Can missed opportunities be reclaimed?

Everything I Never Told You
Celeste Ng
New York: Penguin Books, 2014
Pp. 292

Celeste Ng has an original, captivating, writing style. In her debut novel, “Everything I Never Told You”, she begins with the climax, then scrolls back and forth to reveal how things got to that point and what happened afterwards. The opening sentence reports that Lydia, the beautiful, 16-year old, favoured daughter of the Chinese-American Lee family, is dead. 

A sense of intimacy and empathy evolves as one follows the family’s struggle to cope with this sudden, unexplained loss. In an interview at the end of the book, Ng says, “Any act of writing is an act of empathy: you try to imagine yourself into another person’s mind and skin. I tried to ask myself the questions the characters would have asked themselves.” (p. 2)

And she does so in an authentic manner that makes her characters both complex and believable, even as they sometimes do improbable things. 

Like any family faced with death, and especially as all signs point to suicide, the Lees are filled with self-doubt, grief, bewilderment and guilt — feelings that are further complicated because each of them harbours secrets, and the family as a whole has an unwritten code of silence about the most pivotal events and dynamics in their lives. So each goes his or her own way in grieving and making sense of Lydia’s death. At times, the reader may want to grab one of them, especially the parents, by the shoulders and shout: Hey, let’s talk about this! — proof of how involved one gets in 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 both those things had been impossible.” (p. 25)

Lydia’s Anglo mother, Marilyn, cannot accept her death, much less that she might have committed suicide. Frustrated by her own failure to become a doctor after she became pregnant, she has poured all her ambitions into Lydia’s becoming one, mentoring her 24/7 to the point that the girl has no social life. James, the father, an American of Chinese descent, made it to the top, graduating from Harvard, but was denied a teaching position there because, as they said, he didn’t “fit”. When James gets a position at a mediocre college in a small Midwestern town, they become the only “Orientals” there. Though born in America, appearances render James and the children perpetual foreigners, subject to taunts and patronising remarks, as he had been in his childhood. He worries about Lydia not fitting in and is plagued by guilt that her perceived foreignness played a role in her death, fulfilling his mother-in-law’s prediction that Marilyn will regret marrying him. 

Nath, Lydia’s older brother, and Hannah, the little sister, both know things about Lydia that their parents don’t, but are reluctant to share the information at this late date. In their all-consuming focus on Lydia, the parents don’t really listen to them anyway. 

Yet, in the midst of the dysfunctional equilibrium that the family is locked into, there are heart-warming elements. The story of how Marilyn and James met, fell in love and married is romantic and quirky, and defies prevailing racial prejudices. It was his differentness that attracted her: she thought he would understand the indignities she had suffered while trying to become a doctor in a man’s world, whereas he was drawn to her ability to blend in. Despite their miscommunication, they all love one another, and the children are strongly bonded to each other, often communicating without words. 

“Everything I Never Told You” is a family story but also a story of gender and racial prejudice in mid-20th century America, which Ng recreates with well-placed details. She is also clever at using seemingly random details to round out her characters and denote their moods. By shifting the point-of-view from one family member to another, she enriches each incident, and adds the ambiguity of differing perceptions. This makes the book a page-turner as Ng carefully parcels out the facts, leaving many questions unanswered until the end: Did Lydia really commit suicide? Did Jack, the wild boy in the neighbourhood, play a role in her death? Will Lydia’s death break the family apart once and for all, or lead them to a new type of cohesion?

Stripped of all the details of time, place and ethnicity, this is a chronicle of lacking communication and missed opportunities among loved ones. Ng shows that fiction can have an impact on real life, for any thoughtful reader will re-evaluate their own personal relationships after having read it.