Source of book: I own this.
This was this month’s “Make it a Double” selection for our “Literary Lush” book club. Starting this year, because a bunch of us have a bit of extra time on our hands due to a certain malevolent virus, our hosts decided to add an optional second book for those who wanted a bit more to discuss. Amanda nominated this book, and it is also one of my eldest child’s favorite books.
We previously read Celeste Ng’s other book, Little Fires Everywhere, for our club - I nominated that one. Ng is a perceptive and devastating writer. She has the pulse on family dysfunction, and even a book with a worst case scenario like this one feels fully realistic, not fantastic. Like Interior Chinatown, our recent read, this book touches on anti-Asian prejudice and the question of fitting in as a racial outsider. However, the setting is very different. The book is set mostly in small-town Ohio, a similar place to where Ng herself grew up, as the only non-white in most places she lived, most schools she attended, and so on. In this sense, there is some similarity to Kira-Kira, with the small-town, white America vibe.
The book starts with a fantastic line:
Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.
Lydia is the 16 year old daughter, the middle child of second generation Chinese immigrant James Lee, and his white southerner wife, Marilyn. After a few days, Lydia’s body is discovered in the lake near their house, with no signs of foul play, no note left behind, and little but questions to go on.
From there, the book jumps around in time, between the past and present, slowly unfolding the family dynamics and the multi-generational trauma that haunts the Lees.
I feel bad even going further than that little blurb, because spoilers are impossible to avoid. If you don’t want them, stop reading here, read the book, and then come back and finish this post.
As it turns out, both James and Marilyn have unfulfilled - and unfulfillable - dreams. For James, born an American but never accepted as such, he just wants to be “normal.” To be treated as just another guy, not as an “Asian.” The aggressions, micro and macro, described in the book all happened to Ng and her family during her childhood, and are all too believable. Even such stupidity as talking slowly as if they couldn’t understand English - despite Ng, like James, being born in and growing up in the United States. Because of his alienation, James wishes for his kids that they be popular and have friends and fit in. Which doesn’t happen, because of where they live - in an all-white neighborhood.
For Marilyn, her trauma is that she never got to pursue her dreams. Her mother deified the role of housewife and mother (ironic since her husband left her), and raised Marilyn to that role. Marilyn’s attempt to break free and pursue her dream of being a doctor was cut short by her relationship with James that resulted in pregnancy. Later, when she runs away from home to try to get her degree, she is again stymied by pregnancy - this time with her youngest, Hannah. So, she instead pours her life into Lydia, the middle child, the one who looks closest to white (and thus to Marilyn), the one who was actually wanted, unlike Nath, her son, and Hannah.
Lydia is thus caught between two parents, both of whom are trying to live their own disappointed dreams through her. Further complicating this is that Lydia blames herself for her mother running away, and decides to always try to do what she is asked in order to keep the family together.
Obviously, this is a toxic dynamic. Nath, who is the actual genius in the family, never gets attention or credit for it, even as he pursues his dreams of astronomy and is accepted at Harvard. Lydia, intelligent enough, but unable to keep up with advanced classes her mother demands she take, finds herself falling behind and desperately unhappy. And then, with Nath leaving for college, she will have nobody who understands her.
Hannah, meanwhile, is fairly accepting that nobody in the family cares about her particularly. She is too young to really have a close relationship with Nath and Lydia, and her parents are too focused on Lydia to notice her anyway.
James and Marilyn, meanwhile, cannot talk honestly with each other. Marilyn can’t see that James remains haunted by his inability to fit in, as well as the horridly nasty things Marilyn’s mother said about the marriage. (To her credit, Marilyn takes James’ side, and doesn’t realize James overheard them, but she also doesn’t really make the effort to understand his deepest fears and pain.) Likewise, James never understands Marilyn’s disappointment in her life, and attributes it more to his own failure to be a “normal” white person, rather than more accurately to Marilyn’s thwarted desire for a career. Since the book is set in the 1960s and 70s, options were a bit more limited for her, but he might have encouraged her to pursue her education.
Everything I Never Told You seems to draw some inspiration from the way Henry James writes: Ng starts at the perimeter - looking from a distance at the central fact, then slowly working inward so that the entire context of that fact becomes increasingly clear as the book progresses. It takes very careful writing to do this well, and that Ng did it in her first book is impressive indeed. (Little Fires Everywhere has some similarities.) I found the writing to be psychologically insightful, and the way that Ng was able to make every character sympathetic and nuanced was enjoyable.
