This book review was written by Daria Melikova of Richard Montgomery High School
Trigger Warning: This book and review mention suicide. Celeste Ng’s debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, is a deeply moving story on the intricacies of ambition, love, family and race in America. Although far from an uplifting book, Ng’s storytelling is incredibly captivating and emotional, perfectly serving to express the novel’s ultimate message. The book opens with the death of Lydia, the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, although her family has yet to know of it. However, upon registering her disappearance, Lydia’s parents are utterly destroyed, and when Lydia’s body is found in the lake from what seems to be a suicide, their already turbulent family life begins to fall apart even more. Everything I Never Told You is about more than just Lydia’s death though, an aspect used instead as a springboard to explore the unstable lives of each family member. In the end, the mystery is not whether Lydia died, the question is what led up to her death. As Lydia’s parents and siblings grapple with the loss of a daughter and sister, each in different ways, they are forced to confront their own insecurities and finally come to terms with all of their previously concealed emotions. “The things that go unsaid are often the things that eat at you—whether because you didn't get to have your say, or because the other person never got to hear you and really wanted to.” —Everything I Never Told You (Celeste Ng) The story branches off in so many directions as it switches between the distant past, the near past and the present, delving deeper into their secrets and complex relationships. Life with Lydia in it displays the damaging expectations weighing down on all of them, but particularly on her, that could have led up to her eventual death. Marilyn’s and James’s pasts indicate how clearly this stems from the issues they faced in their own youth, showing how intertwined each of these moments in their lives is. As the end approaches, the tension steadily builds to an ending just as tragic and painfully sad as the rest of the book. Focusing on the dynamics of this unique family, it’s a very character-driven book which, personally, I found made the subtle plot all the more interesting. Celeste Ng clearly understands how complicated humans really are, developing such relevant and emotionally complex characters as she slowly exposes the nuances of each of them. Everything I Never Told You gives a hauntingly realistic examination of each character and the relationships tying them together such that you can’t help but be absorbed into the story “How had it begun? Like everything: with mothers and fathers. Because of Lydia's mother and father, because of her mother's and father's mothers and fathers…Because more than anything, her mother had wanted to stand out; because more than anything, her father had wanted to blend in. Because those things had been impossible.” —Everything I Never Told You (Celeste Ng) To start, we have Marilyn and James Lee, the parents whose own histories shape that of their children. James, a first-generation Chinese American, always felt like an outsider as the only Asian boy at his boarding school, the boarding school that his parents worked at as cafeteria workers. Thus, shamed by society, James has spent his life trying his best to blend in and, as a result, distance himself from his Chinese heritage.
Then there’s Marilyn, who wanted nothing more than to not end up like her mother, trapped in the role of housewife, and instead to go into medicine and become a doctor. She had such big dreams and fought so hard to get them but then, at college, she met James, got pregnant and got married, having to forgo that pathway and make her way into the very same role she had always feared. Together, Marilyn and James do what so many parents do and translate all the hopes and dreams that they were never able to attain into detrimental expectations for their children. Unluckily for Lydia, their first daughter and middle child, all of their efforts are pushed onto her; James obsesses over the need for her to make lots of friends and be popular while Marilyn is determined to prepare her for the life she had originally worked for herself, full of academic success and the ultimate career as a doctor. “Lydia knew what they wanted so desperately, even when they didn’t ask. Every time, it seemed such a small thing to trade for their happiness.” —Everything I Never Told You (Celeste Ng) Lydia simply wants to please her parents so she always puts on a smile and pretends for them that everything is alright when, in reality, she was failing both of her parent’s expectations. Far from the perfect mold that her parents formed for her, Lydia is actually a loner, struggling in her classes with really only her older brother, Nathan, to keep her going. Her character is probably one that many can relate to, falling apart under the expectant gaze of her parents. Nathan, or Nath, the