Everything I Never Told You

Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.

As an opening line, could anything be sadder than a dead sixteen-year-old? Pretty and popular, brilliant and with a bright future all but guaranteed, Lydia Lee will soon be pulled, half-decomposed, from the bottom of the town's lake and her Dad will cry, “Her friends must know what happened to her!” And her Mom will insist, “She must have been abducted – Lydia would never go near the lake at night!” And Lydia's brother and sister, each harbouring secret information, will understand that the truth may never be revealed. Dun dun.

Everything I Never Told You is like a literary mystery novel, jumping around in time from when Lydia's parents first met in the 50s to the few months after her death (set in 1977), and there's a nice tension as the reader waits to see if the facts of her death will be revealed. Throughout it all, there is much made of the fact that the Dad, James, is a Chinese-American (born in California of immigrant parents) and Marilyn, the Mom, is the product of a single mother household, with a Southern white-gloved Mom who never had contact with her daughter again after meeting James at their wedding. We will also learn that James, ostracized his entire life, burdened Lydia with his own hopes that she have many friends, and that Marilyn, who gave up her dream to become a doctor when she realised she was pregnant, pushed Lydia to fulfill her own academic goals (the whole time ironically vowing that she would never force her daughter to conform to anyone else's expectations like her mother had done.)

Author Celeste Ng writes some very lovely scenes – I especially enjoyed James and Marilyn's early love story – but overall, this book didn't really work for me. It was incredibly heavy handed with the family pressures – every interaction between James and Lydia involved him trying to encourage her to make more friends and every interaction between Marilyn and Lydia involved homework and test results – and I just wanted to reach through the pages to Ng herself and say, “Yes. I got it the first time.” Meanwhile, with an omniscient point of view that gets into everyone's head, we learn that Lydia's much younger sister Hannah is neglected but satisfied in her role as family observer (creepily always present and watchful) and their older brother Nath understands that Lydia doesn't want her place in the center of the family's orbit. After her death, Nath conjures a conveniently parallel memory of a time when he had pushed Lydia into the lake in a fit of jealousy:

(T)he second he touched her, he knew that he had misunderstood everything. When his palms hit her shoulders, when the water closed over her head, Lydia had felt relief so great she had sighed in a deep choking lungful. She had staggered so readily, fell so eagerly, that she and Nath both knew: that she felt it, too, this pull she now exerted, and didn't want it. That the weight of everything tilting toward her was too much.

This reluctance on Lydia's part and understanding on Nath's is also repeatedly spelled out for us. It culminates in a phone call between them while Nath is on a student visit to Harvard, the weekend before Lydia's death:

Nath sighed. “What happened? Did Mom nag you about your homework?” He tipped the bottle to his lips and found the beer had gone warm, and the stale liquid shriveled his tongue. “Wait, let me guess. Mom bought you a special present but it was just a book. Dad bought you a new dress – no, a diamond necklace – and he expects you to wear it. Last night at dinner you had to talk and talk and talk and all of their attention was on you. Am I getting warmer?”

All their lives Nath had understood, better than anyone, the lexicon of their family, the things they could never truly explain to outsiders: that a book or a dress meant more than something to read or something to wear; that attention came with expectations that – like snow – drifted and settled and crushed you with their weight. All the words were right, but in this new Nath’s voice, they sounded trivial and brittle and hollow. The way anyone else might have heard them. Already her brother had become a stranger.

Even so, Ng did maintain narrative tension – just what happened to Lydia? Maybe she was under enough pressure to consider suicide (especially when she realised that Nath was serious about going away to Harvard and she would be losing her only ally)? Maybe she was rebelling against expectations and just got mixed up with the wrong crowd? Maybe the answer lies with that shady Jack character who lives down the street? As more and more of Lydia is revealed, the reader learns that she isn't who anyone in her family thinks she is and maybe even our own expectations of her are flawed. The eventual solution both did and didn't satisfy me, but I did enjoy the overall mystery vibe of this book.

But one last comment: much is made of the racism James and his half-Chinese children endure, and if Ng is trying to say that this is representative of what she herself has lived with, it's a truly shocking level. I lived in small town Ontario in 1977, and although I must admit I didn't know any Asians there, if I had seen a Chinese family driving down the street I would never have pulled back the corners of my eyelids and started chanting, “Ching chong ching chong”. Again, maybe this is a true story for Ng, and I might be naive about the racism around me, but as a persistent theme, I felt knocked over the head with it.

