Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
“Lydia is no more. Yet they are not yet aware of this. So starts this beautiful book about a Chinese American family living in a small Ohio town in the 1970s. Lydia is Marilyn and James Lee’s favourite child, and they are determined that she will realize the goals they were unable to achieve. The careful balancing act that had been keeping the Lee family together is upset when Lydia’s body is discovered in a nearby lake, throwing them into disarray. Everything I Never Told You is both an intense page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, revealing the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle throughout their lives to understand one another. It is a profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing.
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
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“Everything I Never Told You” is a historical work because it is set in the 1970s, yet it so masterfully explores are still pertinent today. Asian Americans continue to experience discrimination today, and Celeste Ng created a realistic portrayal of it. The opening lines of this book, in my humble view, make it even more painful because they depict every parent’s greatest nightmare. The title sums up exactly what happens throughout flashbacks of how the Asian American Lee family came to be in the very depressing situation they currently find themselves in.
The middle daughter of a middle-class family, Lydia, is initially thought to be missing before being discovered to be dead at the beginning of the book. The remainder of the book analyzes potential events and suspects who may have directly or indirectly caused her death. Until the book’s conclusion, we don’t know how she passed away; only where.
It takes place in the 1970s. It concerns a mixed-race family from a tiny Ohio town (China father, White mother, and children). Like any parent, the family wants nothing more than for their children to blend in. The children struggle to blend in, though, since they are frequently singled out by their classmates for being, or rather, Appearing, different.
The parents want Lydia, the middle kid, in particular, to fit in. Despite having black hair and Asian characteristics, she is regarded as the most attractive of the three kids because of her blue eyes and White mother’s features. Her parents just like her for her appearance. They have high standards for her. Her father provides her with lovely things that he doesn’t buy for his other children because he wants her to be well-liked. Her mother wants Lydia to be smart and to go into medicine, but as we later find, she was married when she got pregnant young, and her husband preferred that she stay at home and raise the children instead. The mother of Lydia even goes so far as to review and correct Lydia’s morning homework, something she does not do for her other children.
For Lydia, the strain from her family is too much. In order to appear popular in front of her parents, she pretends to be talking on the phone with friends when, in reality, she is either offering to help with homework or talking about a deadline. She hides poor test results from her parents so she can appear intelligent in subjects she finds difficult. To improve her reputation, she eventually befriends a “bad lad,” but as their connection grows, we come to suspect they are secretly dating.
As Lydia finally succumbs to the pressure from her parents and peers, she “disappears”. We begin learning about the past of the other characters at this point. We discover that Lydia’s father is a first-generation American who encountered significant prejudice when applying for professorial positions because he was Chinese. We discover how Lydia’s mother sacrificed her goals and desires for love, only to come to regret it and harbour resentment over it.