oldest child, is incredibly smart and is fascinated by outer space, dreaming of following a career centered on the subject. However, with all the attention centered on Lydia, Nathan gets no love from his parents. His father hates the fact that Nath prefers staying at home reading rather than socializing and trying to fit in with the popular kids. As the child that Marilyn first got pregnant with at university, his mother still sees him as the obstacle that set her from her path to becoming a doctor. All Nathan wants is for his father to be proud of him for once and to support his dreams and achievements. Thus, always under the shadow of Lydia, Nath can’t help but feel jealous of her, even while he understands the pressure their parents put on her. Here is yet another familial aspect that Ng described so perfectly, painting the relationship between brother and sister, one filled both with love and a bit of contempt, and the way siblings still seem to have a deeper understanding of each other, incredibly realistically. Finally, there’s Hannah, the youngest child, always almost an afterthought, practically invisible among her family. Constantly overlooked and neglected, Hannah is able to be very perceptive, the only one able to understand the bigger picture, as she observes her family and their issues essentially from the sidelines. Like Nathan’s wish for support from their father, Hannah just wanted to feel some love from their mother, and honestly from everyone else in the family. I felt so bad for this poor child who deserved so much more than being shunned to the side and forgotten. Overall, Ng is extremely successful in exploring the emotional tears separating the family, describing each character and relationship so realistically as to create an incredibly heart-wrenching read. With each of them always bottling their emotions and then lashing out at each other to compensate, the thoughts and histories that begin to shape them for the reader really exemplify the title of the book, truly becoming Everything I Never Told You. A looming presence in many of the family’s issues is the idea of race, a topic exceptionally explored in this book. In fact, Ng commented on the idea, saying that oftentimes people talk about race as just a black and white issue when, in reality, there’s so much more to it. She states that people identify in so many different ways, whether you’re white, black, Asian, mixed and so on, and that as a result, the race issue is one that must be approached in more complicated ways.
In Everything I Never Told You, the story is set in a time when derogatory terms like “oriental” were still regularly used and when interracial marriages had only just been ruled to be legal. So for one, we have James’ story in which he is excluded from his fellow classmates just because of his Chinese heritage, leading him to shun and be ashamed of his own culture. Besides that, he faced utter distaste from Marilyn’s mother upon her finding out his race, a race that didn’t match Marilyn’s. As biracial children, Lydia, Hannah and Nathan also face the racism issues firsthand. Not only do they have a hard time fitting in, making friends and engaging in social activities, they also face the brunt of xenophobic comments.
Celeste Ng goes above and beyond in her commentary on this issue as she shows how, realistically, it isn’t always going to be about “us against them.” The issue also includes internalization as well as underlying racism that you may not even be aware of. For example, we see this in the dangerous way that James attempts to maintain a principle of being “color-blind,” of always steering clear of the race topic and even refusing to acknowledge racist comments yelled at his own son, believing that it’s his own fault that he’s not trying hard enough to fit in. Even the fact that Lydia is Marilyn and James’ favorite child attests to this issue as Lydia was the most white-looking child they had, with blue eyes and a lighter complexion.
“‘If she were a white girl, they’d keep looking.’ A rock plummets into James’s gut. In all their time together, white has been only the color of paper, of snow, of sugar. Chinese—if it is mentioned at all—is a kind of checkers, a kind of fire drill, a kind of takeout, one James doesn’t care for… Now, when Marilyn says this—If she were a white girl—it proves what James has feared all along. That inside, all along, she’d labeled everything. White and not white. That this thing makes all the difference in the world.” —Everything I Never Told You (Celeste Ng)
With incredibly stunning words that evoke great emotion, this book proves to be enrapturing, heartbreaking and incredibly thought-provoking. It’s a pretty quick read yet it packs in so many important themes on race, family and the damaging effects of the expectations and pressure parents lay on their children. A relatable, compelling and overall perfect examination of this Chinese-American family, Celeste Ng’s book is bound to satisfy anyone.
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