Everything I Never Told You

“But Lydia, defying genetics, somehow has her mother’s blue eyes, and they know this is one more reason she is their mother’s favorite. And their father’s, too.” 

Written in the time before Lydia’s death was confirmed to her siblings, this description is in the present tense, as though Lydia still lives. She is still the favorite child who eclipses Nath and Hannah both. While the passage states that the other siblings “know” that Lydia’s more White-passing appearance is another reason for Marilyn’s preferment, the novel in its entirety disrupts this “fact,” as it shows that it is James, not Marilyn, who is concerned with Whiteness.

“In the picture, Nath can’t distinguish the blue of her irises from the black of her pupils, her eyes like dark holes in the shiny paper. When he’d picked up the photos at the drugstore, he had regretted capturing this moment, the hard look on his sister’s face. But now, he admits […] this looks like her—at least, the way she looked when he had seen her last.” 

This passage illustrates the disparity between the Lee family’s idealized mental image of Lydia and the troubled girl she was at the time of her disappearance. Nath has a moment of disorientation as he wonders whether he captured Lydia at an inopportune moment in the picture. However, he eventually reasons that she did look this “hard” when he last saw her. At this stage in the narrative, he senses that Lydia’s troubled state directly relates to her death.

“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.” 

This extract introduces the central conflict at the heart of the Lee family. White Marilyn, who was raised by a Betty Crocker devotee, wanted a life that was as far from a pampered middle-class homemaker as possible. Meanwhile, Chinese American James, who faced discrimination and exclusion for being different from his White peers, wanted to blend in. However, the patriarchal, racist society they live in makes both James’s and Marilyn’s wishes “impossible” and in conflict with one another. James’s desire to fit in means that Marilyn must also fit in and play the traditional wife. If she is untraditional, she will make James stand out even more.

“All her mother said, over and over, was, ‘It’s not right, Marilyn. It’s not right.’ Leaving it unnamed, hanging in the air between them.” 

The repeated use of the preposition “it” indicates the unspeakable and vague nature of racial prejudice. Even Marilyn’s bigoted mother cannot find the exact words for what she finds wrong with Marilyn’s marriage to a man of a different race. It is unclear as to whether the union or society’s attitude toward it is “not right,” as both become confused in Marilyn’s mother’s mind. This inability to speak about racial difference and prejudice will haunt the Lee family in the events leading up to, and following, Lydia’s death.

“Slowly the chairs fill with some of Nath’s classmates, with juniors and freshmen he finds vaguely familiar but doesn’t really know. Even the neighbors, as they file in, feel like strangers. His parents never go out or entertain; they have no dinner parties, no bridge group, no hunting buddies or luncheon pals. Like Lydia, no real friends.”

This passage illustrates how isolated the Lee family is in their local community. Taking Nath’s perspective, it begins with his personal experience of friendlessness and then describes the situations of his parents and Lydia. This sequential progression from family member to family member allows the reader to contemplate the loneliness of each family member in turn, before concluding that it is odd that all of them are lonely. The list negating the types of friends the older Lees could have emphasizes how alone they are despite living in Middlewood for almost two decades. The funeral, an event that should result in an outpouring of neighborly compassion and support, is a formal, ceremonial occasion that reflects the Lees’ lack of integration.

“The bookshelf was so full of books that some are crammed in sideways at the top: A Brief History of Medicine, she reads upside down. Rosalind Franklin and DNA. All the books Marilyn had given her over the years to inspire her, to show her what she could accomplish. Everywhere evidence of her daughter’s talent and ambition.” 

The crowded bookshelf with its precariously placed books becomes a metaphor for the weight and excess of Marilyn’s expectations for Lydia. It is clear to the reader that Marilyn wishes for Lydia to fulfill her frustrated wish of becoming a doctor. However, even as Marilyn explores Lydia’s room in search of the truth, she cannot help attributing the medical “talent and ambition” to Lydia rather than to herself. Marilyn’s projection delays her discovery of the truth of Lydia’s misery prior to her disappearance.

“She thought with sharp and painful pity of her mother, who had planned on a golden, vanilla-scented life but ended up alone, trapped like a fly in this small and sad and empty house, this small and sad and empty life, her daughter gone, no trace of herself left except these pencil-marked dreams. Was she sad? She was angry. Furious at the smallness of her mother’s life.” 

Marilyn reflects how her mother wanted a life as golden and vanilla-scented as the cakes in Betty Crocker’s cookbook. Her mother wanted to be warmly sheltered from the harsh realities of the world, in the manner of a perfect mid-century housewife, but instead ended up isolated and trapped in her empty home. Marilyn, who became a housewife and unwillingly led the life that her mother envisioned, also feels trapped. Ironically, she does not realize how her unfulfilled dreams entrap Lydia.

“James, not attuned to the sensitivities of the playground, was suddenly annoyed at his son’s shyness, his reluctance. The confident young man in his imagination dwindled to a nervous little boy: skinny, small, hunched so deeply that his chest was concave. And though he would not admit it, Nath—legs twisted, stacking the toes of one foot atop the other—reminded him of himself at that age.” 

