EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU by Celeste Ng (2014)

“How had it begun? Like everything: with mothers and fathers. Because of Lydia’s mother and father, because of her mother’s and father’s mothers and fathers.” 

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

Everything I Never Told You is a story about family. The Lee family, to be precise: a Chinese-American family living in idyllic, suburban Ohio in the 1970s, the Lees are secretive, dysfunctional, antisocial and, as the book begins, shocked when the body of their teenaged daughter Lydia is found at the bottom of the local lake. The middle child of three, Lydia was the family favourite. Her mother, Marilyn, dreams of a life for her daughter different to the domesticity into which she herself fell. This desire, bred by disappointment and failure, is a metamorphosis of something both selfish and selfless: does Marilyn want the best for her daughter, or is she merely mutating her into a vision of the things she was never able to be?

Marilyn Lee aspired to become a doctor. In the 1950s, however, women didn’t become doctors; they became housewives and stay-at-home moms. To her credit, Marilyn fights back. She strives to overcome the stereotypes of her gender, even earning acceptance Harvard Medical School, but in her sophomore year, she falls into the exact trap her mother prophesied: she meets a nice Harvard boy, falls pregnant to him, and has to leave school to assume full-time motherhood. Seven years later, Marilyn has two young children and no qualifications, and she wonders where it all went wrong: how did her dedication to not being deterred lead her into the exact same lifestyle she was so determined to avoid? She attempts to get her goals back on track, but when, ironically, she is thwarted by the unexpected arrival of her third child, Marilyn accepts that her dreams are not meant to come true: her fate lay in the very things she had so desperately tried to escape. The same, she realises, does not have to be true for Lydia. Lydia, her sweetheart, her eldest daughter, her legacy -- Lydia can be whoever she wants to be, achieve whatever she wants to achieve. Lydia becomes Marilyn’s passion project. The opportunities that Marilyn wasn’t able to seize don’t have to be out of her daughter’s reach, and she begins, with relentless energy, to sculpt her young daughter into the educated, qualified woman she was unable to become.

Despite how wrong it all ends up going, Marilyn did set out with good intentions for her daughter. She was an early-level feminist, rebelling against the expectations of female domesticity that dominated the mid-20th century by excelling at her studies and successfully taking them to a tertiary level. Her acceptance into Harvard Medical School is an awesome feat -- even in the 1970s, Harvard’s acceptance ratio of males and females was still four-to-one (Radcliffe Magazine). Her mother, however, never supported her daughter’s bold aspirations. Always gently hinting that women were unfit for medicine and besides, that Marilyn didn’t have what it took, her mother believed that Marilyn was chasing a foolish dream and that her grand plans would, in due time, all fall to pieces. Much of Marilyn’s bitterness, and her galvanization to encourage Lydia, is driven by the fact that despite the antiquity of her worldview, Marilyn’s mother ended up being right. Marilyn did not have what it took to become a doctor. Her ambitions fell to pieces not once, but twice. She failed to prove her mother wrong. And so she became adamant: Lydia would not face that same discouragement and demoralization. Lydia would have a mother who inspired her to dream bigger than society expected of her, and Marilyn would sit at the helm, shaping her daughter into the brilliant scientist she was unable to become.

These good intentions are spiked through by Marilyn’s selfishness. When she looks at her two children, Marilyn is reminded of her failures. Her aspirations were ripped apart by her family, the husband who impregnated her and resulting the children for whom she had to drop everything. Her aforementioned attempt to get her goals back on track was not a simple trip to the bookstore for textbooks and an enrolment in a community college. She needs to start fresh, unburdened. In the middle of the night, without even leaving a note, Marilyn packs a bag and vanishes. Lydia, five years old at the time, blames herself. It must be my fault, she frets to herself. I must have done something wrong, something so bad that she couldn’t stand to be around me anymore. When Marilyn, plans ironically upended by her third pregnancy, returns to her family months later with her private resolve to never let Lydia know her same failures, Lydia has also made a secret decision: no matter what it involves, she will do everything possible to make her mother happy, so that she will never leave her again.

And so it begins. Marilyn stacks Lydia’s bookshelves high with textbooks, militarizes her homework routine, tests her and quizzes her and beams with delight every time her daughter brings home an A+ or fires back a correct answer. Lydia, in turn, throws herself into her studies, watching how her mother blossoms in response to her academic success. For a while, this works -- Lydia’s diligence delights Marilyn, and Marilyn’s engagement with her daughter’s life energises Lydia’s dedication to the ambitions her mother has passed down. Yet these aspirations were not inherited organically. Lydia’s ‘goals’ are not inspired by her mother; they are inspired by her fear that if she doesn’t make her mother happy, she will leave her again. Marilyn manipulates Lydia, holding over her daughter’s head the threat that she might abandon her again. Because Lydia has become so devoted (albeit out of fear of abandonment), Marilyn is able to live vicariously through her. She tells herself that she is pushing Lydia so hard because she wants Lydia to embrace the opportunities that she herself was unable to, but in reality, what she really wants is to use her daughter to recreate her own past, editing out all of her mistakes and transforming Lydia into the version of herself that she wishes she had been.

As the novel unfolds, we discover the true harm of Marilyn’s selfish behaviour. Lydia feels trapped. She depends on her adopted ambitions to make her mother happy, but she has realised that she doesn’t really want to become a doctor, that she wants to forge her own identity and future. Yet she is paralysed by the debilitating fear that if she voices her dissatisfaction, her mother will leave her. Marilyn’s failures have made her bitter and resentful, and she takes this out on Lydia -- which, as we learn, results in Lydia’s death. Haunting, chilling, and thought-provoking, Everything I Never Told You explores, in short, bad parenting; how an earnest mother projects her own failures onto her daughter, selfishly trying to start her own life anew in the willing mould her daughter’s life presents. After all, Lydia’s birth ruined Marilyn’s life. Surely, in return, she deserves to claim ownership of her daughter’s entire identity -- an eye for an eye, a life for a life.

WORKS CITED

• Harrison, Pat. “The Complicated History of Women at Harvard.” Radcliffe Magazine, Radcliffe Institute For Advanced Study Harvard University, 2012, www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/news/radcliffe-magazine/complicated-history-women-harvard.