54 pages • 1 hour read
Celeste NgEverything I Never Told You
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Deceptive Appearances: Subverting Stereotypes and Expectations
Ng’s book begins like a typical crime novel, with the disappearance of a young woman and a family calling the police. By the end of the first chapter, Lydia’s body is dragged from the lake, revealing she died from the stereotypically feminine death by water, like Ophelia from Hamlet and the writer Virginia Woolf. Given water’s association with tears, as with Ophelia and Woolf, there is the suggestion that unbearable emotions caused Lydia to sink.
Both Marilyn, who puts a safety lock on the door, and Nath, who thinks that reputed lothario Jack Wolff is somehow involved, unconsciously desire a reason for Lydia’s death that lies outside their troubled family. They crave the cliché of a lunatic or a head-turning seducer so they do not have to face up to their own responsibility in Lydia’s death. The narrative pretends to satisfy Nath’s suspicion, as it reports Jack’s disheveled appearance at the funeral and his careless behavior with girls, whereby he is “known to make a specialty out of deflowering virgins” and quickly tiring of them afterward (65). Nath, who assumes that Lydia was one of Jack’s many conquests, divines that Jack had “hurt her somehow” (65). His idea of how Jack may have hurt Lydia is vague, although he predicts that it is in the romantic sense. Later, Marilyn’s discovery of an open box of condoms in Lydia’s school satchel misdirects the reader into imagining a scenario in which Lydia lost her virginity to Jack.
While Lydia wished for such a scenario as a means of rebelling against her family, it did not come to pass. The condoms were in her possession because she snatched them out of the glove compartment in her attempt to get Jack to play to stereotype. She forgot to return them when she dashed out of the car after receiving the shocking news that Jack is romantically interested in Nath. Thus, Ng replaces the expected trajectory of Jack’s drama—a seduction of Lydia—with the novel dilemma of being “in love with someone who hates you” (269). Importantly, Hannah notices this surprising fact first, as her watchfulness enables her to witness the incident of Jack’s drinking the drop of water that falls off Nath’s shoulder. Moreover, while both Nath and James set Jack up as the stereotype of rugged, heterosexual, White American manhood, Jack’s only consistent passion is for a non-White man. Nath, who initially wishes to destroy Jack for what he perceives to be a privileged position, must learn to see past appearances to appreciate Jack’s true character.
Another subverted stereotype is the myth of the perfect, victimized daughter. Ng presents Lydia as the prized, blue-eyed daughter of a mixed-race couple. While her brother and sister are recognized as Chinese “by the eyes,” Lydia, who defies genetics, has a more ambiguous appearance (3). She appears to enjoy a measure of White privilege, as her parents think she has a close group of girlfriends with whom she regularly speaks on the phone. However, as the novel progresses and the true extent of Lydia’s isolation and exclusion is revealed, Lydia comes to resemble another stereotype, the White media’s idea of the lonely Oriental who stands out too much to have friends. Baffled by the lack of evidence explaining Lydia’s death in the lake, the police latch onto the media’s interpretation and conclude that this misfit Other committed suicide. Importantly, in Chapter 11, which follows Lydia’s perspective, Ng shows that this is not the case. Instead of being depressed and exhausted by the weight of a racist society, Lydia dies while trying to realize a new vision of what her life could be like: She was not attempting to kill herself but to swim, a feat that previously terrified her. Tragically, she drowns instead.
In subverting the literary stereotypes of seducer, prized virgin, and lonely, desperate Oriental, Ng creates characters that are far more real and interesting. She plays with the reader’s expectations, which are typically informed by the cultural stereotypes and narratives that they are already familiar with, to show how they can be wrong. As characters like Nath demonstrate, it is through learning that stereotypes and judgments can be wrong that people grow more open-minded and tolerant.
Sacrificed and Subdued Young Women
In his New York Times article, Alexander Chee writes that Ng’s novel presents
a deep, heartfelt portrait of a family struggling with its place in history, and a young woman hoping to be the fulfillment of that struggle. This is, in the end, a novel about the burden of being the first of your kind—a burden you do not always survive. (Chee, Alexander. “The Leftovers.” The New York Times Book Review, 15 Aug. 2014.)
Chee implies that Lydia, who took her fatal voyage because she needed a new perspective on her family’s struggles and her life prospects, was sacrificed in the attempt to achieve that new understanding. The sacrifice of a young woman for the good of society lies at the heart of folk narratives across cultures. While in many primal myths the society elders directly orchestrate the sacrifice, in this instance, the rite was Lydia’s own choice. She decides to swim alone, even though she does not know how, to mark a new beginning where she will live as herself, free of the pressures her parents have put on her. In a family of secret-keepers, she decides that she will tell the truth. While Lydia’s death initially causes turmoil and rupture, as her father begins an affair and her mother belittles him, it eventually forces the survivors to tell the truth and binds them back together. Lydia’s death also benefits her sister Hannah, who receives long overdue parental attention and enables Jack and Nath’s reconciliation. Ironically, the family need to lose a member—the one the parents deemed most precious—to become more whole.
