Every parent’s worst nightmare: a missing child.
In Celeste Ng’s novel Everything I Never Told You, the reader is not kept in suspense about what happened to 16-year-old Lydia, who lives with her family in a peaceful small Ohio college town. Chapter 1 starts
Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.
Lydia’s body is found in the lake, but why and how did this happen?
Slowly, over the backstory chapters, the secrets emerge. Lydia’s mother Marilyn seems like the quintessential housewife — making eggs three different ways for her family, fresh hot dinners … Marilyn, though, has had a more complicated past than it seems. A clever child in the ’50s who had always wanted to be a doctor, she fell in love with her Chinese-American professor and married him, and then pregnancies derailed all her attempts to study further. She will live vicariously through her daughter Lydia, she decides. Marilyn is Caucasian, so it’s a nice inversion that the non-Asian parent is putting the heavy academic expectations on the child.
Marilyn cupped Lydia’s chin in her hand and thought of all the things her own mother had never said to her, the things she had longed, her entire life, to hear. “You have your whole life in front of you. You can do anything you want.”
James, Marilyn’s husband, has his own frustrations, but his relate to both implicit and explicit racism. He has always been top of his class, but never quite gets the plum faculty jobs and is now teaching in a small college in Ohio.
The central conflict in the book is that Chinese-American James wants to blend in, while blond Marilyn wants to stand out. Neither, of course, can attain these goals.
Their oldest son Nath is brilliant, but ignored. Supposedly James thinks they are too alike, but I found this a bit unconvincing — why would James ignore his gifted oldest son to focus on his daughter? It is particularly odd when Nath’s early acceptance to Harvard is ignored while the parents fuss about Lydia’s failed physics test.
The third child, Hannah, is completely ignored by both parents, and skulks sadly around the place longing for a bit of affection. This too seemed a bit off — Hannah seemed quite charming, and it’s difficult to understand why she would be so forgotten.
Hannah had been listing Lydia’s many nicknames in her mind. Lyd. Lyds. Lyddie. Honey. Sweetheart. Angel. No one ever called Hannah anything but Hannah.
Meanwhile, nearby lives Jack, child of a single mother, the quintessential popular highschooler, who has been secretly hanging out with Lydia. Nath suspects him of something, but Jack’s secret turns out to be quite different.
The time of overt institutionalized racism has passed, but there is still plenty of pointed aggression against a mixed-race family in the 70s. The newspaper reports about Lydia have loaded headlines like
Children of Mixed Backgrounds often struggle to find their place
(suggesting that any problems are because she is a misfit). There are plenty of racist comments from the other schoolchildren:
An older girl — maybe ten or eleven — shouted “Chink can’t find China!” and the other children laughed.
In fact, there was a lot of racism in the book, which seems a little excessive, but I can’t say whether this is realistic for smalltown Ohio in the 1970s.
Celeste Ng writes elegant paragraphs, perhaps if anything slightly too polished, so that they lose their edge.
For a moment James looks young and lonely and vulnerable, like the shy boy she’d met so long ago, and half of Marilyn wants to gather him in her arms. The other half of her wants to batter him with her fists.
The resolution at the end seems rushed and contrived, so for me, this was a book to read and enjoy, but not re-read or savour.
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