《無聲告白》英文讀書筆記

　　Everything I Never Told You is a beautiful but poignant novel about a 16-year-old girl’s death and her mixed-race family as the only Chinese American family in a small town in Ohio in 1977.

　　It was Chinese American writer Celeste Ng’s debut novel, but has enjoyed great success in both the United States and China.

　　On amazon.com, it got 4,259 reviews; while in China, its Chinese translated edition received 264,915 reviews on dangdang.com, and 55,317 people reviewed it on douban.com.

　　Readers in both nations have discussed one of the center themes in the novel -- that the young generation need to break free from the burden of parents’ expectations and find their own place. In this book review, however, I want to focus on the girl’s father James and her mother Marilyn.

　　I will explore how they both fail in their life struggles and how they end up placing their burdens on their daughter, which causes her breakdown.

　　When a young girl commits suicide, the first and most important question is: How has everything gone so wrong? The author asks this question in chapter two and answers immediately:

　　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. Because long ago, her mother had gone missing, and her father had brought her home. Because more than anything, her mother had wanted to stand out; because more than anything, her father had wanted to blend in. Because those things had been impossible.

　　It occurs to me that here the author points out two problems: (1), that Marilyn thinks so highly of standing out that she might sacrifice anything else to achieve it, and James, contrastively but in some sense similarly, values most the ability to blend in and let the desire to blend in defeat other feelings and longings of his; (2), unfortunately, it has been impossible for both of them to fulfill their aspirations.

　　Why these aspirations are so important for them, and why they turn out to be impossible to fulfill? We need to analyze the reasons from several aspects.

　　First, when she was a young girl, Marilyn’s ambition to stand out is, in some sense, her protest against the rigid discrimination ideology of gender but her isolation makes her protest futile.

　　She sees her mother’s insistence on abiding by the traditional role of a woman meaningless and ironic. Besides, her mother also obliges her to be a traditional woman as well. Marilyn is disappointed and angry with her mother. Moreover, when she marries a Chinese American man she loves, she again confronts her mother’s racism and gets even more disappointed and angry.

　　Many times of confrontations with her mother push Marilyn to isolate herself from her mother, and her mother from Marilyn.

　　People would think isolation is necessary and a sort of solution to conflicts. However, nobody is a lonely island in the world. The sexism and racism could only be changed through communications little by little.

　　It seems that by ending relationship with her mother Marilyn gets her own life, however, actually she did nothing to change the attitudes of her mother. Sexism and racism remain in her mother’s mind. It is clear that Marilyn still lives in an unfavorable, unmoved world and therefore her isolation is ineffective protest.

　　Second, since a woman’s dream of becoming a doctor is really hard to fulfill at any time, even harder when she has to take care of her kids, she needs to reach out for help. But she doesn't.

　　Escaping her responsibilities as a mother to fulfill her dream to be a doctor is extremely unrealistic and doomed to hurt everyone in the family. It is not impossible if she gets understanding and support from her husband and kids, even from her mother, and make plausible arrangements together with them. Unfortunately, She treats her mother, who is a teacher and very adept in housekeeping and could possibly be her support and resource, as only enemy to escape from. Worse, she even won’t disclose her ambition to her husband to win his support.

　　Why? It seems she believes she either disowns her kids to go to medical school or she gives up her dream to take the role of keeping a house. She assumes that no one would support her, not her husband, or her mother, or her kids.

　　To some extent it is true, from James’ response when she expresses she wants to work: “No. When I get tenure, we’ll have all the money we need,” and from the professor she wants to work for: “I had no idea you were actually serious about that. With your children and your husband and all.”

　　It is understandable she is a lonely soldier in 1977. She is inevitably overwhelmed and silenced by difficulties of clarifying misunderstanding and balancing study and family, never reaches out for help, escapes without explaining, and brings horrible harm to her children. I strongly argue at least some nonsupport is from misunderstanding and she could have tried to eliminate it or change it to understanding and support.

　　As Iris Chang depicts in her The Chinese in America, given all the obstacles faced by Chinese Americans in the 1910s, Bessie Jeong, one of the nation’s earliest Chinese American women physicians, approaches life with a mixture of natural optimism and resilience. She harbored no bitterness toward her tradition-bound family and even reconciled with her father. She had a wide circle of friends. She proved adept at managing a career along with a family.

　　Although women like Bessie Jeong were rare, it is certain that women do have a choice, no matter how enormous the pressures are, to balance their career and family.

　　Meanwhile, Marilyn’s husband, James, has also got a lot of things wrong. It seems to me that he bears an original sin, that is, his father came to American under a false name. “Everyone’s name was false”, the author writes, “Everyone hoped not to be found out and sent back. Everyone clustered together so they wouldn’t stand out.”

　　On the one hand, James would blend in at any cost, including bending his head when his father was called to the classroom to mop up a spill and walking to and from school alone to pretend he had no connection with his Chinese parents; on the other hand, he considers Marilyn’s love as the symbol of “America herself” taking him in. He feels it is too good to be true. He fears that “she might suddenly realize her mistake and disappear from his life as suddenly as she had entered”. He overly indulges in this insecurity and gradually fixes it as the nature of his relationship with his wife.

