeah, I mean, and we go on the book, there's Psychic Cindy and there's Uncle Number Nine. And actually Uncle Number Nine, you can totally meet him and go to his compound.

It's near [00:11:00] Houston and he is a hoot. 

Jessica Fein: Tell us about a spirit channeling experience you had that really changed things for you. 

Susan Lieu: Okay, I think that my question, no, my mother and without my family speaking, I went to read thousands of pages of depositions where my family's sharing about what happened, where the doctor is sharing about him and his advertising tactics to the Vietnamese community.

So I'm reading all this documentation. I'm going back to Vietnam several times to see which family members will talk, and for a long time nobody does. But every time I learn something new, I put it on stage in my one woman show. And so now I've done two of them, and I go to San Francisco. And I want to retrace my mother's last day, so I go back to my childhood home.

I drive to the plastic surgery clinic. I get in trouble because I accidentally set the fire alarm off. But I get an email from Psychic Cindy that says she's available to meet me. When she was unavailable, I go, Oh my God, this is a message from my mom. So I go meet her. And whenever [00:12:00] I meet a medium, I confirm that it's my mother on the other side.

I think it's very easy for our mind to play tricks on us. And they say, Oh, there's a woman figure here. And she really misses you and says she loves you. And like. Of course, there might be people out there that are tricking you, trying to manipulate you, get money off you. I get all that. It's a business.

But I also get that if you can verify and ask specific questions of the person on the other side, and once you're a believer, you can actually gather a lot of information from the other dimension. Right? That's a possibility. There are fakers out there, and there's reals. So, you gotta do your due diligence.

So I did my due diligence, and I asked my mother, I said, Hey, should I keep doing this? Should I keep putting on these shows? Like, am I exploiting your story? Or, I don't know why, but I feel like I need to keep doing this. Part of me was to prove that I wasn't a coward in my own life. I had found so much joy in performance and stand up comedy, and I walked away from that after I got heckled.

But there was this turn where I was wondering, if I am going to become a mother, I need to confront my own demons around [00:13:00] that. This convergence of who I want to be, of knowing her, I felt like it was coming to a head, and I felt like, should I stop? Because my family is not engaging. Right? I have showed them one recording of the first show.

Only one brother out of the three siblings even watched it. And he just was like, Whoa, that was really intense and goes to watch football afterwards. Like, it wasn't what I thought it was gonna be. Right? I thought there was gonna be so much reconciliation, but there wasn't. And so I talked to Psychic Cindy.

My mother says, This isn't about you. We are doing the work of healers. We are working together. We've got bigger things to do together. My sister hears that recording and she was like, What? This isn't about you? I'm like, No, it's not. Because when I go on stage, it becomes therapeutic theater. I'm creating a container for all of our grief, for us to transform our trauma into healing.

We're doing it together through art. My sister goes, I'm going to come. I'm going to come see your next show. That was transformational. And also my sister shares the recording with my [00:14:00] siblings and my dad. And they all heard it too. They heard me crying, they heard me pleading with my mother, they heard all of it.

But they didn't comment about any of it. They just commented about the business advice because I also was like, Oh, do you have any business advice for each of my siblings who run businesses? And that's the only thing they could comment on. But I know they heard the whole recording. 

Jessica Fein: Well, they heard it and then they come to the show and you mentioned that the first time you actually spoke openly as a family was in the aftermath of the show.

Susan Lieu: In front of 140 people. 

Jessica Fein: Yes. Were you like, hold up, what is happening? We're actually talking about this here? Like, how did that happen?

Susan Lieu: Oh my god, I was so nervous about even asking them if they want to be a part of the post show talkback. And they're hesitant, but Wendy and my brother were like, okay, we'll do it.

And I remember when I was performing my show, like, I play 15 characters in 65 minutes. And so I'm telling the entire arc of our family story. And I lock eyes with my sister, and I like, forget my line, I'm like, oh my god, now I know where [00:15:00] she's sitting. But at the end of the show, she leans over to my brother and said, Hey, is that true?

Did you really pull the plug on Ma? So there was so much learning about what each of us were going through because of my individual research I had with people, because of the pieces I put together from the depositions. And then you could kind of see it, the most unspoken, painful thing in our family history.

