A Silver Necklace or A Silver Stethoscope

“A stethoscope looped around her neck like a shining silver necklace” (Ng 95).

(http://bestanimations.com/Money/Gems/Gems.html)

The quote above is from Celeste Ng’s novel Everything I Never Told You and highlights the system of gender roles. Systems are underlying themes in the novel that many plot events are connected to. In the novel, the system of embracing or opposing conventional gender roles is apparent. Marilyn, a young woman, dislikes gender roles while James, Marilyn’s young husband, embraces gender roles. Marilyn’s and James’s upbringing and experiences with gender roles influence their present, adult notions of gender roles. 

As a child, James witnessed his mother defy gender roles and work to help her family make ends meet. James remembers, “his mother rising early each morning […] massage oil into her calloused hand, trying to soften them, and his father would leave the room, ashamed” (Ng 79). James learned from his father’s shameful reaction that supporting the family is the man's job, not the woman's. James refuses Marilyn’s request to work because he wants to conform to gender roles and does not want other people to think that, “he couldn’t make enough — his wife had to hire herself out,” (Ng 79) similar to what people thought of his father. 

On the contrary, Marilyn’s mother is a home economics teacher who often resembles a real version of Betty Crocker. Marilyn’s mother wants Marilyn to grow up to be the perfect housewife: sporting pearls, baking cakes, and sewing clothes. However, Marilyn wants to break gender roles and take part in more masculine classes like wood working than home economics. When Marilyn tries to switch into wood working, she is refused because she would, “be very distracting to the boys in the class” (Ng 27). The men who study alongside Marilyn in a college level laboratory always try to help her because they think that she is incapable of performing the same tasks men perform. The people who believe that Marilyn is better off in the kitchen rather than in the lab are the people whose attitudes push Marilyn to break gender roles to show that women are just as capable as men. 

(http://younginnovator.eu/category/women-entrepreneurship/)

Everything I Never Told You exemplifies how men are more comfortable to accept gender norms because men are not oppressed from certain careers. Nowadays, women advocate to break gender roles because women are discouraged from pursuing professions that are considered too “masculine”. Past experiences with gender roles effect one’s feelings towards them. While some women are content with a sterling silver necklace around her neck, other women dream of a stethoscope around her neck as a similar symbol of success and accomplishment

For a more in depth discussion about gender roles, watch this Ted Talk by a fifteen year old girl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R_JX0qRV-w

Literary Engineer: Celeste Ng

When you think of an author, does an engineer appear in your mind? Maybe an artist or chef does but an engineer? Celeste Ng is a prime example of the so-called "literary engineer" from her well-placed mechanisms in her novel Everything I Never Told You. She focuses on the broken mechanism of a girl's death (who was called Lydia). As the story unfolds, the broken mechanism starts to affect the rest of a family system where her parent's develop unhealthy coping mechanisms. Ng creates a phenomenal effect, displaying how one fallen mechanism ruptures an entire system. 

Early in the novel, Marilyn, Lydia's mother, develops a coping mechanism which disturbs her role in the Lee family: being a loving mother. Marilyn is not an effective engineer. With creating unspoken rules such as "Don't talk about Lydia. Don't talk about the lake. Don't ask questions," (Ng 106) Marilyn limits herself to recover from the devastating loss of an important mechanism in the Lee family by fixing the system in isolation and covering-up the incident. 

As a result of her narrow-minded behavior, Marilyn becomes insensitive with other family members. She does not focus on the well-being of her remaining children: Hannah and Nathan. Neither does she monitor her conversations when confronting James about being cooperative with the police. She rudely says, "Unlike some people, I don't just kowtow to the police." (Ng 116) Marilyn practically becomes as effective as the Lydia's broken mechanism which places more restraint on the Lee family.

On the other hand, there is James, Lydia's father, who fails to be an effective engineer by protecting his emotions in a withdrawn way similar to Marilyn. Unlike Marilyn, he does not aim to actively make assumptions on how Lydia's mechanism broke. Instead, James wants to have a meaningful conversation with his wife about how to recuperate from their loss and build a strong family without it. He is met with a withholding partner, stubborn to discuss the matter.

James is not the victim here as it may be perceived. His ego as the "man of the house" to protect his wife from gruesome information backfires when she is not cooperative back. With raging emotions, James undermines his values to stay a loyal partner to Marilyn by cheating on her with his teaching assistant, Louisa.

