Everything I Never Told You

Everything I Never Told You

By Celeste Ng

"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet." So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia's body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos. A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.

I've been reading so much genre fiction, getting into this was a bit of a shock to the system. And I wouldn't say that it was even that enjoyable - Lydia, the sixteen-year-old center of her family, is found drowned in a nearby lake, and the book is basically about the shattering of the family both after she is found and the cracks that led to the event in the first place.  What's weird though, is that for all I didn't want to be drawn into it, I pretty much ended up sobbing through the last fourth of of the book, from when the officer finds Nath (what a horrible nickname, if your name is Nathan, then Nath should sound like the first syllable of that, right? But everytime I read Nath, it sounded like "Nash" in my head with the short "a" and it drove me crazy) passed out in the car and picks him up and takes him home.  Ng basically writes about a family that bottles up every anxiety, and hurt, and microagresssion, and this is the section that releases them, along with the reader, each character having their own catharsis in sync.

This is definitely not an "action-driven" book, once the initial tempest is done with the vanishing and discovery of Lydia's body, we basically spend the rest of book flipping backwards and forwards through time, hitting seminal moments in the family life, although the point Ng drives home (REPEATEDLY) is that oftentimes, what is seminal to one character may make a much different, even fleeting impression on another.  I mean, we're not left wondering what the title "Everything I Never Told You" is supposed to mean - every couple of pages, we hit another memory or incident that carves out the hearts of one or more characters, who then never air their grievances and just let it fester. Apparently this family never talks to each other. "Everything I never told you" is interchangeable for "everything". 

What's somewhat interesting is how my own family mimics or echoes many of the characteristics in this book - in 1977 my grandparents had three children between the ages of 8 and 15, one of whom, ironically (at least in this context, it's not ironic in our family) went on to marry a person from Hong Kong, so that I have several half-Chinese cousins - though there isn't any hullabaloo about blue eyes as they don't run on that side of the family), all of this taking place in small midwestern towns, and yet how little of any of those coincidences struck me as I was reading Everything, perhaps because for all their sins, my family doesn't resemble the Lees in anyway.  Not that we don't have our own problems - as Tolstoy famously wrote, "All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." What does that have to do with the book? Nothing much, except to lead me to believe that we (and the characters) have brought our own miseries upon our heads, and that it may not be that life is hard - which it is - but that you become so rubbed raw by your own peculiar sympathies that you become your own worst enemy.  

In my edition of the book, Ng says that she started the book sympathizing with the children, but once she had her own children, felt greater empathy for James and Marilyn.  The book does almost give us a real twist, as we begin to assume, after all these flashbacks, that Lydia committed suicide because of the immense pressure Marilyn put on her to live out those dreams that Marilyn couldn't herself.  Ironically, it's actually James' fault for not teaching her how to swim - but they'll never know that, so Marilyn's erroneous realization that she put too much on Lydia is two wrongs making a right, I guess.  

There's also quite a bit of discussion on how things have or haven't changed since the setting of the book, i.e., would James' great regret of being Chinese and Marilyn's great regret of being a woman, which regrets they basically put onto their children, thus messing them up for life, still be the kiss of death today? Honestly, I would say...not. I mean, I'm not an expert by any means, but Marilyn and James are two people who see the world only from the prism of their failures, not their successes, and they didn't have to be that way.  Wouldn't be much of a story if they weren't, though, I guess!

Perhaps it's all just hubris, to think that we won't repeat the mistakes of our own parents, but hopefully I won't have to cope through an accidental drowning in order to ensure that I don't get so far up my own butt that I never realize my own progeny are just that - separate and individual beings who will develop their own traumas, no need to pile mine on them.