You can see it in its entirety. To this day. My siblings and I have had public conversations, they've been a part of like four post show talkbacks I think now, and one also for my book tour. Those two siblings show up, but we still have not had a private conversation about my mother. 

Jessica Fein: What do you think it is?

What makes them able to talk about it in the context of, you know, there's an audience? Is the intimacy too intense? Too scary? What is it? 

Susan Lieu: I mean, the moderator is saying, How do you feel about Susan's performance? Right? But they're not actually saying, Let's unpack your own grief. Right? Like, I am now an [00:16:00] object which they can react to, but they don't actually necessarily have to get vulnerable about themselves.

Yeah. Right? And I think the evolution of Susan on her hero's journey in this story is that for so long, I personalized their lack of engagement with me. I thought they were being mean, they were withholding information, that they were blaming me and shaming me, and that it was my fault. It was so hard to believe that as true, because we actually hang out a lot as a family.

We have a five day sleepover called Extreme Indulgence every year at Christmas time. You know, like, we choose to hang out! 

Jessica Fein: That sounds so fun, by the way. Extreme indulgence. I would like to be having a five day extreme indulgence sleepover. 

Susan Lieu: Well, and all of our sibling couples, we compete for the best dinner, the most extreme dinner, and your name gets engraved on a trophy with your meal.

Jessica Fein: That's awesome. 

Susan Lieu: Yeah, I mean, like, we communicate our feelings through food. We never use I feel statements, but we can create an incredible meal. So anyways, the point about all of this is Over time, [00:17:00] Susan has matured to realize their behavior and how they can talk about their own grief is really their journey.

They are doing the best that they can, and everyone, every single person on this planet is battling their own demons. And that's what their best looks like. It is not personal. And when I can shift my reaction to a place of compassion, our dynamic inevitably changes. This is about every single person, if we can shift our reaction to a place of compassion and understand they're reacting how they can.

And this isn't about me.

Jessica Fein: You're right. But to be able to do it is so much harder than to be able to say it. 

Susan Lieu: Oh, yeah. Like we still aren't having those conversations that I want. I want like emotional intimacy. I want authentic vulnerability. You know, I want us to be like Full House and Danny Tanner. Like I want all that.

And it's just not our reality. But I gotta tell you, if I didn't go and do the one woman show and take it on a 10 city national tour, right, and [00:18:00] really get that all out, and also form community around it so I could transform my pain, if I didn't write the book, I feel like I would be stuck in the past. I feel like I would be resentful.

And I just didn't want to carry that anger on as a mother. So I also had to take care of my own baggage because these were the cards I was dealt with my family and I can blame them. I can set expectations around them or I can do my own shifting within myself. And so I had to do all those other things so I could transform myself.

I had to own it. 

Jessica Fein: You had to own it. And what was so interesting was a lot of this came, as you mentioned, at the time when you're thinking of forming your own family. Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about body image because not too much later. You find out you're pregnant, you're about to change very dramatically from your physicality.

And this is kind of at the crux of this whole story, because, as you mentioned at the beginning of our [00:19:00] conversation, your mother died from a botched tummy tuck. That's right. And. We know that the topic of body image is so fraught in society and your mother's self worth was so tied up in her body and her body image and She body shamed you as a little girl.

So how did going on this journey reframe your views on beauty and self worth? 

Susan Lieu: Oh my god, I grew up in my mom's nail salon. We had magazines of Cosmo, Seventeen, Elle magazine, everywhere, right? It was the water that we breathed in, right? And what I didn't realize at the time is my mother had four kids. My mother spent seven days a week sitting in her nail salon chair.

She had no time for self care. She had no time to go have a gym membership. 

Jessica Fein: Meanwhile, all day long, she's giving other people their self care and their beauty. 

Susan Lieu: That's right. And we were 13 people living in a four bedroom house. You know, she [00:20:00] sponsored over her aunts, her parents, her cousin. She gave her witnesses back to her 10 siblings back in Vietnam.

She carried a lot for everyone else. So let's acknowledge that she is a powerhouse of a woman, but who is free from their self worth not being tied to their bodies. I have a four year old now, and so, I have gone through one pregnancy, and like, I'm always squeezing my midsection, wishing, Man, you know, it'd be nice to start over.

