Review: Everything I Never Told You

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

So part of him wanted to tell Nath that he knew: what it was like to be teased, what it was like to never fit in. The other part of him wanted to shake his son, to slap him. To shape him into something different. Later, when Nath was too slight for the football team, too short for the basketball team, too clumsy for the baseball team, when he seemed to prefer reading and poring over his atlas and peering through his telescope to making friends, James would think back to this day in the swimming pool, this first disappointment in his son, this first and most painful puncture in his fatherly dreams.

James Lee, the son of Chinese immigrants, has had to struggle his whole life not only to get to the position he is in now but also to hold onto it. A university professor teaching American History (specifically the history of the American Cowboy), James has done everything in his power to denounce his Chinese heritage, including his mother tongue, in order to fit in and become as American as possible. He's ashamed and embarrassed of his parents and their poor, humble upbringing, and has done all he can to erase his connection to them by the time he meets Marilyn, the pretty, blonde American girl in his class with the same wild ambitions as his own.

Marilyn, whose quintessentially all-American, apple-pie upbringing has left her starving for more than her own mother's house-wifery, has likewise struggled with her identity as something entirely outside of what is expected of her. She doesn't want to stay home, raising kids and baking cakes and pies from Betty Crocker cookbooks just to please her husband, but instead wants to pursue science and become a doctor. Mirroring James' own disgust and embarrassment of his parents, Marilyn sees only failure in her mother's path in life and seeks to prove to herself that she can 'do more' and be better. For mid-20th-century America, both James and Marilyn are already countercultural enough in their ambitions as it is, let alone when they fall in love and decide soon after to marry.

The problem is, life doesn't always work out the way we want it to - in fact, at some point or another everyone ends up feeling disappointed in themselves or in the way their life is going at one time or another, but it's how we let that disappointment control us and the direction that our life takes afterwards that really matters.

Too soon after marrying, Marilyn gives birth to Nath, and not long after that, to Lydia...a little while later, to Hannah. Each time she becomes a mother again she vows that, eventually, she'll be able to go back to school to finish her degree and become a doctor...but each time, she is disappointed. Motherhood overtakes her life, and she soon finds herself in the exact same position as her mother, which kills her once-fighting spirit and fills her with resentment. James, who has never really felt that he fit in or belonged despite all that he has accomplished, still believes that at any moment someone will realize that he's not worthy - of his position, of his wife, of his American Dream - and will take it all away from him. And so his own resentment and anxiety grows, again unspoken.

I've come to understand that I've never really understood - I've never understood what it would have been like to grow up in a multiracial family, or to have had such highly rigid expectations placed upon me at birth, the immense pressure to do better than my own parents, to prove myself and make something out of our name and legacy. Of course I wouldn't, having come from a white, middle-class, fairly laid-back upbringing, where I was allowed to carve my own path and was left largely to my own devices in terms of school and making friends. Sure I was pushed here and there, mostly by my grandmother, to be less shy, more assertive, to try new things every once in awhile, but that was never, ever anything compared to the intensely suffocating pressure that Lydia, Nath and in an indirect way young Hannah have to face from their parents. It was not even close to the incredible disappointment their parents feel in themselves and in turn in their own children. That's really the most heartbreaking part of this entire story, that Marilyn and James believe so fiercely that they have become failures themselves, that they have let themselves down, and in believing so they've directed all of their energy, pain, loss, and fear into trying to prevent the same from happening to their own children - especially, as we see, in Lydia, the favourite child.

James and Marilyn's own disappointments in life and in themselves have remained unsaid all these years, entirely uncommunicated, for fear of toppling the precarious balance and control that they believe they've created over their lives, and it is this most dangerous act that has morphed their pain and disappointment into a disgusting, rotting thing that sits ever amongst them, waiting just below the surface, slowly poisoning their family. The children, always so much more perceptive than parents give them credit for, realize that if they do not do what their parents desire, even to their own pain and suffering, that their family as a whole will fall apart - and so they endure their parents' demons as their own to overcome. The cycle of pain and resentment continues on, until one day...the fine balance and fake veneer of calm snaps, and the worst thing that could happen, does.

I have taken the time to write an unusually long (for me) review/essay because there are just so, so many things that I have wanted to say / work through / process in terms of the characters and their incredible family dynamic. They are so tightly knit together, so bound and committed to each other, and yet they are miles and miles away from each other, never saying what is really on their minds, never letting the other know what they are truly thinking or feeling, because that would mean breaking the balance, facing their demons, owning their mistakes. I feel mostly for poor, sweet and innocent Hannah, the baby of the family, who has spent her entire young life as quietly and inoffensively as possible - never speaking unless spoken to, never showing her emotions to anyone, always seeking the love and touch and familiarity of her brother and sister and parents but never receiving it - she is a ghost, living amongst her family and yet almost never really noticed. It is her delicately perceptive, empathetic voice that I felt the most connection to throughout.

One of the most emotional, heartbreaking, and true stories I've ever read. I won't forget this broken family for quite some time. I won't forget their struggle to fit in, not only within the world in which they live, but even more importantly amongst themselves, within their own family, within their own skin.

View all my reviews