Everything I Never Told You

Celeste Ng is an American writer whose parents emigrated to the United States from Hong Kong in the late 1960s. She was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio. Her debut novel Everything I Never Told You achieved both commercial and critical success, becoming a New York Times best-seller as well as Amazon’s Best Book of the Year in 2014 and a New York Times Notable Book of 2014.

In his New York Times review, Alexander Chee judges that the book is a “literary thriller” with a “doubled heart.” Its mission is to be as exciting as a thriller while commenting on the integration of Chinese Americans in the 20th century, by telling “a story bigger than whatever is behind the crime.” Chee describes how Ng dangles two stock protagonists of the crime genre before the reader: the missing ingenue, Lydia Lee, and the local bad boy, Jack Wolff. However, when neither Lydia nor Jack nor the investigation into Lydia’s death prove to be what readers expect, Ng succeeds in creating an original narrative with an important message on how the White hegemony limits opportunities for minorities. Chee concludes that even “if we know this story, we haven’t seen it yet in American fiction, not until now.” (Chee, Alexander. “The Leftovers.” The New York Times Book Review, 15 Aug. 2014.)

Plot Summary

Everything I Never Told You has a bitemporal structure. Chapters alternate between the narrative of events after Lydia Lee’s death in May 1977 and a narrative that describes Lee family’s history, beginning with Lydia’s parents James and Marilyn.

The narrative opens on the morning that 16-year-old Lydia Lee does not come down to the family breakfast table. Lydia, the whitest-looking child of Marilyn and James, a White and Chinese American couple, is also the favorite of both parents, who dote on her at the expense of their other children, Nath and Hannah. By the end of the first chapter, the family learns that Lydia’s body was found at the bottom of a lake.

A police investigation into Lydia’s death begins. When the police find that Lydia was marginalized for being the only non-White girl in school, they assume that suicide was her cause of death. Marilyn rages against this conclusion, while James is so traumatized by the coroner’s report and the truth about his daughter’s social exclusion that he seeks refuge in an affair with his Chinese American assistant Louisa Chen.

Meanwhile, the reader learns that Lydia’s problems began not with her but “because of Lydia’s mother and father, because of her mother’s and father’s mothers and fathers” (25). The son of Chinese immigrants who was excluded by his peers, Lydia’s father James has a deep unfulfilled wish to fit in. In contrast, Marilyn, the daughter of a Southern Betty Crocker devotee, wished to break with the feminine domestic idyll by becoming a doctor. When Marilyn and James meet at Harvard, where she is an undergraduate student and he is teaching a course on the American cowboy, they fall in love. When Marilyn gets pregnant with Nath and James misses out on a teaching post at Harvard, the couple get married and move to Middlewood, Ohio. There, they have another child, Lydia, and James becomes a college professor, while Marilyn remains a bored housewife.

One day, at age 29, Marilyn decides to leave her family to finish her degree and go to medical school. James and the children are traumatized by her absence, and Lydia vows that if her mother returns, she will do everything to make her happy. Marilyn returns when she is pregnant with Hannah, and seeing how eager Lydia is to please her, she transfers her hopes of a medical career onto her daughter. Meanwhile, James also transfers his fantasies of social integration onto Lydia. Nath, after initially mourning the loss of his parents’ attention, comes to accept that Lydia must be doted on, while he and Hannah are neglected, to maintain the family’s equilibrium.

By the time of her 16th birthday, Lydia is quaking under the pressure of pretending to be scientific for her mother and popular for her father. When she fears that Nath, who has gotten into Harvard and is annoyed by his parents’ continued lack of appreciation, is drifting away from her, Lydia feels increasingly isolated. In revenge, she befriends the rebellious Jack Wolff, whom Nath loathes owing to a childhood misunderstanding.

While Nath suspects that Jack is seducing Lydia, the truth is that Jack is Lydia’s confidant, not her lover. While Lydia hopes that Jack will seduce her, he in turn tells her that he prefers her brother, Nath. A scorned Lydia is further challenged when she fails a driving test and suspects that her father is having an affair with Louisa Chen. Unable to sleep, Lydia goes to the lake where, following Marilyn’s return to the family, Nath pushed Lydia in and then saved her. Lydia decides that she will start anew and not rely on Nath or pretend to be who her parents want her to be. Although she cannot swim, she thinks the ritual of swimming will mark her new beginning. Tragically, she drowns.

In the weeks following Lydia’s death, Marilyn finds out about James’s affair. They reconcile when they manage to talk honestly about the pressures and discrimination they have faced over the years. After fighting with Jack due to suspicions about his involvement in Lydia’s death, Nath and Jack also reconcile. There is even an intimation that Nath returns Jack’s romantic sentiments. Lydia is in the family’s thoughts as much as ever, although they are still uncertain about why she entered the lake.