It'd be nice. It'd be nice. I suck in sometimes on pictures, right? I look back at my old pictures and be like, What was I thinking? I look great then. Cause now I don't feel great. But maybe 20 years from now, I'm going to do the same. My mother grew up in that. And on our Sunday mornings, when we had a few extra hours together, we would watch Paris by Night, a Vietnamese variety show.

And the Vietnamese woman would come out in their traditional outfits called ao dai's, and it was so slim fitting. It's tight, you know, but it's a long tunic, but there's small slits up your waist area. And my mother, my aunts, all together would be [00:21:00] clamoring saying, who gained weight since the last episode, right?

Like, oh, she's so ugly, she's so fat, you know? We were growing up in that. Which is, women are reinforcing it around each other of what is enough and what is not enough. After she passed away, I remember a few months later, my father and my aunts, we were at the dining room table. And I went for a second bowl of rice, and they stopped me, and they said, You know, if you get too fat, no one will ever love you.

You'll die alone. It was very confusing to me because in Vietnamese culture, there's force feeding. You know, like, eat, eat, eat, I made you your favorite dish, like, this is how I am showing appreciation for you. Or like, Oh my god, every grain of rice in your bowl that's left over is a worm in hell that you must eat.

Jessica Fein: I mean, the food was like its own character in your book. 

Susan Lieu: Yes, because we are emotionally repressed people. We do not show emotions through words, we show it through food. And we have gone through so much war over so many generations that you do not have security of what's going to happen tomorrow. You have security today.

We were in [00:22:00] so much poverty that the only thing you had to nourish you was food, right? That was your hope. That was your sustenance. And so I grew up with a really complex, complicated relationship to food. And because I was the youngest, because I was an Asian female, Asian daughter was all about honoring your elders and respecting your elders and never challenging your elders.

So if they told me, finish every grain of rice in your bowl, even if you're full, you do it. So I had a very detached relationship with my body. It was listened to your elders. Not listen to your body. There's a story where I'm about six or seven years old. My sister and I and my mom are at a noodle house.

My favorite bowl tuta, and there is a fish ball and a kidney left, and noodles, and I don't want anymore. I just want to eat this precious fish ball. And my mom's like, finish it, finish it, and I eat it and throw it all up at the restaurant. And she was like, no one loves you. No one adores you. [00:23:00] She dragged me to the bathroom to wash up and she's just like mad.

She's ashamed. She's mad and I wasted food I wasted money and it was just it was so confusing growing up So my relationship to food to my body to my elders It was so complicated. So after she passed, they say words that basically you're gonna die alone if you get too fat. And I want to say that I was never obese.

I was just a little more. I did not grow up malnourished like my brothers and my sister in a refugee camp. You know, like I was born in America and I just had a different build. And that was too much. It was embarrassing. It was my fault. I didn't try hard enough. So I remember the year after my mother's death, I started this food and exercise journal because I had found a lot of comfort in food, and yet, that was my new enemy.

Like, that was my thing I could control to be enough when I was just a little girl. 

Jessica Fein: Also must have been especially confusing to [00:24:00] be, on the one hand, forced to eat and not listen to your own body, but then also shamed for being “more.” 

Susan Lieu: Yeah, and every time I would see my family in college, after college, it was first line, you know, it wasn't, Hey, how are things going?

You know, like, what's bringing you joy in life? Very open conversations. It was more like, wow, you gained weight. 

Jessica Fein: And that didn't change at all after the botched tummy tuck? 

Susan Lieu: Oh, no, not at all. In fact, they probably felt like they were being helpful parenting, you know, like that they were helping guide me to live a more successful life.

What they didn't realize is for the next two decades, I would be in dysfunctional relationships. Because I was so insecure about my worthiness, anyone with a pulse that had any interest in me, I would date and date for too long or hang on to. What they didn't realize is I wanted to belong so bad that I would join a cult, a Korean yoga cult, actually.

Because I all of a sudden had this opportunity [00:25:00] to connect with my body and to listen to my body, but also I had clear rules on how to succeed in that structure. Whereas in my family, there were no clear rules, and I always felt pretty minimized. 

Jessica Fein: So, speaking of the cult, which I'm glad you circled back to, because I mentioned it at the beginning.

You're in school, you end up getting in this cult, which you don't, of course, realize is a cult. And you got yourself out of it, and that was really interesting, the strength of character that that took. 

Susan Lieu: Yeah. So I'm at Harvard at the time in my undergrad, and I get sucked into a Korean yoga cult called Don Yoga.

