The Manicurist's Daughter was thought-provoking for me in several different ways. Susan's mother, a Vietnamese immigrant to the United States, dies after having plastic surgery when she's thirty-eight years old, leaving behind a husband and four children. At the time, Susan was eleven years old. Reading about how hard the family worked to have a secure household makes me feel grateful that my family didn't have to worry as much, and that I had more time to be a kid. How much of that was having to start over in a new country with nothing, and how much of it was the drive of Susan's mother? How much of it was cultural expectations that made Susan's mother the way she was? Why did she feel the need to have plastic surgery so much - especially when it made up such a large part of the income that came in? Any young girl or woman who escapes objectification and criticism about her appearance is exceedingly rare. Even knowing what her mother went through, Susan constantly battles criticism from her family members about her weight. As someone who has also lost their mother (albeit at an older age) I understand when Susan wonders about what her mother would have thought of something, and to some extent views her with rose-colored glasses, even though her mother didn't sound overly maternal most of the time. I didn't always love how there would be occasional flashbacks, instead of being told sequentially, and I feel like it would be easier to experience the show about her mother and family that she talks about than hearing it described alongside the battle to get her family members to talk about her mother. Thought-provoking both from the perspective of coping with the loss of an important family member, and how the culture Susan was raised in affected how the family dealt with that loss and treated each other in the aftermath of it.