These two mechanisms insinuate that James does not care enough about his family system when he can make the effort to look at what is important: communication. He read Lydia's autopsy which states, "suicide, homicide, or accident could not yet be determined. The cause of death was asphyxia." (Ng 69) Communicating one phrase could have shown that Lydia's death did not have a murderer involved like Marilyn had thought which results in James and Marilyn arguing less from discussing the evidence (and not speculation).

The mechanisms at work in Ng's novel create a well-constructed, realistic effect of a family system. She does not adhere to overused fairy-tale depictions which lose the sense of relatability. As for Marilyn and James, their sets of responsibilities and information are limited by their personalities to build without their fallen mechanism. The two create one of a plethora of mechanisms Ng introduces in Everything I Never Told You. 

So go out there and find all of them! Check out Celeste Ng's novel Here 

Celeste Ng: A Strategic Literary Chef

When thinking of a recipe, most people imagine a list of ingredients mixed together to make some type of food. It can be seen in the more literal, culinary sense, or it can be interpreted more figuratively, like when someone meets their goal through the steps of a recipe. Either way, recipes are made up of ingredients that make the final piece. In this way, any major plot events of a book can be considered recipes, especially in Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. These major plot events are led up to and hinted at using different ingredients, including smaller plot events, mood shifts, character developments, dialogue, etc. In Everything I Never Told You, Ng uses these ingredients to her advantage so that the reader is constantly moving towards the final product.

Throughout the beginning of the novel, Ng uses small plot events, changes in her character’s mental state, and dialogue to hint at Marilyn’s absence. Her disappearance is first mentioned by the police in Chapter One when asking if James’s “wife also went missing once” (13). Even though the full explanation won’t come for another three chapters, Ng wants to grab the reader’s attention and introduce it immediately. While it’s a clever decision to keep the reader entertained, it also represents her writing style: dropping small breadcrumbs of information that will eventually lead to the product of a recipe.

Later on, in Chapter Four, Ng flashes back to Marilyn’s absence, first noting that “All fall, she’d been wrestling a vague discontentment” (77). Though this is just the third sentence of the chapter, Ng is again whisking ingredients into the book that will lead to the final piece: Marilyn leaving home. Even though this important mood shift might not stand out to the reader initially, it becomes more noticeable later on in the chapter when Marilyn begins to think about leaving. Ng then expresses Marilyn’s unsettled thoughts about how she might have become just like her mother. These emotions and plot events--or ingredients--all add to her growing desire to just run away and finish her degree.

The most important ingredient is literally a book of recipes, one that belonged to Marilyn’s mother. After reading line after line of highlighted sexist remarks such as, “Does anything make you feel so pleased with yourself as baking bread?” (83), Marilyn becomes more determined to upend her life and become a doctor. Understanding her mother’s goals makes Marilyn realize her own and want to act on them. This is her breaking point--when she understands that she’s heading down an unwanted path, one aimed at a life all too similar to her mother’s. Ng turns what seems like a minor plot event into one of the most influential ingredients in the book.

Similar to the ingredients leading up to Marilyn’s absence, Ng drops multiple hints throughout the first few chapters of the book that lead to James’s affair with Louisa. The initial clues are placed in Chapter One when James and Louisa change their body language. When Stanley Hewitt enters the classroom, James becomes “acutely conscious of his hand” and Louisa starts “blushing” (11) after leaving, showing that both characters feel guilty. Their physical affair has not started yet, so they aren’t technically guilty of anything, but their change in body language shows knowledge of the inappropriate choices they’re making as both student and teacher, but also as a single woman and a married man. Without directly stating that something immoral is happening between them, Ng is carefully moving the reader towards her eventual recipe product: the affair.

Later on, Ng becomes more discreet with her ingredients by comparing Louisa and Marilyn. Both women are students of James when they get involved with him, which only contributes to the reader’s growing suspicion of an affair. Ng uses body language again to express these similarities by writing that during a lecture, Marilyn’s “cheeks went hot, as if she’d stepped into the summer sun” (36). This is just like Louisa’s blushing after being caught by Stanley Hewitt. It also shows James’s and Louisa’s guilt because Marilyn blushes after kissing James. Therefore, she has already done something inappropriate with her teacher, and she is blushing because she feels guilty.