In the final analysis: Some lovely writing and a nice mysterious atmosphere, but heavy repetitions of themes reduced this book's potential. A lightweight read despite the hype.

I'm still thinking about the racism angle: at one point, James is annoyed that someone asked him what the difference was between an egg roll and a spring roll; as though that was an example of racism. Is it? Is it racist for me to ask an Italian what the difference is between rigatoni and penne? I can only conclude that this was something that happened to Celeste Ng and she found it racist (and while I totally support her right to define what she finds offensive, the intent just may have been benign).

When Mallory was in junior kindergarten, a new girl, Sarah, joined her class. Plopped in near the end of the school year, Sarah had come straight from China -- where she had spent her first five years with her grandparents, despite having been born in Canada -- and she didn't have a word of English. By the end of the first week that she was here, Sarah's Mom, Min, approached me as I was waiting for Mal to come out.

"I saw you walking with a little Asian girl yesterday," Min said.

I thought back and remembered that Kennedy's friend, a girl of Philippine heritage, had walked home with us after school the day before. "Yes, " I said. "That's right."

"Do you babysit her?" Min asked.

"Oh no," I said. "She's just a friend of my daughter's."

Min looked distressed and said, "Oh, because I'm supposed to find a babysitter for Sarah before I go back to work on Monday. I don't know who to ask and I was hoping you watched children after school."

I hesitated. Ever since Kennedy had started school, people had asked me to watch their kids, and even though I did get a diploma in Early Childhood Development, I was happy to have had no extra kids at that time. On the other hand, if this desperate Mom was going to be asking random strangers to babysit for her, who better than me? I decided it would be both the right thing to do and an interesting challenge if I agreed, so I did.

Kindergarten back then was a half day affair, so "after school" meant that I would have Sarah for 5 or 6 hours a day. Mallory and Sarah got along really well right from the start, and while they played in Mal's room most of the time, Sarah was the only kid I babysat for whom I really tried to do lots of art and crafts. By the end of the school year, Sarah had a bit of English, but after a summer of camps, when we saw her again in September, Sarah was speaking very well.

Sarah totally fit in with her classmates, and while some of the kids may have had questions about China and what it was like to live there, I couldn't see any racism. (And I'm sure it helps that even Catholic schools are more culturally diverse now.) I babysat Sarah until she turned 10 (the legal age at which children can be home alone here), and while she and Mal drifted apart, they always remained friendly and I'd be certain to get a hug from Sarah whenever I saw her. Happily, the girls have become close again this year and I can see that Sarah is bright and popular and athletic and a real Canadian girl.

And yet...all of a sudden this year, Mal has been making Chinese jokes about Sarah, and while she plays along and puts on an accent (so solly), I have no idea where it came from or if Sarah is actually offended. I know she was offended when she told me about the English Literacy Test they all had to take in grade 10 last year, and about how she had been put into a small classroom of ESL students and given an extra hour to write the test, and about how the teacher/supervisor had spoken slooowly, enunnnciating all of the instructions for them. What kind of stupid decision what that? Is it racist or just oblivious to who Sarah is beyond her biography?

And speaking of that biography -- I always thought it was kind of sad that Sarah was sent to China for five years after she was born. But then my brother told me a similar story: In his engineering firm, he had hired a husband and wife pair, and as they were preparing for the birth of their first child, Kyler asked about maternity leave and the mother-to-be said, "Oh, I won't need mat leave. I'll be sending the baby back to China for its first five years." Kye explained that EI covered a year of mat leave, and if it was a question of money, maybe he could figure something out...but the woman explained that she wanted to have her baby experience those first few years in China; that it was a cultural expectation. And isn't that interesting?

I should ask Sarah if she would find it racist to be asked the difference between a spring roll and an egg roll. I should ask her if she finds Mal's recent Chinese jokes offensive. As a final thought, I'll say that I'm not offended to learn that when Sarah's family has pasta for dinner they call it "White Night". 

Update: Okay, I asked Sarah about racism and she said that while she wouldn't be offended by anyone asking her the difference between a spring roll and an egg roll, she does get comments every single day that make her want to say, "Geez, okay, I look different, whatever." For example, Sarah's on an elite soccer team, and whenever the other girls kick the ball hard, they make gibberish grunting noises. Once, some of the girls turned to Sarah -- after someone had grunted their gibberish -- and said, "That sounds like Manadrin, doesn't it? What does it mean?" Sarah said that kind of thing -- which is fairly nonstop -- does hurt her feelings, and okay, I'm a naive idiot for thinking that because I don't see racis, it doesn't exist.