Lydia, the whitest-looking child of Marilyn and James, a White and Chinese American couple, is also the favorite of both parents, who dote on her at the expense of their other children, Nath and Hannah. The narrative opens on the morning that 16-year-old Lydia Lee does not come down to the family breakfast table. Chapters alternate between the narrative of events after Lydia Lee’s death in May 1977 and a narrative that describes Lee family’s history, beginning with Lydia’s parents James and Marilyn.

2014.)Įverything I Never Told You has a bitemporal structure. “ The Leftovers.” The New York Times Book Review, 15 Aug. Chee concludes that even “if we know this story, we haven’t seen it yet in American fiction, not until now.” (Chee, Alexander. However, when neither Lydia nor Jack nor the investigation into Lydia’s death prove to be what readers expect, Ng succeeds in creating an original narrative with an important message on how the White hegemony limits opportunities for minorities. In his New York Times review, Alexander Chee judges that the book is a “literary thriller” with a “doubled heart.” Its mission is to be as exciting as a thriller while commenting on the integration of Chinese Americans in the 20th century, by telling “a story bigger than whatever is behind the crime.” Chee describes how Ng dangles two stock protagonists of the crime genre before the reader: the missing ingenue, Lydia Lee, and the local bad boy, Jack Wolff.

Everything i never told you