Ponder: Everything I Never Told You

Everything I Never Told You ©2014 by Celeste Ng opens with a spoiler.

Lydia is dead. But they do not know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast.

Lydia is the 16 year old daughter in a mixed race, Chinese/Caucasian family of five with the struggles to fit in and failure to communicate amongst themselves. It is a story of loneliness, longing, and dysfunction. The characters are well developed and the sad emotions conveyed well – to the reader but not between family members.

The Chinese father, James, marries the Caucasian mother, Marilyn, in 1958 in Boston in a small ceremony. Marilyn's mother had come up from Virginia for the event. In Chapter Two the climate in the country is revealed.

Marilyn realized, suddenly what her mother was imagining. It was 1958; in Virginia, in half the country, their wedding would break the law. Even in Boston, she sometimes saw disapproval in the eyes of the passerby. Her hair was no longer the white-blond of her childhood, but it was still light enough to catch attention when bent toward James' inky black head in move theaters, on a park bench, at the counter of the Waldorf Cafeteria.

1958 was the same year that white man Richard Loving married black woman Mildred Jeter in Washington, D.C. and the couple were jailed for a year for their "crime". Not until 1967, did the Supreme Court rule that banning interracial marriages was unconstitutional, per the Wikipedia article on the Loving vs. Virginia case. Dates when mixed race marriages were allowed by state is given in the following chart. 

I learned a new vocabulary word from my mixed marriage research that I had never even heard before. Per the Merriam Webster online Dictionary definition

Definition of miscegenation:
a mixture of races
especially : marriage, cohabitation, or sexual intercourse between a white person and a member of another race

Discrimination is the theme in this novel. Marilyn is an intelligent women, smart enough to attend Radcliffe, and James is a Harvard grad. They are denied opportunities: James because of his race, Marilyn because of her gender. The mixed race children do not fit in at school. Policemen looking into Lydia's disappearance (and suspected suicide) allude to the fact that blended race children have a hard time finding a place and making friends. James' attraction to his Chinese teaching assistant further weakens the case for the stability and longevity of inter-racial bonds. All of this is sad, very sad. 

But what irks me about this book is that the family does not pull together and confide in each other.  James actually shows a favoritism for his eldest daughter because she has blue eyes; Marilyn showers Lydia with the most attention because she wants for her what she never had for herself due to gender. The family does not draw strength from each other. Marilyn wants intellectual success for her daughter and James wants popularity and friends for her.  Lydia deceives her parents into believing both those things are happening for her when in reality she struggles in her studies and is socially isolated. Was Lydia abducted or is suicide an explanation for her death? The answer is not totally obvious.

As a positive, this novel did make me regard discrimination in a spectrum broader than "Black Lives Matter", so that is a valuable thought expansion. But I have several friends who are in mixed marriages, and I see them accepted in our social circle at least in today's age; true, I cannot imagine what it would have been like decades ago. However, I found it extremely difficult to relate to the lack of communication within the family unit, regardless of the time period. 

I cannot recommend this book highly, giving it two stars which in my system translates to Ok, not great; some redeeming features; I finished it. It predates Celeste Ng's later successful novel Little Fires Everywhere (three stars in my post of 8/14/20) and I felt it was less mature than that work, which did not inspire me either. Everything I Never Told You was a quick read so I was not depressed for too long and I can check the box that I've read Celeste Ng's other work. I am not going to rush right out and read her next novel. She seems unable to decide her focus amongst an array of injustices and dysfunctions. This author is not for me.