In another comparison, Ng uses dialogue as an ingredient. When meeting with James, both Louisa and Marilyn try to comfort him. Louisa tells him that his “‘life is not a waste’” (10), and Marilyn explains that even though paleontology was his favorite school subject, it still counts as history so his area of teaching makes sense (35). While the two types of advice aren’t identical, they both express a similar idea-- that James didn’t choose the wrong career. Ng’s ingredient once again moves the reader towards the final recipe of James and Louisa’s affair.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/learnvest/2013/10/16/3-telltale-signs-youre-on-the-wrong-career-path/#7ae0b1503c1c

While the reader knows of Lydia’s death throughout the entire novel, Ng often mixes ingredients into the book that hint at the reasons why she dies. Clues to the biological cause first appear when Ng corrects her own character. Marilyn’s thoughts explain that nothing exciting or scary happens in Middlewood because it’s a simple college town with a “glorified pond” (7) for a lake. Ng then fixes that statement by saying that Middlewood Lake “is a thousand feet across, and it is deep” (7). If the reader didn’t know about Lydia’s death, this correction might seem a little strange, but not suspicious. However, because the reader knows of her death, this statement implies that Marilyn will learn this information about the lake because that’s where the police will find Lydia’s body. This correction is a significant ingredient that leads to the physical reasons for Lydia’s death.

As for mental and behavioral causes, Ng uses character development, plot events, and dialogue to move the reader to think that Lydia commits suicide. By mentioning Nath’s understanding that “Lydia has never really had friends” (16), the reader gets a glimpse into Lydia’s social life. When this ingredient is put in the mix, the reader immediately begins to think about adolescent life and social issues.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/adolescent-social-development

In addition to social pressure, Ng adds ingredients related to the academic pressure Lydia faces from her mother. While going through Lydia’s room, Marilyn identifies “every poster she’d given to Lydia since she was a child” and “the books Marilyn had given her over the years to inspire her” (73). She’s forcing her interests onto her daughter because she wasn’t able to achieve her own goals. The reader can then understand the effects of this pressure on Lydia and how they contribute to her possible suicide.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/galina-nemirovsky/living-vicariously-throug_b_12095276.html

Aside from being academically flawless, James and Marilyn expect overall perfection and purity from their daughter, another factor that contributes to her possible suicide. Ng makes their favoritism towards Lydia clear throughout the novel, eventually using possessive adjectives and high expectations to help illustrate this thought. When approached with the idea that Lydia might have snuck out during the night, Marilyn says, “My Lydia? Never” (108). Later, after finding cigarettes in her daughter’s backpack, Marilyn thinks that they must belong to someone else because “her Lydia did not smoke” (120). James and particularly Marilyn always expect Lydia to never make mistakes, which is a burden on anybody, but especially for someone who is already under other pressures.

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/10-things-parents-should-stop-expecting-for-their-children.html

Lastly, Ng uses police dialogue again to help move the reader towards the conclusion that Lydia commits suicide. When the police ask James, Marilyn, and Nath if Lydia “ever [gave] any sign she might want to hurt herself” (110), the reader’s suspicions are confirmed. Because the police are suggesting suicide, the reader feels comfortable making the same assumption. Therefore, the recipe of the reasons why Lydia dies is composed of many ingredients that support the theory that Lydia kills herself due to overwhelming pressure.  

The ingredients in the recipes of Marilyn’s absence, James’s affair, and Lydia’s death, while seemingly insignificant at first, become more noticeable and important throughout the book. While some ingredients are more vital or heavier than others, similar to in a literal recipe, all of them play a role in the outcome of each chapter, and eventually, the book. Therefore, Everything I Never Told You isn’t just a regular book; it’s a cookbook. And in this way, nearly every novel can be called a cookbook because they’re all teeming with individual recipes.

Just like the ingredients mix and bake to create the final recipe product, the recipes themselves work together to create the final book. In a cookbook, learning each recipe teaches the chef how to cook better in general. With a literary cookbook, the reader finishes the novel with a better or more thorough understanding of the theme. By making all of the recipes in Everything I Never Told You, the reader learns from Ng about the effects of parental pressure on teenagers and the prejudices faced by Chinese-Americans in the twentieth century.

MIXING UP LITERATURE

mixing up literature!