The swimming pool incident, where Nath shies away from his peers and is in turn excluded by them, marks the beginning of James’s disappointment in the son who resembles him, not only physically but also in how he is treated by others. Prior to this incident, James fantasized about his Chinese-looking son becoming a sporting hero and enjoying the popularity that eluded him. Afterward, Nath becomes a symbol of embarrassment. James’s disillusionment with Nath is the catalyst for the transference of his social aspirations to his White-looking daughter Lydia.

“She lies still for a long time, picturing her sister on the lake bed. Her face would point straight up, like this, studying the underside of the water. Her arms would stretch out, like this, as if she were embracing the whole world. She would listen and listen, waiting for them to come and find her. We didn’t know, Hannah thinks. We would have come. It doesn’t help. She still doesn’t understand.”

Ten-year-old Hannah tries to understand how Lydia died by imitating what she assumes was her sister’s final posture. The posture, arms stretched out to embrace the whole world, suggests receptiveness to help rather than the suicide the adults are beginning to imagine. While Hannah still does not understand, ironically, her idea of Lydia’s willingness to live proves to be correct. Lydia died wanting to embrace a new life rather than desiring to end her old one.

“As one of only two Orientals at Middlewood High—the other being her brother, Nathan—Lee stood out in the halls. He knows that feeling: all those faces, fish-pale and silent and staring. He had tried to tell himself that Lydia was different, that all those friends made her just one of the crowd.” 

James reaches the horrifying realization that a newspaper report came closer to the truth about his daughter than he did. His consolation for an adolescence marked by prejudice and isolation was the fantasy that Lydia fit in and was popular. Given Lydia’s blue eyes and her resemblance to Marilyn, James did not see his daughter as “Oriental.” The assignation comes from a White institution’s view of his daughter. Instead, James finds that Lydia’s actual social state resembled his to an uncomfortable extent.

“The summer Lydia fell in the lake, the summer Marilyn went missing: all of them had tried to forget it. They did not talk about it; they never mentioned it. But it lingered, like a bad smell. It had suffused them so deeply it could never wash out.”

This piece of omniscient narration shows that despite the elder Lees’ best efforts, the summer of Marilyn’s disappearance changed both parents and children irrevocably. Ng’s evocation of the primal sense of smell, as opposed to the more objective sense of sight, with its controllable perspective, indicates how the essence of that summer never left them. The aquatic image of suffusion also indicates that they absorbed the fear and shock of the events of 10 years earlier, so as to be permanently altered by them despite, and perhaps because of, their silence about these events.

“Little bumps pocked the page all over, as if it had been out in the rain, and Lydia stroked them like Braille with her fingertip. She did not understand what they were until a tear splashed against the page. When she wiped it away, a tiny goose bump remained. Another formed, then another. Her mother must have cried over this page too. It’s not your fault, her father had said, but Lydia knew it was. […] They hadn’t been what she wanted.”

When Lydia discovers the bumps on the pages of the Betty Crocker cookbook, it takes her a while to realize that they were formed from Marilyn’s tears. She learns to read her mother’s emotions like a blind person reads Braille. Lydia’s sensitivity to her mother’s sadness causes her to conclude that it was her and Nath’s fault that Marilyn left. Burdened by this interpretation, with no information to the contrary, Lydia promises that if Marilyn returns, she will devote her life to preventing her mother’s sadness.

“The handkerchief around their ankles was tied so tight their feet throbbed. It didn’t loosen, yoking them together like mismatched cattle, and it didn’t come undone, even when they jerked in opposite directions and tumbled face-forward onto the soft, damp grass.” 

This image of Nath and Lydia tied together for the three-legged race is a metaphor for the profound and destructive nature of their codependence. Another simile likens them to cattle, herded animals that are subservient to the force that yokes them together, which is the fear that their mother will leave. However, being “mismatched,” their unsynchronized movement caused them to fall, which benefits neither. As Nath and Lydia grow up, the inflexible knot that binds them inhibits their individual growth and ability to integrate with their peers.

“(What about Hannah? They set up her nursery in the bedroom in the attic, where things that were not wanted were kept, and even when she got older, now and then each of them would forget, fleetingly, that she existed—as when Marilyn, laying four plates for dinner one night, did not realize her omission until Hannah reached the table.)”

Ng puts the family’s response to Hannah, the youngest child, in parenthesis to show that her existence is parenthetical as far as the family is concerned. The image of an attic bedroom and the forgotten fifth plate at the dinner table show almost Cinderella-like levels of neglect. Hannah, who believes that her passivity is a condition of maintaining the family’s fragile equilibrium, responds to the neglect by becoming as quiet as possible. She thus reinforces the impression of her nonexistence.

“Sometimes you noticed the girl across the aisle watching […] and you saw yourself reflected in their stares: incongruous. Catching the eye like a hook. Every time you saw yourself from the outside, the way other people saw you, you remembered all over again. […] You saw it in photos, yours the only black head of hair on the scene, as if you’d been cut out and pasted in. You thought: Wait, what’s she doing there? And then you remembered that she was you.” 

