This past spring I had the pleasure of meeting Celeste Ng when she came to Pittsburgh to promote her second novel Little Fires Everywhere. After the Q&A, nearly everyone in the audience queued up to get her signature, and I was struck by her grace and willingness to chat with every single one of us. In short, Ng is super cool (and my signed copy of Little Fires Everywhere is now quite dear to me).
Because I enjoyed her second novel, I set myself to read her debut work, Everything I Never Told You, which follows a young Chinese-American family in 1970's Ohio.
James Lee meets Marilyn when she's a student in one of his classes. He's the first Asian she's ever seen, and when she visits him for office hours, she does something that surprises both of them: she kisses him. From that moment on, the two fall in love, getting married several months later when Marilyn discovers that she's pregnant. She isn't worried about giving up her dream of becoming a doctor. She figures, after a year or two, she can go back and finish her degree.
But that never happens. Another baby is on the way, and then another, and it isn't one or two years that pass but eight, and she is beginning to realize that her dream was always just that: a dream.
Their children, Nath, Lydia, and Hannah, grow up in their small Ohio town as the only children from a mixed race background. None of them have real friends. Their parents push them to fit in when they so clearly stand out. Still, their family has it's routine - a pattern, even if the pattern is painful, boring, and all-too-familiar. But this all changes when Lydia is found dead.
Moving between past and present, the novel follows James, Marilyn, Lydia, Nath, and Hannah as they attempt to understand Lydia and come to terms with the sudden loss.
While I enjoyed this novel, but it wasn't particularly groundbreaking. I think Ng has a specialty with family dramas, and her ability to get inside each character's head is no easy feat. Ng allows us to understand each member without offering an easy villain, solution, or singular tipping point, which mirroring the complexity of real families.
But while I could understand all of the characters and their motivations, I didn't find myself rooting in particular for any of them. Of course, they're all flawed, like any humans, but even amidst flaws (sometimes huge, glaring ones) I find myself attached to certain characters, or aligning most closely to a single one. That didn't happen in Everything I Never Told You, even though I wanted it to. Perhaps it was just that I identified with all of them equally, and maybe it's a sign of Ng's craft that there wasn't one character I was drawn to. It comes down to personal preference: I prefer a character I can love, or at least really get behind.
I appreciated the novel being set in the 1970's, as it showed the racism and other prejudices that ran rampant then, but also exist in much of the same ways now. However, I felt that Ng sprinkled too many little references to the time period (like the moon landing, current president, etc.). It seemed that these were the only elements tying the novel to that time period, which she could have established with more in-depth scene-setting, rather than pieces of history plucked from newspapers.
Likewise, the ending, with it's projection into the future before circling back to the present moment felt too easy and clean. It isn't revolutionary, but it is a complex portrait of a mixed race family in the 70s. Expectations met.
7/10 📕