Everything I Never Told You

“Honey-blond,” blue-eyed Marilyn, with her “thin-shouldered build,” “elfish chin […] high cheekbones and left-cheek dimple,” embodies the White, feminine beauty ideal of the mid-20th century (3). Unlike her Chinese American husband and her mixed-race children, Marilyn’s appearance allows her to fit in to Middlewood, Ohio. Marilyn is blind to the privilege of fitting in, and this leads her to be ignorant of her Asian-looking family members’ plight and to make throwaway comments that reference Chinese stereotypes, such as when she accuses James of kowtowing to the police.

Indeed, Marilyn, who was a gifted scientist despite much male prejudice, was a physics major in college and wanted to be “exceptional” (243). Rather than achieve the housewife’s dream her mother envisioned for her, Marilyn wanted to be a doctor. However, when the “pill that would change women’s lives forever” does not come in time for Marilyn, she finds herself pregnant, unable to continue her medical training, and forced into the traditional woman’s role of homemaker (27). Pregnancy interrupts Marilyn’s second attempt at becoming a doctor at age 29, when she leaves her family to finish her degree and combat the frustrations of a life that is too much like the one her mother had wished for her.

While Marilyn returns to the family, her absence is a decisive factor in creating the dynamic for Lydia’s preferment above the other children. Lydia vows to do anything her mother wants to stop her from leaving again, while Marilyn decides that “she would help Lydia do everything she was capable of” (147). The subject of the second “she” in this sentence is ambiguous. While “she” initially appears to refer to Lydia, the sentence also makes sense if “she” refers to Marilyn. Thus, it allows for the possibility that Marilyn wants Lydia to achieve everything that Marilyn could not. This proves to be the case when Marilyn transfers her personal ambitions over to Lydia. It is only long after Lydia’s death that Marilyn discovers Lydia adopted Marilyn’s interests because she was afraid of losing her a second time.

Five-foot-nine and Chinese American, with a cowlick that “stood straight up in back, like an Indian chief’s feather,” James Lee has always been concerned with fitting in and being accepted by his White peers (31). James is the son of father who flouted the law banning Chinese immigration to the United States by pretending to be the son of an existing immigrant. The result is that James “never felt he belonged here, even though he’d been born on American soil” (40). Precociously intelligent, James passed the exam for the elite school where his parents were manual workers. To fit in, he relinquished the Chinese language and took an interest in American history and cowboys. However, despite James’s efforts, both at school and later at Harvard, where he earned his PhD, he was overlooked in favor of others who fit in better because of their White skin.

James’s favor of White figures who fit in sparks his attraction to Marilyn and causes him to prefer his Whitest-looking child, Lydia, over Nath and Hannah, who more resemble him. This damages both Nath, who James shuns for his capacity to remind James of his rejected younger self, and Lydia, who feels the pressure of fabricating a social life to please her parents.

James buckles under the pressure of witnessing Lydia’s drowned body and reading newspaper reports that she was socially due to her Asian appearance. Ironically, he finds refuge in the bed and kitchen of his assistant Louisa Chen, who bears the very Asian traits he has long rejected. With her, James finds a way to accept himself and feel relief from the pressure of functioning in a marriage in which his wife has no idea of the hurt caused to him by decades of prejudice and exclusion.

Lydia’s older brother Nathan has, according to his father, an unprepossessing presence, being skinny, small, shy, and nerdy rather than athletic. While James hoped that the son who so resembled him would become a popular swimmer and so have a social experience entirely unlike his father’s, Nath is more like James than he wished. When Marilyn temporarily leaves the family, Nath becomes interested in space and astronauts to fill “the mother-shaped hole” in his world (135). In the vastness of space, he finds the opportunity to transcend the smallness of Middlewood, where he is bullied for his difference from the other children. However, James, “who should have loved astronauts” as “modern cowboys […] venturing into the newest frontier,” shuns his son’s interest and, as Nath grows up, berates him for not being more social (134). This father-son relationship remains frosty, especially as Nath senses his father’s wish that he be more like Jack, the wild, popular, White boy whom they both misunderstand.