If you had to bake a cake, where would you start?  You would probably get out the ingredients you need, and determine how much of each were required to create a final product.  Understanding how recipes work, you would make sure to include everything, as leaving out the sugar or baking soda would make the cake taste different.  However, this concept of cumulative combinations is not limited to baking- in fact, it can be applied to literature.  Similar to how a baker works with a specific mixture of ingredients, a novelist uses literary techniques to create a coherent story.

The novel “Everything I Never Told You” by Celeste Ng is a prime example of the combination and taste present in a recipe.  Throughout the book, Ng reveals small bits of information that contribute to a sense of depth.  Similar to a step-by-step guide, Ng’s writing choices combine to form a tangible and complete novel.   Her use of multiple perspectives, historical connections, and structural deconstructions make the plot more thorough, and ultimately, more real.

One interesting technique that extends the depth of the story is the third person omniscient perspective.  Instead of focusing on one person, Ng switches between the narratives of multiple characters.  Clues and observations from a variety of sources provide key information, and contribute to a sense of entirety.  A great example of this is the unspoken reactions of Lydia's family members.  Through Hannah, we learn that Lydia left the house willingly, and through Nath, we learn that Jack might have been involved.  With this thoroughness of context, we can further interpret what happened, and make our own predictions. Another stylistic choice that contributes to reader understanding is the author's use of a dynamic structure.  Similar to her constant “switching” of narration, Ng writes from a variety of times in the story’s plotline.  Through this method, background information and character development are illustrated more thoroughly.  One particularly interesting section was chapter two, a flashback into the young adult lives of Marilyn and James.  This reference to the history of the Lee family reveals both the characters’ depths and their motivations.

Finally, aside from her effective literary techniques, Ng’s choices in content extend the story’s meaning. To further the scope of the timeline, Ng connects the plot of “Everything I Never Told You”  to historical patterns and culture.  The most prevalent theme is racism- through dialogue and narrative, Ng displays how discrimination impacts the Lee family.  An example of this cultural connection is the description of James’s childhood: “He [James] spent twelve years at Lloyd and never felt at home […] everyone seemed to be descended from a Pilgrim or a senator or a Rockefeller.” (Ng 44)   Here, Ng illustrates the time period through the presence of Asian racism and references to white upper-class culture.  This use of historical context enhances the setting and the connects the characters to realistic society.

me thinking about oreos

Combining a versatile perspective with background information and historical context, Celeste Ng bakes a rich and thorough story.  Without each of these components, the plot would be less thorough, and ultimately, less “tasty” to read.

A Recipe for Disaster

Celeste Ng, author of the novel “Everything I Never Told You,” slowly reveals “ingredients” in her writing that set the stage for later events in her stories. Throughout the first chapters of “Everything I Never Told You,” Ng allows concerning details about James, Marilyn, and their relationship to build, creating a fragile marriage, unable to withstand additional pressures. At first, a reader would have no clear way of understanding the strain behind this marriage; however, by learning about James and Marilyn’s past and by picking up Ng’s subtle clues, one can slowly determine the flaws in this apparently healthy relationship.

James and Marilyn come from widely differing backgrounds. James grows up trying to blend into the crowd--find a place where he fits in. Marilyn, on the other hand, has no qualms about upsetting the conventional social order of things in order to accomplish her goals. Although James and Marilyn possess many compatible characteristics, this glaring distinction prevents them from maintaining a long-term happy marriage as their contrasting ideals constantly clash. Unfortunately, the arrival of an unforeseen tragedy further accelerates the deterioration of their relationship.

Lydia’s death applies even more pressure to the pre-existing tension between James and Marilyn. Marilyn, seeking the persons responsible for her daughter’s death, will eventually find only herself and James to blame. Unearthing “what went wrong” will only highlight James and Marilyn’s conflicting opinions about their lifestyle. And as Marilyn openly attempts to determine a guilty party, James reacts in the opposite fashion. He completely shuts down. By hiding his emotions and trying to shelter his grieving family, he hinders Marilyn’s pursuit of the truth. Her pursuit continues to irritate James, who, having decided that Lydia’s death was a suicide, considers Marilyn to be in denial of the obvious. As James and Marilyn remain stubbornly fixed in their ways, these opposing coping mechanisms further strain their aging love.

James and Marilyn’s relationship is doomed. Ng clearly conveys this message by gradually exposing the reader to the developing flaws in Marilyn and James’s relationship and the reasons why those flaws can only grow. And finally, after adding the tragedy of Lydia’s death to the growing turmoil, their marriage has no chance of survival. Ng has created a recipe for disaster.

