The Lost Other in Community: James’s Dilemma of Cultural Identity in Everything I Never Told You

Everything I Never Told You is the debut novel of a Chinese-American woman writer Celeste Ng. By demonstrating the invisible contradictions behind the seemingly harmonious interracial Lee family and revealing the death of the favorite daughter Lydia, it shows that the minority group of Chinese Americans are faced with the dilemma of cultural identity under the influence of two cultures and they hold a strong desire to build a community in the mainstream white society. This paper intends to focus on the protagonist James as a representative of Chinese Americans to explore the cause of his identity dilemma in community as well as tragic consequences happen to his life, marriage, and family from the perspective of post-colonialism. Despite the fact that Chinese Americans find it difficult to search for self-identity as the lost other, they have always aspired to build a community free from discrimination and marginalization in the space where different cultures meet.