So much so that I change my thesis topic, so that I study them for a summer and invest more money in them. And I sink 14, 000 into them. At one point, they were like, Hey, to pay for more healing programs, why don't you go to your financial aid office and get some school loans? Thank God the office declined my request.

But my family wasn't giving me money. Open up high interest credit cards. And I am in it. But the thing is, I'm studying it for my [00:26:00] thesis. I would talk to my thesis advisor and I would go like, you know, this is kind of weird, but I just feel like they want global peace. They want inner peace, but it's all about money.

Like it must be a cult. And we started to frame my thesis around that. So what I'm telling you is I started to consciously know it was a cult. I would quit and I would come back over and over again, because actually I started to realize when I quit. My default life wasn't that great anyways. I actually felt more fulfillment and satisfaction in the cult.

And so I think that there's something to acknowledge around cults in general about why are people susceptible to being in them? Well, maybe they're trying to really fill a void that they can't otherwise. 

Jessica Fein: Where, along the way, did you actually feel like you found your place in this world? This is a big theme in the book, is how do we find our place in the world.

And there was so much searching on your part. First of all, have you found it? Do you feel like you're there, or are you still searching? 

Susan Lieu: I am a storyteller on intergenerational [00:27:00] healing. I tell stories that refuse to be forgotten. I'm a cultural worker, I'm an advocate for social change, and I deal with the heart.

Yes, I have found my place in the world. Is it hard? Yeah. Do I have doubts? Of course. But would I ever take it back? Would I have ever not taken this path? No way. I gotta tell you though, I had to get fired from corporate America though for, from the management consulting job for me to even consider it as a path.

I was at a fork in the road, and I just think that if the universe didn't do that, I don't think I would have taken that path. So I wanna say that first, is I was forced. To kind of like ask myself, should I do this? But second of all, I look back at 2019 when I did 60 performances to 7, 000 people in one year.

Community organizations from around the country came together to bring folks out. I would give away tickets. I would fundraise to subsidize the tickets so that folks could come from low income [00:28:00] communities. And night after night, I was doing my heart's work. People were laughing and crying with me. I would compare it to a wedding and a funeral.

People would line up after the show and wait in line to hug, to cry, to talk. Oh my god. Oh my god. That happened. And now that's happening with the book where almost every day, I'm getting fan mail. Hey, this is really changing my life. This is helping me get up in the morning because I'm dealing with my daughter who's in an eating disorder facility.

And it's not just Vietnamese, not just Asian, not just women. I've got Jewish folks, I've got men. I've got daughters of American Vietnam vets reaching out to me saying, thank you for seeing me. People are telling me that they were formerly in a cult. People are telling me that they are struggling. What a blessed life I get to live.

Jessica Fein: And what a blessed thing you are doing for so many other people. You know, under the quote unquote, best of circumstances, Grief is [00:29:00] awkward and uncomfortable and confusing, and your situation was far from the quote unquote best of circumstances, if there really even is such a thing. What do you wish people knew about grief?

Susan Lieu: Well, I say this line three times in my book, when we feel, we heal. We got to go through. Because we are, as humans, designed to avoid pain. It makes sense. We're looking for comfort. But when we can go through and go through that grief curd around the denial, the anger, the sadness, sit in that valley of despair, that is when post traumatic growth is possible.

Where you can derive new meaning, a new narrative, for you to liberate yourself. And to have strength in that horrible experience, so you can move forward, so you don't live in the past. And so I say, go through. Because it's messy, it's ugly, it's dirty, it's uncomfortable, it's lonely. In creating all these works with the [00:30:00] shows and the book, I gotta tell you, I was in a lot of valleys of despair, and I went through, I went through, and I have a lot more compassion and love for my family, for myself, when I parent, I give myself a lot more grace, and I am very hard on myself, and that's what I'm certainly working on, but man, to feel like I am living the work of intergenerational healing, right?

We don't have to always talk about the trauma, because the trauma is painful, it's hurtful, it's heavy. But how can I shift that so we can be proud of our past, so we can feel strength from that, resilience, we can do that, but you have to go through, when we feel, we heal, and it's scary, and go seek support from that, find structures like a therapist, healthy habits, hopefully like exercising, right, but go through, because there will be light, but for a long time, there is darkness.