EINTY

With the first two sentences of “Everything I Never Told You”, Celeste Ng comes in HOT. Ng writes, “Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet.” From the beginning, this is an example of a recipe. Any amateur baker or cook out there knows that the first piece of information given in a recipe is the final product. If a person were looking at a recipe for chocolate chip cookies, the first line would not be “bake 8 to 10 minutes”.

The idea of the recipe is to first reveal the final product, then tell the you the steps in order to get there. That is the technique that Ng employs with the first two lines of her book. Also, most recipes include a photograph of the finished product. This is shown in the photograph above. The cover of “Everything I Never Told You” is a picture of Lydia face down on the water. Before even picking the book up, you can see a lifeless body, and then by reading the book you become aware of how that happened. Just based off of the cover and the first two sentences, you now know that recipes will be in use throughout the story.

Celeste Ng is uses a recipe to tell her story. Early on, she sets the stage for the story by including the small detail about Lydia having her physics homework set. This small detail is the first of many subtle hints that Lydia may have had mental health issues. As the story progresses, more details about Lydia emerge, such as Marilyn’s discovery of condoms and cigarettes in Lydia’s room.

James and Marilyn also are not aware that Lydia is not truly friends with the girls that they thought she was, such as Karen Adler and Annie Hall. These instances are like ingredients in a recipe. Going back to the chocolate chip cookie example, eggs by themselves do not taste sweet

. Rather, they are disgusting. When added to sugars, butter, vanilla, flour, baking soda, salt, nuts and chocolate chips, they are an entirely different product and do taste sweet.

A small detail about being obsessed with academics may not seem like much, but when combined with so many other components, there is some substance to the detail. That is the connection between a recipe and a small detail in literature.

In the Kitchen with Ng

Everything I Never Told You is a scavenger hunt. In every story told through each character, the writer, Celeste Ng, hides clues. At first glance, these memories may seem irrelevant, but they are pieces of a puzzle. The question I constantly found myself asking is: “What led to this?” The hints Ng leaves are like ingredients in a very advanced recipe; they offer various answers to this question. Without them, the audience would not know how the Lee family got into their current situation. Not paying attention to these tiny details would cause you to become lost in a tragic story with no background to what triggered it.

I don’t know who Lydia is; no one reading the book does either. But somehow the writer, Celeste Ng, makes it feel like we do.  Ng never writes from Lydia’s point of view, but instead focuses in on those who were close to her. In doing so, she sheds light onto what kind of person Lydia was and what lead to her death/suicide. The more hidden clues Ng provides, the better we get to know Lydia; just as every individual ingredient adds to a more elaborate final dish. In chapter four, James brings forward a memory of teaching Nath to swim. He remembers sending Lydia to a babysitter while her brother and him ventured to the lake. “Mrs. Allen is watching your sister just so you could learn the breaststroke, Nathan” (Ng 88). As the reader, knowing Lydia has drowned, this line is very powerful. Without the knowledge that Lydia drowned in the lake, and that it was possibly a suicide, this line would mean nothing. Flour is just flour until you use it to bake a cake. Lydia was the middle child in her family. Often, middle children are overlooked. This line is a perfect example of that. James shoves Lydia to the side so that he can have one on one time with Nath. If her childhood consisted of repeatedly being neglected by her parents, it is very possible that her death was not an accident. This line adds so much to the possibility of Lydia’s death being suicide. Following the recipe metaphor, this behavior from her parents can be seen as a “key ingredient” in her reasoning for wanting to end her life.

James and Marilyn Lee are very inconsistent characters. Throughout chapters 1-5, bits and pieces of their past are revealed. As the reader, it is hard to figure out what kind of relationship the couple has without the flashbacks of them in their prime years of dating. Understandingly, they are acting “out of character” due to the death of their daughter. Along with the story of how they met and how their relationship started, you can get a sense of what kind of connection they had before Lydia died. In chapter two, the depth of their initial connection is described through James’s eyes. “Coming to her made him feel perfectly welcomed, perfectly at home, as he had never felt in his life before” (Ng 40). Their relationship starts there and descends into screaming matches where wives throw their coffee mugs across the room in rage and husbands wander off to sleep with their colleagues. Ng lays out a series of events that led to this change. Marilyn’s mom dying, James meeting Louisa, Marilyn dropping out of school, Lydia’s death: Ingredients to the shit-show that their marriage has become.   