Behind Lydia’s sacrifice is Marilyn’s own relinquishing of a potential medical career and an alternative version of herself. On two occasions, pregnancy and responsibilities to a young family cut her premedical training short. Marilyn’s pain is evident when she looks at other young female doctors with envy and disorientation, as though she is viewing the rightful version of herself. For example, she looks at Dr. Janet Wolff and thinks, “without a husband, without children […] I could have done that” (96). When Marilyn’s third pregnancy makes her second attempt at a medical career impossible, she decides that her dream of becoming a doctor is too precious to sacrifice, and so she puts it on Lydia, unwittingly sacrificing Lydia’s right to discover who she is on her own terms. Later, in the weeks approaching Lydia’s death, when Marilyn implores her daughter to study hard and not let “life slip away,” she subconsciously attempts to defend her own sacrificed life and the alternative version of herself that she cannot let go of (222). Marilyn’s preoccupation with Lydia becoming the person Marilyn was not able to become leads to a further sacrifice, that of her youngest daughter Hannah, who learns to pretend that she does not exist. It is only after Lydia’s death that Marilyn embraces what is, as she clears away the books that represent her personal dreams and devotes attention to her younger daughter.
Another female sacrifice is that of Louisa, the young Chinese American woman who somewhat resembles Lydia. During her affair with James, Louisa envisions an alternate future in which she replaces Marilyn as his wife. However, bereaved and distracted, James only sees Louisa as a type—a woman with the jet-black hair of his daughter, or “the sort of woman” he “should have fallen in love with,” as opposed to his blonde wife (205). Ironically, Marilyn also sees Louisa as an alternative wife for James and casts Louisa as her polar opposite, thinking that Louisa is “a shy little thing […] as far from me […] as a girl could be” (215). She imagines that Louisa is docile as opposed to assertive, like her. Following his reconciliation with Marilyn, after Louisa has served her purpose of forcing them to confront their neglected issues, James never speaks to Louisa again. Arguably, Louisa started an affair with her boss to be less alone as a Chinese American student in a White-majority town. However, for the Lee family’s survival, her feelings must be sacrificed, and she is cast out of James’ life and the narrative.
In her portrayal of sacrificed and subdued young women, Ng shows how women’s personal desires are sacrificed to maintain the status quo in a patriarchal society. Further, in an environment of scarce opportunities for women, especially non-White women, one woman’s personal needs and desires often take precedence over another’s.
Racial Discrimination, Silence, and Shame
The Lee family functions, or malfunctions, by not speaking about painful issues, especially those that concern race. While the Lees’ silence affronts outside prejudice by pretending that everything is normal, it also creates distance and misunderstanding between family members.
Marilyn and James are silent on racial differences following Marilyn’s comment at their wedding that her mother “just thinks I should marry someone more like me” (55). She then kisses James and thinks to herself, “ridiculous […] so obvious that she didn’t need to say it” (55). However, whatever is so obvious to Marilyn remains ambiguous, especially to James. It could be obvious that her mother is a bigoted woman with ridiculous views, or obvious that she would understandably oppose such a radical union.
Although the couple do not mention Marilyn’s mother again and act as though she never existed, she is conspicuous by her absence in their lives, and James continually dwells on her prejudice. Indeed, the hurt inflicted by Marilyn’s mother’s rejection still feels fresh 20 years later, when James brings her up as Marilyn confronts him for his affair. When Marilyn says, “I thought you were different,” meaning different than the average philandering husband, James misunderstands her, associating the word “different” with his “too different” Asianness (242).
Although Marilyn faced gender prejudice in Harvard’s labs, she cannot comprehend James’s experience of being perceived as different at the skin level. This leads her to mock and trivialize his anxiety that Lydia should “do what everyone else is doing […] fit in,” as though James is less a grown man than an immature adolescent hungry for his peers’ approval (243).
James’s unresolved pain, resulting from race-based rejection at every stage of his formative years, causes him shame. This shame in turn causes him to remain silent when his children face similar prejudice. Rather than preparing his children for a world where they stand out because of their appearance, and where some people are racist, he prefers to deny that they are different from others at all. This denial causes him to project unrealistic fantasies of popularity onto his children, in some cases denying the evidence before his eyes. For example, although James can see kids shunning Nath and hears the racist taunt “Chink can’t find China,” he cannot bring himself to comfort his son or to speak honestly about this incident (90). Although “part of him wanted to gather his son into his arms, to tell him that he understood” and relate a comparable incident of bullying that he faced in his own childhood, James decides that Nath must learn to toughen up and “take a joke” if he is to fit in (91; 92). As James’s internalized self-loathing is projected onto his son, James misses out on celebrating the differences that make Nath special, such as his exceptional academic promise and his interest in space.
Ng shows that the family only finds true connection when they talk honestly about race. Prior to Lydia’s death, Jack initiates this trend when he, who perhaps feels like he is the only gay boy in school, asks her what it is like to be the only non-White girl. While Lydia’s problems are not resolved by confiding in Jack, the permission to stop lying and tell the truth inspires her vision of living as a more honest version of herself. Similarly, to save their marriage, James must break his silence about the racism he has faced, and Marilyn must acknowledge that facing constant judgment for skin-level difference would make a person’s outlook on life different than her own. Ng’s presentation of the damage that silence about racism inflicts in the 1970s creates some distance between the reader and the narrative. Thus, the reader can better see this silence as an old model of dealing with racial difference and can aspire to a more progressive approach, like the frank one espoused in the conversations at the end of the novel.
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