On rereading Everything I Never Told You

How Can I Be Like Everyone Else

Celeste Ng

Everything I Never Told You

The Penguin Press, 2014

In high school I read this novel entirely from the child’s side. Lydia is dead, but they don’t know this yet. A sharpened pencil and six physics problems wait beside her cereal. Her father wants her liked. Her mother wants her to be a doctor. The diaries stay blank. She holds a telephone to her ear with no one on the line. I was a child then, and I left no room for the parents. Their love looked to me like an arrangement: the daughter would become the life they had missed, and she would be used up in the becoming.

That reading was not false. It was the only standing place I had. The pressure on Lydia is real. She has her mother’s blue eyes and her father’s black hair. In the grocery store a stranger tugs at the corners of Nath’s eyes and Hannah’s, says she knew they were Chinese, and lets Lydia pass as her mother’s child. James loves her as the daughter who might finally not look like him. Marilyn loves her as the road she herself did not finish. Both loves ask Lydia to correct a failure that was never hers. At sixteen I could hate the correction, and I did.

What I could not hear, until I had lived where I did not fit, was the sentence inside the father’s correction. First-generation immigrant parents often love a child by trying to make that child the same as everyone else, so the child will not have to stand where they stood. James’s parents are that generation. In 1938, when he is six, a letter from a paper brother sends them across the country to a boarding school in Iowa. The father will do maintenance. The mother will work in the kitchen. If the boy can pass an entrance exam, he may attend for free. They sell the furniture and take five Greyhound buses. The school issues two navy uniforms with new names stitched on: Henry, Wendy. On the first morning his father tells him he is the first Oriental boy at Lloyd, and that he must set a good example. The girl in the next seat asks what is wrong with his eyes. He cannot read the Chinese of the letter that moved them. He remembers the look of the calligraphy. Years later, at Harvard, he chooses the most American subject he can find, the cowboy, as if a syllabus could finish what the uniform could not. When he stands up to teach it, the room still hesitates. This little man, not even American, is going to teach them about cowboys.

John W. Berry describes assimilation as one path of acculturation: the marks that set a person apart are put away, and acceptance is the thing hoped for in exchange. James offers Lydia that path. He does not ask her to be exceptional. Marilyn is the one who does, and she says so in the quarrel that finally opens the house. Do what everyone else is doing, she tells him. Make friends. Fit in. That was all he ever said to Lydia. She did not want their daughter to be just like everyone else. She wanted her to be exceptional. Berry’s integration would have let a child carry a heritage and enter the life around her at the same time. This house does not offer integration. It offers two corrections. The father corrects his failure to blend. The mother corrects her failure to leave a Betty Crocker kitchen, the goddess of her own mother’s home-economics classroom. Lydia’s blue eyes let both corrections be hung on one girl.

The sentence is older than James. Sameness had already been stitched into his parents’ uniforms, so that they could be called by names the school was willing to say. He is their American son. He cannot read their letter. He still passes the sentence on, translated into Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People: win friends, be popular, blend in. When the book falls into Lydia’s lap, a small piece of ice slides down through her chest. She says she has friends. She knows it is a lie. He beams. In high school I could read only the command. The command is real. The panic inside it I learned later, after I had been the person other people look at too long. Then a father’s gift of likability stopped looking like vanity and started looking like a wish that the next body would be spared the stare.

Seeing his panic does not create empathy between them. Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut call the mismatch dissonant acculturation: in one family, the generations do not become local in the same direction or at the same speed. The usual picture is a parent still living in the old language and a child already gone into the new one. The Lees look, at first, like an exception. They all speak English. The dissonance is quieter, and because of that it is easy to miss. James believes being liked is a skill he can place in his daughter’s hands. He hears himself helping. She hears that, as she is, she is not yet the same as other people. His way of surviving arrives as a script she is not allowed to hand back. The failure runs in the other direction too. She cannot feel the twelve years he spent pretending a navy uniform made him look like everyone else. He cannot feel that her obedience is not peace. They are not cold to each other. They are unable to enter each other’s reasons. That inability is the wound.