 
Ng is a sneaky writer. She spreads out bits and pieces of the story and leaves you to put together. Keeping up with the story is like keeping up with an old cookbook. Not knowing about Lydia is like having directions in the recipe covered with dried up cake batter. But using what we know about the other instructions, we can infer what the missing step might be. And with the predictions that you are forced to make while reading, in the end you will see if you were correct; or if you were actually supposed to add three tablespoons of flour - not three cups.

A Two-Fold Recipe

What do you see in this crepe cake?

A reflection of you and your grumbling stomach? Sure, but not quite.

A missing piece of cake? Sure, but that's not what I'm looking for.

Oh, layers? Yeah.

A crepe cake comes in two-fold. When the cake isn't cut at all, you only see one layer: the outside layer. The magic only begins to unfold when you cut the cake, revealing the inner layers—the history, the ingredients. Both layers come from recipes; the inner layer's recipe teaches you how to bake the cake, and the outer layer's recipe teaches you how to decorate it.

In a similar sense, Celeste Ng develops her plot in Everything I Never Told You (EINTY) by using ingredients presented to her to create a narrative flow and by adding stereotypes to create a smokescreen effect.

So, first, when you bake a cake, you need to collect the ingredients. You can't make a cake out of air, unless you have the power to transform your imagination to tangible food. (Hey, that'd be pretty cool, actually.) In EINTY, Ng includes "husband, children, house, her sole job to keep it all in order" in Marilyn's mother's recipe for happiness (Ng 78). As the story progresses along, Marilyn achieves all of her mother's wishes. This is analogous to a cake that has been created successfully by following a well-known recipe.

Sometimes, when you're off collecting those ingredients, you can feel nostalgic. (Maybe you used to collect strawberries to make your grandmother's specialty: strawberry shortcake.) Similarly, Ng writes that "[Marilyn's] mother's gold ring, her twelve settings of china, the pearl bracelet from Marilyn's father" evokes a feeling of nostalgia and grief in Marilyn's heart (81), as she reflects upon her mother's death. Later in the story, Marilyn, remembering her mother's cookbook, even cries over the sight of eggs. All these tiny details that make up the "inner layer" recipe of the story informs the reader of the importance of paying close attention and connecting small clues, which then allows the reader to understand how small steps tie into the big picture of the story.

Now, imagine looking at a recipe that has only three steps. You'd think, 'Man, that would be super easy to make!' However, once you start baking the cake, you might come to realize that it's incredibly hard to get your pears to taste soft but not too soft or your bread to be thin but not too thin. These are all the tiny details you might have missed, thanks to your presumption that a short recipe would also be easy to follow through. Ng accurately portrays this when James thinks Jack is a "bold, afraid of nothing" boy, simply based on Jack's outer appearance—or "recipe" (88). Ironically and interestingly, the title Everything I Never Told You itself implies that Jack could be hiding something from the crowd, though his intentions or reasons are unclear. James doesn't know Jack enough to understand the layers of history Jack has gone through that has made Jack who he is now.

First impressions and/or stereotypes also apply to a group of people. For instance, James refers to his family as a "family of misfits" (112). This isn't entirely false. Marilyn struggles with being a woman amid a world full of educated men, and James struggles with being a Chinese American amid a world of whites. However, the story of each character is not exotic. Marilyn's grief over her mother's death is not one that is reserved for only women, but for anyone who has faced the loss of a loved one. James's poor hardworking family does not only represent the Chinese Americans, but also the unemployed workers or underclassmen. Marilyn and James are only viewed as "different" peoples because their appearances are "different" from that of the "norm," just as a recipe may be viewed from a different perspective because it appears too short or too complex.

Remember how a crepe cake is two-fold? Ng shows that the characters in EINTY are two-fold, too. Ng's characters aren't wildly different from the people we see in the world today. We can connect with those characters and their experience. So, perhaps, it's time for us to examine ourselves and understand the stories behind our two-fold recipes, which represents the connection between who are we internally and who are we externally.

Celeste's Recipes

Recipes of People:

by Katerina Taetle

With a cup of love, a tablespoon of fear, a sprinkle of nostalgia, and a pinch of tragedy, Celeste Ng can cook up a realistic person.  

