Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You

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Celeste Ng's debut novel, Everything I Never Told You (Penguin Press, 2014), begins with the blunt statement, "Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast."

This statement captures a moment prior to a horrible knowing, a moment still immersed in familiar feelings and relations among the family members. Lydia, the second child of three, has been the gravitational center of the family, bearing the brunt of her parents differing expectations and therefore becoming the only child who really received full attention in the family.

The novel churns through the aftermath of Lydia's death, with each parent struggling to make sense of the tragedy and what it means for their expectations of life (as lived through Lydia). Marilyn, the mother, particularly feels the loss since she invested so heavily in Lydia as a chance to recapture her dreams of becoming a doctor--a childhood plan derailed in her junior year at Radcliffe College when she became pregnant with her oldest son, Nathan (called Nath). She is a white woman from Virgina whose interest in science and being a doctor put her at odds with the prevailing ideas of women's work at the time, a contrast sharpened by the fact the her mother was her local school's home economics teacher and an adamant supporter of the idea that girls must learn to be good housewives. James Lee, the father, meanwhile, is a Chinese American professor of American history (specializing in cowboys) whose need to be just like white Americans leads him to feel shame at seeing his mixed-race son growing up like he did, never quite an insider in their Midwestern community in a small college town.

Nath, in the meantime, has been the supportive older brother to Lydia, understanding the terrible burden that Lydia faces as the only child who seems to matter to the parents. Of the three children, he seems to experience the most difficulties as a mixed-race Asian and white child in their all-white town, something his father disdains in him. And Hannah, the youngest daughter, is the forgotten member of the family who sees and hears much though rarely interacts with her parents or siblings.

In addition to these family members, the other key figure is their neighbor Jack, a suspicious neighbor in Nath's class who had been spending time with Lydia in the months before her death. Jack bears the brunt of Nath's anger in the aftermath of his sister's death, and he is convinced Jack is responsible for it.

This novel is a careful working through of the desires of each family member, particularly the parents and the two older children, in light of lifelong frustrations. James cannot get over being Chinese and different from other Americans. Marilyn cannot forget her dreams of becoming a doctor. Nath wants some approval from his parents, who only see Lydia. And Lydia, poor Lydia, understands that embodying her parents' expectations (to be friends with everyone for her father and to become a doctor for her mother) is the only thing that keeps their delicate family together. The narrative structure is full of flashbacks with the various characters, particularly the parents. In the present time frame, the story also proceeds forward from the day of Lydia's death through the police investigation and through the end of the school year for Nath.

This story treads familiar ground in terms of Asian American experiences in small towns as well as feminist concerns regarding women's work. I'm trying to think of other novels where there has been a Chinese American male character who so thoroughly internalizes a sense of racial self-hatred but can't think of any off the top of my head. The tragic mulatta narrative is present here, of course, with the death of a mixed-race characters as the center of the story. And there is another familiar narrative that emerges later in the novel that provides even more texture to the story, but I don't want to spoil it for people!

All in all, this novel is a welcome addition to the body of Asian American literature. It is particularly great for providing some reflections on 1950s experiences (James Lee as a graduate student in history at Harvard and Marilyn as a woman in the sciences) and the 1970s (Nath's obsession with space travel in the years after the first moon landing, for instance). It certainly fits in with other books that explore the complicated dynamics of family relationships.

Note: I listened to the audiobook version of this novel.

A Review of Carlos Bulosan’s The Cry and the Dedication (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1995)

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The Cry and the Dedication is Carlos Bulosan’s unfinished manuscript about socialist guerilla fighters in the Philippines in the 1940s and 1950s. Poet, novelist, and essayist Bulosan is best known for America Is in the Heart (1946), his semi-autobiographical story of Filipino American migrant farm workers on the West Coast. Cry and the Dedication has many of the same stylistic traits – particularly the soaring utopian rhetoric undercut by the depiction of harsh realities – but it is more definitely politically radical in its outlook than America.

The narrative centers on seven guerilla fighters (6 men and 1 woman) as they make their way across the countryside; each person represents different social classes – urban, rural, peasant, city worker, petit bourgeois, etc. They are headed to the city, where an ally from the U.S. will provide one million pesos for the resistance movement. As they progress, they pass through each person’s hometown, where almost invariably they encounter tragedy and/or betrayal. As E. San Juan notes in the introduction, these homecomings-that-are-not-homecomings suggest the impossibility of any kind of easy return home; at the same time, the seven also encounter glimpses of hope and possibility. Of the seven, arguably the two key characters are Dante and Hassim. Dante, who is 35 years old (just like the narrator-protagonist of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy), has lived part of his life in the U.S. and has returned to join the guerilla fighters and document their history. Hassim is the very young but wise leader of this group, a self-taught former factory worker in the city. The fates of these characters are very significant, as the introduction notes.

The great Marxist literary critic E. San Juan, Jr., provides the introduction that begins by describing his discovery of the manuscript amid Bulosan’s papers in the University of Washington archives. The introduction also provides historical and theoretical context for the novel, which is very helpful; Bulosan imagined the manuscript as part of a four-novel series about Philippine history. Unfortunately, Bulosan died young (age 42) from tuberculosis, so this final magnum opus was never realized.