Jessica Fein: Okay, I started off by saying this book is [00:31:00] rich and there are a lot of themes and now I think we've just begun to touch on it, but the listeners absolutely get what I was talking about. So everybody, you need to go out and read The Manicurist's Daughter. And are you still doing any standup? I want to see it.

Susan Lieu: Yeah. So you can actually watch 140 Pounds: How Beauty Killed My Mother. You can stream it from my website. And you get to experience hopefully cathartic laughter and sadness and to just be in your emotions so you can stream that. I am working on a several different projects right now that are in the works.

I am a multi hyphenate storyteller. So I started in theater. I have a book. I'm in museums. And now I'm looking at film and television. So I'm, I'm tinkering. I'm tinkering. But I got to tell you with all of my work, I have just been so naive the whole time because I don't realize the probability of like such low success, but I do it anyways, right?

Jessica Fein: Oh, that's great. Thank God you're naive, right? I mean, none of us would do anything if we really started to look at the odds. 

Susan Lieu: Right, but [00:32:00] my mother, I mean, like we only had enough money to get those things done. one way tickets to try to escape Vietnam because she had an underground lottery operation that she won three times, right?

Like, I only got into Harvard because I watched Legally Blonde. Like, when we look at all these odds, it's just like, her quote was always, Susan, you have one heart, one mind, and two hands. Do something with your life, right? She didn't lament on the odds against her. She said, go manifest your dreams. Go after it.

And so I'm still doing that, and I'm still scared, but I'm still doing it. Because I think that's it. That's the important thing, is like, I don't want to live with regret. My mother died when she was 38 years old. My goal was to publish this book when I was still 38, and I did, with one month to spare. But like, who are we kidding to think we are so immortal?

Who are we kidding? And why can we not live our life today like we're mortal? Live like you're mortal. Because there is an end, and [00:33:00] so don't live with regret. 

Jessica Fein: I love it, and I am so inspired. I'm like, I gotta go, because I gotta go create and forget about the odds, and be a multi hyphenate, and do all the things. Download your Wild Woman show, because I can't wait to see that. Thank you so much for sharing your story with the world and then for being here today and sharing the story with all of us. You are awesome. And I'm so excited to find out what's next for you. 

Susan Lieu: Thank you. 

Jessica Fein: Here are my takeaways from the conversation with Susan.

Number one, stop taking it personally. Remember, every single person on this planet is battling their own demons. When we can shift our reaction to a place of compassion, the dynamic inevitably changes. Number two, feel it to heal it. The valley of despair is horrible, but we need to go through it to get to the other side.

Number three, break free from hand me down shame. Those voices telling you you're not enough, they are borrowed beliefs, not yours. Start listening to your gut instead of your guilt. Number [00:34:00] four, I think this one might be my favorite. Don't let statistical odds discourage you from pursuing your dreams.

Don't google the chances of success. That might just be procrastination in disguise. Set your deadline, do the work, and let the statistics sort themselves out. Number five, sometimes your scars can become your superpowers. When we shift the narrative, we might find unexpected strength, resilience, and wisdom.

Number six, live like you're mortal because you are. Ask yourself what you might regret not doing or saying. And number seven, Trust the detours, the weird job, the failed relationship, the cult you accidentally joined. They are all part of finding your path. Keep moving, staying true to your core mission. If you liked this episode, I'd be so grateful if you'd leave me a review.

And if you're not yet subscribed, subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode. Thanks so much for listening. Have a great day. Talk to you next time. 

Music: I've got the whole at my [00:35:00] fingertips. I feel like flying. I feel infinite. I know we're the kind to think along other lines, but will be fine.

Come along now. The sky is endless. Now we. We are limitless now, come along now, the sky is endless now. We are limitless, we are limitless now. The sky is calling, calling out to me. Some new beginnings with endless possibilities. Are you with me? Can you hear me? With us.[00:36:00] 

Come along. The sky is endless. Now we're limitless. We're limitless now. Now the sky is endless. Now

we're limitless. Are you with me now? Can you hear me? When I'm singing out, when I'm singing out, when I'm singing out. I've got the whole world at my fingertips. I feel like flying, I feel infinite. I know that we're the kind to think along some other lines but we'll be fine. Ah, come along now. The sky is now.

Come along now, the sky is endless now. We are limitless, we are limitless now.