Some background: Everything I Never Told You, a novel by Celeste Ng, describes the Lee family struggling with the loss of a child.  Throughout the novel, Ng gives the perspectives of each member of the family and the parts of their past that make them who they are.  Ng’s uses recipes to develop plot and characters.  Ng uses the recipes that make up a person and how these people are the ingredients of a family.  Ng uses recipes to produce a heartwarming story of individuals and family in Everything I Never Told You.

The adults in the novel are the best examples of the recipes that make a person because they are older and have been part of families in the past.  In contrast, the children in the family have not had the same experiences because they have not lived as long or in different situations, however, the experiences from their own parents will have an effect on future relationships.

Here’s why and how Celeste Ng does it: Ng utilizes recipes in Everything I Never Told You is when justifying a person’s actions and explaining backstory.  She uses the recipes of what makes someone themself: their background being the ingredients and their actions and person as a whole being the product.  Marilyn Lee is a strong example of recipes; she is truly shaped by her dreams and her past.  Ng describes Marilyn looking around her childhood home after the death of her mother and how nothing has changed:

“She saw the same shabby furniture she’d grown up with, the same pale lilac wallpaper with a grain, like silk.  The china cabinet full of her mother’s dolls, whose unblinking eyes gave her the same cold tingle on the back of her neck.  On the mantel, the same photographs of her as a child,” (81).  Marilyn notices the objects that remind her of her mother.  

Her biggest fear is becoming her mother.  

When she sees her old home she realizes her fears have come true.  Marilyn’s memories and fears are enough to influence her to run away from her husband and children to become a doctor.  

Another character shaped by the ingredients of his past is James Lee who faced racism and financial struggles as a child and leads a life of trying to blend in so his own children do not have similar experiences.  He does not allow Marilyn to work because his own mother worked and he saw it affect his father.  

Ng writes of James“...he still remembers his mother rising early each morning and donning her uniform...he remembered how at night, his mother would massage oil into her calloused hands, trying to soften them, and his father would leave the room ashamed. ‘No’ he told Marilyn,” (79).  James does not let Marilyn work because of his memories despite its importance to Marilyn.  His parents impacted him just as he impacts his family and his memories of his mother affect his relationship with his wife.  

They shape him as a person.

Breaking the Societal Stereotype

The definition of a system is a set of connected things or parts forming a complex whole, in particular.  If you don’t believe me, check it out for yourself….  https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/system

A system that comes to mind when I hear the word “system” is the solar system.  The solar system is comprised of planets that revolve around the sun and it would not a complex system without its individual parts.  

Check out this gif to see the individual components (planets) working together to create a larger and more complex system!  https://media.giphy.com/media/FsTRLi4SnM86Y/giphy.gif

Celest Ng creates and develops multiple systems in Everything I Never Told You.  A prevalent system is dealing with hardships.  Lydia, one of the daughters in the Lee Family initially disappears and eventually is found dead.  Her family learns to cope with death as well as past memories and experiences.  Even though the reader may think that the main system is coping with death, there are other recurring hardships that members of the Lee family deal with.  

Marilyn, Lydia’s mother chose to study in the engineering field when she went to college.  She knew that this was a male dominated field, but she went against the societal stereotype.  While reading a passage, I noticed that the professor might have said an offensive comment, “When she arrived at the laboratory, though, she found herself the only girl in a room of fifteen men. The instructor said, Miss Walker, you’d better tie up those golden locks” (26). Marilyn constantly faced challenges while attempting to pursue her passion in engineering.  Her being female was controversial and held her back in many ways.

Even though this took place during the mid 20th century, even in my daily life, I sometimes relate to what Marilyn went through.  Last year, along with a few other students, we established our school’s Varsity Squash Team.  The director of the league was firm when he was confirming the establishment of separate both boys and girls team.  He constantly requested that we initiate one co-ed team; however, my persistence influenced him to agree to starting a girls’ team as well as a boys’.  Do any of you guys feel like you break the societal stereotype? The Huffington Post Article below elaborates on this world-wide issue…  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/clare-winterton/5-amazing-ways-women-and-_b_6016820.html

I think it is noteworthy to recognize other systems in Ng’s Everything I Never Told You.  Coping with death is a crucial system that should be noted; however, other systems such as breaking the societal stereotype also should be analyzed.