After reading Hamilton, I decided to take a break on non-fiction and work on a novel. This year, Penn State Harrisburg is reading Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You. This is an engrossing read. I read it in two weeks. The book covers the gamut – racism, sexism, bullying, and more – in a way that makes you feel the feelings of the characters. 

As a parent, the book grabbed my emotions from the very beginning: a  young girl is missing and then found drowned in a lake near her home. The rest of the book reconstructs the long and short histories that got her, and her family, to that moment. The book starts slow, as it builds the back story of the girl’s interracial parents. Her father is Chinese and her mother is white. Set in the 1970s – meaning their budding relationship was in the 1960s – this simple fact structures much of the conflict in the story. Her father lived the emotional abuse of being a minority in the United States. Her mother dealt with sexism as she tried to make her way in a “man’s world” of medicine. Or at least, in the preparation for entering that world, a dream that would be stunted. As the book progresses, the reader comes to understand why so many things are never said among the family of five (the girl has an older brother and younger sister). Each experiences their own forms of discrimination, but they do not fully understand the experiences of the others. Ng’s prose makes their personal feelings palpable for the reader.

I was left with a lot of questions about my own life and family. What are the things that I do not say? Both those hidden feelings of love and bitterness. The unsaid caused massive harm to this family, though they also paid the price for how the unsaid was revealed, with so many assumptions being wrong. What things do I say to my boys that undermine their self-confidence and scramble the message of how much I love them? And most hauntingly, how is my partnership like the clutch and gas pedal analogy in the book? The relationship of the husband and wife reveals a partnership where one necessarily diminished so the other could rise. I have that in my marriage. My wife gave up a lot professionally to be with our boys. It is a wonderful thing in many respects, but there is much loss there. A loss that I desperately want to make up, but it is not that easy. We are not the only academic couple that has navigated these challenges and Ng’s book brings the experiences of both partners, with all of their complex emotions, to the fore. I bet there are questions in this book for you to ponder.