　　I could not say that he does not love his wife, but it is not love when he has no intention at all to learn about her bitterness toward her mother’s sexism and racism and her inner struggles as a woman who has a career ambition.

　　His insecurity dominates his marriage and leads him to interpret wrongly her behaviors many times. Without any confidence in Marilyn’s love, he believes she might leave him anytime. Finally, he commits adultery desperately in the crisis of his daughter’s death.

　　It is undeniable that the discrimination against Chinese in America has been so demoralizing that it leads to a series of sins: false names, pretending having no connections with parents instead of honoring them, slapping his son for not trying to blend in, and even adultery.

　　It also brings deep sorrow and heavy insecurity. James and his parents have been surrounded by the institutionalized discrimination wherever they go. No matter how hardworking they are, life is always oppressing. His father died soon after his mother died of cancer because “his father simply hadn’t wanted to live alone”.

　　James never shared his life before he meets Marilyn because nearly everything about his parents is sad, because he fears that she would see him as “a scrawny outcast, feeding on scraps, reciting his lines and trying to pass. An imposter.”

　　Being outcast, he dreads the word “different” and outbursts violently when his wife says she thought he was different: “You’ve never had people mock you to your face. You’ve never been treated like a stranger. You have no idea what it’s like, being different.” Years of being discriminated makes him lonely and vulnerable.

　　In order to protect himself from the harsh situation, he has become insensitive to life. He is unable to build empathy with his wife. He could not even understand what she means by “different”.

　　Yet it is not fact that James has no choice. In fact, he makes wrong choice by enduring the oppression silently and allowing shame, insecurity, and weakness to take over self-esteem and autonomy. He could have cared about his wife’s pain of giving up student life and career ambition. He could have supported his children’s wish to be themselves.

　　But he chooses to ignore his wife’s needs, suppress his children’s interests, and coerce them to gain popularity among the whites. It tremendously hurts his family in all aspects.

　　After his daughter dies, he further surrenders to discrimination by admitting his marrying a white girl was a mistake and they and their children would not fit in anywhere, as Marilyn’s mother suggested. “He had hung his head like a murderer, as if his blood were poison, as if he regretted that their daughter had ever existed.”

　　The bitterness evokes both sympathy and anger from Marilyn. Unlike him, she is a fighter. She fights against humiliation from the men and against racism. When she realizes that her husband always expects that she would “regret” their marriage, she is disappointed that he doe not fight together with her.

　　James’ life shows that to surrender to discrimination does not lead to happy life, it only results in bitterness.

　　To fit in, especially to assimilate through self-repression, could be destructive. For his kids, it hinders the development of their self-respect and critical thinking ability necessary to struggle effectively toward their empowerment.

　　Lydia becomes more and more vulnerable during this process until she breaks down. She does not fall apart because she is not a white girl, instead, she could not bear self-repression any longer.

　　As Marilyn mourns over the unfulfilled dream and wants her daughter to fight together with her to be exceptional, however, she oppresses her daughter, in some sense, to embrace what the girl has not wanted.

　　The oppression from your mother who loves you is most unbearable, especially when it is intertwined with strong fear that she might leave you like she did before.

　　In their life, there is no discussion about the mother’s irresponsibility and the child’s deep psychology damage caused by it. Marilyn does not think she needs her children’s forgiveness and understanding. But the fact is, both she and her children need to discuss equally what “exceptional” means and how they could be empowered to achieve success, like Marilyn finally discusses with James about the word“different” when she painfully discovers his adultery.

　　How “different” has been different for the couple. To James, years of racial discrimination makes this word a humiliation in his entire life; to Marilyn, it is courage and ambition beneath the mundane life of housewife, “thoughts pinging the closed windows like a trapped bee”.

　　Communication, even though it is a fight, enables them to understand each other for the first time and sympathize with each other to live a better life in the future. “For the rest of the summer, and for years after that, they will grope for the words that say what they mean: to Nath, to Hannah, to each other. There is so much they need to say.”

　　It is the compassion toward each other that can save them from the terrible suffering of losing a child. And this compassion comes from constant, real communications. They have been silent, trying to forget about the past “with no looking back” to “start a new life together”, but silence only makes things worse, so do the incomplete messages.

　　All the wrenches brought by discriminations need to be righted case by case, just like the world does not get better all of a sudden but slowly from person to person.

　　Everything I Never Told You explores the example of a Chinese American family at the crisis of a daughter’s death. To make sense of how all has gone wrong, it goes back and forth in time, deep and subtly into everyone’s mind, and inside the problems of racism, sexism, family expectations, and misunderstandings. All the poignant details in the novel are saying that human beings, who almost are all suffering to different extents at different stages of life, need the compassion from each other to reconcile and rebuild a future together. And through full, equal communications can they understand what they really mean to let the compassion fall upon each other.

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