Lydia describes to Jack how the sensation of being other and incongruous in the eyes of the White majority affects her own self-perception. When Lydia sees herself from the outside, she regards herself as an imposter, especially when she instinctively dissociates from her photographed image. The repetition of the word “remember” denotes that her perception of the difference between her and the White majority is not intrinsic, but extrinsic—a burden that a racist society continually forces her to carry. Lydia’s sharing of these feelings with Jack is significant, as it marks the first time that she gives voice to what previously felt unspeakable.

“In all their time together, white has been only the color of paper, of snow, of sugar. […] 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.” 

James cannot tolerate Marilyn’s supposition that if Lydia were White, the police would have continued their investigation and not dismissed her as a suicide. To James, Marilyn is not just stating a fact about their daughter’s ethnicity but also declaring that Lydia, and by extension James, occupies an inferior position. For James, Marilyn’s racial distinction indicates that she is as prejudiced as her mother while pretending to be open-minded.

“Slowly he lifts a bun from the box. It is lighter than he remembers, cloudlike, yielding beneath his fingertips. He had forgotten that anything could be so tender. He breaks the bun open, revealing glossy bits of pork and glaze, a secret red heart. When he puts it to his mouth, it is like a kiss: sweet and salty and warm.” 

James’s multisensory experience of the char siu bau buns indicates how he falls under the spell of a culture that he has almost forgotten, even though it is his own. The bun, which is unbelievably light, yielding, and glossy, has superlative, almost fairytale dimensions. The tenderness of Chinese American Louisa and the Chinese cuisine that he dismissed in his attempt to become more Western are suddenly a refuge from a world that excludes and misunderstands him. The secret red heart stands in for James’s own and is a reminder of the primary attachments that James dismissed, including his parents and their language and culture.

“She perched on the arm of Lydia’s chair and stroked her daughter’s hair. It was so crucial to make her understand, but she didn’t know how. A quiver had crept into Marilyn’s voice, but Lydia didn’t notice. ‘Trust me. Please. Don’t let your life slip away from you.’” 

This passage expresses Marilyn’s vulnerability as she asks Lydia to focus on her studies. She feels so strongly about preventing Lydia from making the same mistakes she did that she struggles to speak. The quiver in Marilyn’s voice indicates real fear that the future she envisioned for Lydia may not happen. Ironically, when Lydia’s life does slip away from her, it is far more tragic than the scholastic failure that Marilyn imagined.

“She knew that something had shifted in her sister, that she was balanced on a dangerous, high-up ledge. She sat very still, as if one wrong move might tip Lydia off the edge.” 

Hannah is conscious that Lydia has been raised perilously high in her parents’ estimation and is in danger of falling. Her sense of imminent disaster is such that she censors her own childish fidgets as a means of magically preventing such an event.

“‘Let’s pretend,’ he says, ‘that you never met me. That she was never born. That none of this ever happened.’ Then he is gone.” 

When Marilyn confronts James about his affair with Louisa, it leads to a further confrontation about his longstanding hurt at being excluded, and hers at being prevented from being exceptional. James concludes that they should pretend that their meeting and Lydia’s existence never happened. James posits that their union and the resulting fruits (including their children) were an experiment gone wrong.

“Lydia, five years old, standing on tiptoe to watch vinegar and baking soda foam in the sink. Lydia tugging a heavy book from the shelf, saying, Show me again, show me another. Lydia, touching the stethoscope, ever so gently to her mother’s heart. Tears blur Marilyn’s sight. It had not been science that Lydia had loved.” 

Marilyn revisits her memories of Lydia to see her daughter clearly. Only with the benefit of hindsight can she see that Lydia favored science as a means of touching her mother’s heart, as she literally attempts to do with the stethoscope. The fact that Lydia is straining her body, standing “on tiptoe” or “tugging” a book too heavy for her, indicates the burdensome nature of Marilyn’s demands on such a young girl.

“Hannah, so pleased in that little silver snare, looked like her younger self—timid, gawky, shoulders just beginning to stoop under the weight of something that seemed so thin and silver and light.” 

Lydia’s realization that her parents have put her under too much pressure comes when she spots Hannah, who looks like a younger version of herself, wearing the chain gifted to Lydia by James on her 16th birthday. While the chain seems slender and dainty, the expectations that come with it are burdensome and cause a childish posture to sink. In labelling the chain a “little silver snare,” Lydia demonstrates her awareness of the deceptively simple yet destructive nature of parental expectations, which can keep a child trapped in misery.

“She will stop pretending to be someone she is not. From now on, she will do what she wants. Feet planted firmly on nothing, Lydia—so long enthralled by the dreams of others—could not yet imagine what might be, but suddenly the universe glittered with possibilities. She will change everything.”

This note of optimism prior to Lydia’s death illustrates her grand plans for changing the status quo. Relinquishing the need to please others, she looks forward to discovering life as her true self. However, her feet are planted on “nothing,” an omen that indicates her present state of unsafety. Thus, while Lydia intends to “change everything” by her presence, in reality she does so through her absence and death.