Wei-Chin Hwang gives this widening gap the name acculturative family distancing. It is not always a fight. Often it is a shrinking of what can be said. The pencil beside breakfast, the blank diary, the silent phone, the physics grade kept out of sight: these are the shapes the distance takes. The values do not sit on one plane. For the father, fitting in is how a person stops being a target. For the mother, standing out is how a daughter stays out of the life Marilyn was pushed back into. Lydia is asked to finish both tasks in one body. The family learns to treat her silence as good sense.

David L. Eng and Shinhee Han write of racial melancholia among Asian Americans: a loss that cannot be mourned in public, because success is received as proof that the loss is over. James becomes a professor of American history. People still blink, and he says first, “Well, I am American.” The sentence is a guard, not an arrival. There has been no funeral for the boy whose eyes were a question. Grief that cannot be finished changes address. He hopes a popular daughter will paint out the morning at Lloyd. Lydia does not inherit a story someone sits down and tells. No one walks her through the five buses or shows her the stitched names. She inherits an assignment. An assignment is harder to refuse than a story, because it comes dressed as love. This is what I mean by intergenerational trauma. The misfit life the older generation could not mourn becomes the normal life the next generation has to perform, every day, in its own body.

Marilyn’s injury is not an immigrant’s, and it shows me the same limit. She marries James because something in her says he understands what it is to be different. He does, and he does not. Her difference was a cookbook and a professor who chuckled and asked whether she meant to be a nurse. His difference is the stare in the diner, and the colleague who speaks to him loudly and slowly, as if he cannot hear. Each of them mistakes the other’s exclusion for a shared one. The child lives where the two mistakes overlap. Later James draws toward a teaching assistant who, from the back, could have been his daughter. The person who shares the particular way he is looked at is not the wife who believed their differences matched.

I no longer hate them in the single way I hated them at sixteen. I can see a first generation sewing sameness into cloth, and the next generation placing sameness into a book, and Lydia on the lake, sure that if she kicks she can reach the dock and begin, in the morning, as herself. When she was small, Nath held her in the water and told her to kick. He had her. She remembers the lesson the wrong way up. She unties the boat herself. She is not keeping a beautiful appointment with death. She has decided to start again, and the start, as she understands it, means entering the water alone. At night the lake looks like nothing, a void. She steps out of the boat.

Seeing the parents clearly does not make the lake shallow. I can feel James’s panic because I have been the person who does not fit, and I know how badly one then wants the next person to be spared. I grew up on the child’s side of that wish. Standing at the door of the parents’ fear does not make me someone who could have held Lydia up. At the end Nath floats where she does not. He has already learned how not to drown. He also knows he will never know what she never told him: whether she thought he had let her go, or whether she wanted him to. Years later the family will redraw her outline and, in that moment, be sure they understand her completely at last. I have changed sides once. The title includes the reader who is certain the new side is the true one.

I still cannot accept the ending. Wanting a child alive, and wanting that child to be the same as everyone else, or to be exceptional, never brought her back to the breakfast table. The trauma is not a conclusion I attach to the novel. It is the house itself. Each person in it has a reason. None of them can feel what the others feel. The smallest body is used up first.

Works cited

  1. Berry, John W. “Immigration, Acculturation, and Adaptation.” Applied Psychology, vol. 46, no. 1, 1997, pp. 5–34.
  2. Eng, David L., and Shinhee Han. “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, vol. 10, no. 4, 2000, pp. 667–700.
  3. Hwang, Wei-Chin. “Acculturative Family Distancing: Theory, Research, and Clinical Practice.” Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, vol. 43, no. 4, 2006, pp. 397–409.
  4. Ng, Celeste. Everything I Never Told You. The Penguin Press, 2014.
  5. Portes, Alejandro, and Rubén G. Rumbaut. Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation. University of California Press, 2001.

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