In real life, you don’t need a fairy godmother to change an ordinary pumpkin into Cinderella’s carriage. In fact, you can do it yourself--maybe not in one step, but multiple steps. Grind the pumpkin, heat the pumpkin pieces to their melting point, mix them with metal, and consolidate them in the shape of a carriage.
Almost everything in the world is made through a series of simple steps. The microscopic world is no exception. Most chemical reactions, like the iodine clock reaction, occur in a series of elementary steps that all together form a reaction mechanism. This also applies to Celeste Ng’s novel Everything I Never Told You. As a reaction mechanism requires all its elementary steps to be present, the correct type of reactants, and often the presence of a catalyst, Ng shows that the Lee family needs every member to be present to maintain family order and happiness, that hurtful remarks, however trivial, can pile up to transform lives, and that the plot progresses through her timely inclusion of plot events.
So to the first parallel: just as a chemical reaction fails to proceed when any one of its elementary steps is missing in the reaction mechanism, the Lee family falls apart whenever a family member is absent.
Say you wanted to make an iodine clock reaction. If you don’t have the first step, you won’t get the second step. Without the first and second step, the reaction mechanism is incomplete. Take a look at how the family reacts after Lydia dies. All members of the family, Marilyn and James especially, become less empathetic. When Nath picks a fight with Jack at Lydia’s funeral, James is not able to console Nath. Why? James has to “keep his own face from crumpling” (Ng 64). According to Hannah, James and Marilyn also fight for the first time (Ng 115). Marilyn’s upset about James’s passive compliance to the police, so without even thinking, she blurts out the word “kowtow” (Ng 116), hurting James and evoking within him hundreds of hurtful childhood memories. James, as a result, goes to Louisa. See how messed up James and Marilyn’s relationship becomes?
With Marilyn absent, the family members also behave similarly. When Marilyn leaves home on receiving news of her mother’s death, James, Nathan, and Lydia rely on instant breakfasts for over a week. James also puts in extra effort to design a fun event for the family. Notice how unhappy the family becomes, how crucial it is for every family member to be present, just as a reaction mechanism needs all its elementary steps and reagents in order to function and yield the desired products.
Now to the second parallel: as even the slightest errors in a reaction mechanism could yield undesirable effects, the seemingly trivial racist and sexist remarks targeting James and Marilyn leave a permanent mark of disgrace in their lives.
Combusting propane, a common ingredient of natural gas, would yield carbon monoxide, not carbon dioxide, if propane were to react with a limited amount of oxygen, not an excess. If HCl, a strong acid, were replaced by its conjugate base, Cl-, in a reaction with NaOH, the reaction would not even proceed. Just as the presence of one hydrogen atom or amount of reactants matter, small but hurtful events in James and Marilyn’s childhood accumulate and shape their personalities. As the only Asian American at Lloyd High School, James grows up detesting his difference. In his twelve years at Lloyd, he “never [at once] felt at home” (44). An outlier even as a capable professor, James is rejected by Harvard simply because of his race--because he “wasn’t the right fit for the department” (50). Marilyn’s mother disapproves of Marilyn and James’s marriage only because of James’s race. Although James seems unaffected by these events the moment they occur, his desire to blend into society gradually accumulates, evident in his way of raising Nath. When Nath goes to the swimming pool, James forces him to join the kids playing Marco Polo so that Nath can “learn how to make friends” (Ng 89), trying to implement his ideals of a “confident young man” (Ng 88) into Nath’s life. The word “kowtow” (Ng 116) also brings to James’s mind the little racist remarks and actions in his childhood and adulthood, such as those aforementioned.
This is also the case for Marilyn. Like James, Marilyn lets her mother drill her mother’s perception of happiness into her own life--to marry a “wonderful Harvard man” (Ng 30)--during her childhood. It is only few years into her young adulthood at her wedding that Marilyn openly defies her mother’s authority and beliefs. Despite her mother’s plea that she reconsider her marriage with James, Marilyn persists in the interracial marriage, an act considered unconventional in her society. Ng shows how these events, however trivial they may be at first, have the power to influence a character’s decisions and actions.
And finally, to the last parallel: as a catalyst increases the overall rate of the reaction mechanism by increasing the rate of the slowest elementary step, Ng incorporates significant plot events at the appropriate time to make the story progress. If the catalyst, hydrogen peroxide, were not present in the iodine clock reaction, the reaction would occur extremely slowly or might not even proceed.
Celeste Ng similarly includes major events that act like catalysts in certain chapters. Ng writes about Marilyn’s discovery of Marlboros and condoms in the fifth chapter to show Marilyn’s change of perspective on Lydia’s death. Prior to the discovery, Marilyn only mourns, refusing to consider the possibility that her daughter may have committed suicide. Upon the discovery, she says to herself that “she will find out everything she doesn’t know” (Ng 120), and that “she will keep on searching until she understands how this could have happened” (Ng 120). Marilyn, whom Ng portrays as headstrong in the first four chapters, is now depicted as a mother determined to verify the truth of her daughter’s death.
Another example of Ng’s literary “catalyst” is her way of developing James and Louisa’s relationship. Ng does hint at their potential sexual relationship when first introducing them into the story, but the next time Ng mentions them, she jumps right into sexual stuff. In my opinion, this is the most significant jump made so far in the novel--only within the span of two chapters!
In summary, Ng’s emphasis on the importance of every family member, the dangers of trivial but many hurtful words, and the timely addition of important plot events in Everything I Never Told You parallel some core attributes of reaction mechanisms: the presence of all elementary steps, the qualitative and quantitative accuracies of every reactant, and the presence of a catalyst.
Read more about reaction mechanisms--what they are and how they work.
https://www.khanacademy.org/science/chemistry/chem-kinetics/arrhenius-equation/a/reaction-mechanisms
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