Written by Ling Ling Huang, NATURAL beauty
In my 20s, there were times when it could have been difficult to tell my annual spending at Sephora from the G.D.P. of a tiny nation. The search for betterment went beyond the surface level: Every shopping excursion presented the chance that I would discover the item that would transform not just my appearance but also my own nature. Money may not be able to make you happy, but it may give you confidence, which is pretty close.
In "Natural Beauty," Ling Ling Huang, who is aware of this psychopathology, pumps it to its highest level of profanity. When we originally meet our obscure protagonist, she is having taken away by her Chinese immigrant parents to live, take action, and suffer at a restrictive, racist institute.The narrator experiences bullying and exclusion from her friends, which leads to her becoming, like many persons of colour, the school's mascot and being paraded around at events and fundraisers. She asks the one man she has multiple affairs with if he feels anything for her, but all he can manage to say is how talented she is.
After one of her concerts, her parents suffer a horrific accident, and the narrator decides to stop playing the piano since she believes her selfishness and hobbies are to fault. In search of a lucrative career to help support them, she lands a position at Holistik, a beauty business that sits on the cusp of technology, in the middle of innovation and peril. Holistik tracks its customers' pursuit of perfection and attempts to commercialise it.Holistik tracks its personnel for optimisation as part of its quest and commercialization of perfection: "What starts as an excitement for improvement becomes an all-consuming infatuation. Caution develops into paranoia and then fear. Is there anything in life more reassuring than understanding one's fears? I learn what I need to be frightened of at Holistik to become beautiful.
Holistik's technology get increasingly intrusive and covert as our narrator advances within the organisation, as if they were squeezing their employees to extract every last drop of product. She forms a bond with the owner's niece and starts to resemble all of her coworkers, who approximate white beauty standards. She is advised to adopt the name "Anna"Anna" makes use of her financial resources and Holistik's products to support her parents as much as she can despite feeling guilty about both their past and present.
Huang's plot might use a little light blotting; it feels inevitable but still shocking when the book turns horror, like a DJ cutting off a music just as you were getting into the groove. Her abilities—Huang is a violinist with classical training, and "Natural Beauty" is her first book—combine best when she writes about music, pulling off the very difficult task of creating descriptions of the pieces that are as airy and deft as the melodies themselves. She also excels when she criticises the destructive, narcissistic version of self-care that might pass for empowerment. When Audre Lorde remarked that "caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare," she wasn't referring about a Botox drive-through.
However, in the world of Holistik, pubic hair transplants, procedures to maintain a tooth gap, diamond freckling, and an obscure, elevated religion called "Dianaism" (which encourages people to be more like Princess Diana) are best for obtaining power, satisfaction, and value. All of these are seen as undeniable improvements to the self, disregarding the restless, sweaty panic that underlies each appointment or idea.
