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.