Show staged in funeral home kills beauty myth
In a purely technical sense, the San Francisco Columbarium and Funeral Home might not have been the most ideal venue for Susan Lieu’s “140 lbs: How Beauty Killed My Mother.” The unforgiving acoustics of a tiled floor under the dome of a mighty rotunda swallowed Lieu’s more hushed utterances and made her louder ones echo. If you were more than a few rows back, it could be difficult to see the diminutive solo performer.
But in a spiritual sense, it’s hard to imagine a more fitting site for Lieu’s piece, which traces her journey from wanting to “avenge” her mother’s death — she died in 1996, when Lieu was 11, during a botched plastic surgery — to finding another way to think about her grief and anger.
The Columbarium is a oneofakind San Francisco space. A gorgeous neoclassical structure near Lone Mountain, it stores the ashes of the dead in drawersize niches. It’s the only spot where the dead can be in
terred in San Francisco, and it’s open to the public. It’s also nondenominational, so you’ll see the last names Martinoni, Yoshida and Braunschweiger all in the same alcove, maybe next to another one written in Cyrillic — a testament to the kaleidoscopic diversity of city residents.
Some niches are covered in plates; some have windows, so you can see urns and the dead’s treasured objects inside, set up like miniature shrines that give a small picture of someone’s life. There are rosaries, model cars, necklaces, photos, stones, quotations, embroidery, dolls, Square and Compasses symbols of the Masons, Stars of David. It makes you think about what your own niche might look like, if you were to have one. The place has not exactly a dusty smell, but an old one, a historical one, a sacred one. Like fabric and dried flowers, like a house of worship. What friendly ghosts must smell like.
For “140 lbs,” which is on a national tour and is presented locally for a threeday run as part of the Reimagine End of Life festival, Lieu set up her own memorial altar in one of the Columbarium’s many small chambers: photos of her mother, a purple dress featuring peacocks made of sequins, incense, a bowl of citrus fruit — but also the documents of Lieu’s legal research into her mother’s case. Reams of court transcripts are highlighted and annotated: “I should probably read this,” goes one of Lieu’s notes, written in felttip marker. “This one makes me angry still.”
There’s a poster advertisement for Lieu’s mother’s plastic surgeon, Leslie Moglen, who practiced on Geary Boulevard, not far from the Columbarium. It’s written in Vietnamese. Lieu says in the show that Moglen preyed on vulnerable immigrant women. He had already been on probation with the state medical board for other cases before Lieu’s mother sought him out for procedures on her stomach, nostrils and chin. Eventually, his medical license was suspended for six months, and he was put on further probation.
Taking in the memorial before the show on Friday, Oct. 25, you could hear audience members talking about their own mothers’ relationships to beauty: “Has your mom had plastic surgery?” “Yeah. Boob job. Boob job replacement. Undereye.” Toward the end of the show, Lieu asks powerful questions about how we inherit selfhating norms, and what we’re supposed to do with that inheritance: “Does it make you sad that I hate my body, too?” she says, talking to her mother’s ghost via the Vietnamese tradition of spirit channeling. “If I have a girl, how can I make her love her body?”
To get to that place, Lieu first suffers a lonely quest.
Can she sue Moglen? No, he died in 2014.
Can she talk to his survivors? After some initial encouraging signs, they’re not forthcoming.
Can she get her family to share their memories? They don’t want to revisit that sad story anymore.
Can she at least find out why her beautiful mother wanted plastic surgery? Why does Lieu want to focus on that, her aunts wonder, and not on “how hard” her mother worked, fleeing Vietnam as a refugee, bringing the whole family over, creating her own nail salon?
And can she get through all this without all her family telling her, over and over again, that she, too, needs to lose weight?
Lieu doesn’t always differentiate clearly among her many characters or offer decipherable transitions when she jumps in time. She often muddles enunciation. But her message couldn’t be clearer, and all the life tributes all around her in the Columbarium only made it more urgent. Revenge doesn’t satisfy, and we can’t ask the same world that created impossible beauty standards to dismantle them. We have to do it ourselves.