Celeste Ng "Everything I Never Told You"
We're introduced to Celeste Ng's debut novel, "Everything I Never Told You" - the book that set the tone for her entire career. A Chinese American writer, Ng is uniquely positioned to write about what it meant to be Asian in 1970s America. Through this story, she explores grief, identity, race, family relationships, and the impossible expectations parents place on their children - expectations that often become the very thing that breaks them. The novel became a major success upon publication which I do not really understand that much, but I will address the points I liked in the end.
"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet."
That's how this family drama with a touch of mystery begins. As the story unfolds, we slowly piece together the history of the Lee family, untangle their complicated relationships, and see both the life they had before Lydia's death and the one that follows. How far will her parents go in their search for someone to blame? And what secrets are Lydia's brother and sister hiding or going to reveal?
Beyond a fairly engaging plot - and, admittedly, my curiosity about who killed this generation's Laura Palmer - I don't have much praise for the novel. So let me start with what really annoyed me.
Here's how I imagine writing a novel works. You create your characters, give them a backstory, map out how different events shape them, connect all the little arrows of motivation so that their actions feel natural. But when you actually write the book, you don't normally explain those connections over and over again. You trust the reader to put the pieces together. That's exactly where this novel lost me.
Throughout the entire book, it constantly feels as if the author doesn't trust the reader to remember anything. Hannah does something... because no one has ever noticed her. Lydia agrees with her mother... because her mother once left, remember? It keeps reminding you of motivations you've already understood chapters ago, as though you're going to forget them every twenty pages.
Maybe that's simply Ng's narrative style, but by the end it became exhausting.
I also struggled with the point of view. Is this a narrator speaking, or are we inside the characters' heads? The narration often explains everyone's motivations with such certainty that it almost sounds as if the characters themselves fully understand why they behave the way they do - which feels especially strange considering many of them are teenagers. But if it's an outside narrator, then the perspective doesn't feel detached enough either. It ends up somewhere in between, and that ambiguity never quite worked for me.
So yes, I have quite a few questions about the storytelling itself and the way the novel handles perspective. I genuinely think I would have enjoyed the story much more if it had trusted its readers a little more.
That said, I did appreciate the glimpse into what life looked like for Asian Americans not that long ago. Seeing how race quietly shaped everyday interactions, family expectations, and a person's sense of belonging was probably the most interesting part of the novel for me.