Nath is neglected in favor of Lydia by both parents, which he initially protests when he pushes Lydia in the lake but later accepts when he saves her so the family will not be left with a “vacuum” (154). His role in his relationship with Lydia is to support her, as she bears the burden of their parents’ expectations. However, this becomes challenging when Nath pursues his own dream of getting into Harvard and achieving the academic success that Marilyn wanted for Lydia, yet is still neglected by his parents. His reaction is to distance himself from the family, including Lydia, and to imagine a future apart from them.

However, following Lydia’s death, Nath’s anger and confusion find a target in Jack, the boy Lydia befriends with when their relationship turns frosty. When he finally reaches his goal of beating up Jack, it is a hollow victory, especially as he learns that Jack’s relationship with Lydia was beneficial to her. Nath then begins his own friendship with Jack, which starts with acceptance and culminates in attraction. Lydia remains part of Jack and Nath’s relationship, as Nath thinks of her “at every important moment of his life” (291).

The youngest child in the Lee family, Hannah shares her father and brother’s Chinese appearance. She is small and tends to hide behind her curtain of long black hair. At a very young age, Hannah instinctively understands “her place in the cosmos,” as she grows from “quiet infant to watchful child” (161). Indeed, Hannah is so quiet and watchful that she sees what the elder family members do not, such as Jack’s love for Nath. Curling up in closets and hiding under tables, Hannah knows that her role in a family that neglects her is to “stay out of sight as well as out of mind” (161). Still, Hannah cannot help craving the attention and affection of the parents and siblings who dismiss her. When she notices Lydia slip out the night of her disappearance, she allows herself to fantasize about a world where she, and not Lydia, “would get her father’s jokes, her brother’s secrets, her mother’s best smiles” (22). Indeed, the vacuum left in the family after Lydia’s disappearance allows Hannah to shine, as her sensitivity enables her to console her parents and help her brother see the truth about Jack. As the family recognizes her value, Hannah “begins to stand a little straighter […] speak a bit clearer,” and takes up the space that she could not while Lydia was still alive (22).

Jack Wolff, “tall and lanky, freckled and bold,” is the blue-eyed White boy whom Nath misjudges as the cavalier seducer responsible for Lydia’s death (88). His name, which but for an additional “f” would be “wolf,” also sets him up as a predator. Nath observes how Jack seduces one girl after another at their high school and thinks that Lydia is the latest on the list. He judges that Jack, who is failing high school, is a privileged rebel without a cause. In reality, Nath’s animosity toward Jack has roots in his own boyhood memories of Jack, whom Nath feels taunted him when Marilyn left, and the sense that his father would prefer him to be like Jack. Nath’s wish to beat Jack has as much to do with his own hurts as those he believes Jack inflicted on Lydia.

Ng’s narrative initially introduces a version of Jack who is compatible with Nath’s view, as Jack turns up to Lydia’s funeral in a shirt that is “dark blue, not black,” and “still has on his old black-and-white tennis shoes with the hole in the toe” (62). This irreverent get-up paints Jack as the typical callow bad boy and misleads the reader into thinking that he may have been instrumental in Lydia’s death.

However, as the narrative progresses, Jack becomes a more complex character. The son of a single working mother who was rejected by his father, Jack received insufficient paternal attention and so has much in common with Nath. Given their single-parent family, both Jack and his mother are the subject of curiosity and prejudice in conformist Middlewood, with even Marilyn judging that Janet Wolff achieved career success because she let Jack “run wild” (95). Jack also becomes an important confidant for Lydia in the final months of her life. Though he does not satisfy her egoic need to lose her virginity, to spite Nath, he challenges her to figure out who she is beyond others’ wants. This leads Lydia to a moment of transcendence prior to her death.

The most poignant aspect of Jack’s character is his deep love for Nath, which stands in conflict with his emotionless conquests of women. Although the text does not explicitly show Jack’s struggle to come to terms with his sexuality, there is the sense that he accepts himself when he admits his feelings for Nath to Lydia.