Another thing I loved about the book is how well Ng is able to bridge the specific circumstances of the characters to the universal truths of family dynamics. I am an ordinary generic white guy, but many of the emotional events are things I recognize from my extended family. My mom grew up essentially as Hannah (except without Hannah’s ability to roll with the neglect): an older sibling was the favorite, expected to set the world on fire and fulfil the parents’ dreams. Many of us had a sibling who was the favorite child - as Nath puts it, the favorite child’s failures get more attention than the other children’s successes. For many of us who grew up in the Fundamentalist subculture, there has always been the sense that we were expected to make up for our parents’ mistakes and failings - to be the “godly” people they thought they were not at a certain age. For my parents’ generation, many of them indulged in some combination of “sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll,” and a lot of the sheltering and theological nonsense we endured was an attempt to keep us safe from those.
And then there is the attempt to fix one’s past through one’s children. Just as Marilyn sees Lydia as the change to escape the housewife trap, I think my parents - my mom in particular - tried to fix her own family dysfunction through me. Her father and older brother were both oldest male children, and a lot of who they were was projected onto me, with my sister viewed as the poor victim younger sibling. Except that I am not, and never was my mom’s father or brother - we aren’t remotely the same people, despite our birth order. And, obviously, nothing that happened with me could possibly fix other broken relationships or make up for them.
In the paperback edition we have, there is an interview with the author at the end, and I found that to be fascinating. Here is one passage that I noted:
Sibling relationships are fascinating: you have the same parents and grow up alongside each other, yet more often than not, siblings are incredibly different from one another and have incredibly different experiences even within the same family. You share so much that you feel you should understand one another completely, yet of course there’s also enough distance between you that’s almost never the case. It gets even more complicated when one sibling is clearly the favorite in the family: the family constellation can get really skewed when one star shines much brighter than the rest.
I wholeheartedly concur with what she says. Experiences in the same family do differ greatly, and a favorite very much skews things. I feel my parents tried to be fair and evenhanded when we were little, but things went awry in my teens, in significant part because of Gothard’s teaching that “rebellion” was inviting Satan into your life, and expressing disagreement or frustration with the status quo was “rebellion.” It ended up making normal teen development into a pathology. (Compounded, of course, by the fact that I do have a mouth, and tend to be a divergent thinker and natural skeptic.) Unfortunately, this accelerated after adulthood, and any pretense of not playing favorites evaporated, while the metanarrative of me as a rebellious person who mouths off remained dominant.
Ng also talks about the problem parents face - and I sympathize - of trying to do what is best for your children.
After my son was born, though, I became much more sympathetic to Marilyn and James, I started to understand how deeply parents want the best for their children, and how that desire can sometimes blind you to what actually is best.
I myself worry about this with my own kids. I try to do what is best, but I also try to listen to them and support them in finding their own version of best, not mine. Sure, there are the usual non-negotiables: study hard to get through high school, do your chores, bathe regularly… But ultimately, what they do as adults will be their decision. Where to go to school, what career to have, whether or not to marry, who to marry, whether to have children, whether to embrace or reject religion, and so forth. And that’s before you get to such deeply personal things such as gender identity and sexuality.
This is the opposite from what Gothard (and James Dobson, and pretty much the entire Culture War Industrial Complex) taught. The goal of parenting was to make political, cultural, and religious clones, to someday “take back America” from the forces of “evil.” (Which turned out to be anyone outside of the tribe, including racial minorities.) Gothard also taught that God spoke only to one’s authorities, not to the person directly. So a child’s opinion was irrelevant - the parent already was told by God what was best for the child. And if you think this stopped once a child turned 18, well, you were obviously not in Gothard’s cult. And, shockingly (or not), in practice this meant conformity to the rules of the cult. God spoke to the leaders, the leaders convinced the followers that God was speaking to them through the leaders, and the rules were crammed down the throats of the children. Kind of like how Marilyn’s dream of being a doctor was crammed down Lydia’s throat. Lydia lacked the vocabulary and developmental maturity to cope with this, and it eventually broke her. For others, it will break the relationship eventually. (For example, Marilyn and her racist mom.) But something tends to break.
Speaking of Marilyn’s mom, I think she exemplifies the flip side of Marilyn. For Marilyn, she expects Lydia to fulfil her dream - to make a different choice than Marilyn ended up making. For Marilyn’s mom, in contrast, she doubles down on her own choices, grooming Marilyn to be the perfect housewife, perhaps thinking that if she herself had been more perfect, she wouldn’t have lost her husband. In effect, Marilyn’s mom looks to Marilyn to validate her choices, not reverse them. If Marilyn takes the same path - housewife - then it confirms that her mom was right. Man, I have seen this dynamic play out so many times. I suspect many Christian housewives are secretly ambivalent about it - even to themselves - and so feel the need to make sure the next generation stays home too - to validate their choices. It’s a mess, a generational mess. And, although it appears that the Lees have in some ways come to peace with things by the end of the book, one wonders how the next generation will truly play out.
I have enjoyed both of Ng’s books - I really hope she continues to write.
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