Reading Midwest Asian America in Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You

Reading Midwest Asian America in Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You Nicolyn Woodcock (bio) Year over year, I hold up a worn copy of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1975) in front of my students and dramatically tell them that this book changed my life, how it is the first book I read in which the characters and their problems resembled my lived experience.1 At 19, I didn’t know Kingston’s memoir of growing up Chinese American in Stockton, California, in the 1950s, the daughter of immigrants who arrived prior to World War II and run a laundry business, only narrowly paralleled my own life as the mixed race daughter of a Filipina immigrant and a White man, since divorced, who grew up in the poor working class in Toledo, Ohio, in the 1990s and early 2000s. However imperfect, the feeling of recognition was so strong upon reading The Woman Warrior that I changed my college major, setting me on the path to a PhD in English. I usually don’t tell students, however, that Kingston’s was the only work of Asian American literature I would read in my undergraduate English curriculum and that, although graduate school drastically expanded my exposure to Asian American literature, I have only experienced such a strong shock of recognition one other time: when I read Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You (2014), a novel about a mixed race Chinese American family living in Middlewood, Ohio, a fictional college town emplaced an hour west of Toledo, set in the 1970s.2 The Lee family includes James, a professor of American history at Middlewood College and a Chinese American who grew up in Iowa; Marilyn (née Walker), a White woman from Virginia who [End Page 169] once dreamed of being a doctor; and their three children: Nath (18), Lydia (16), and Hannah (10). Beginning with Lydia’s death, the novel is a heart-wrenching exploration, as the title suggests, of everything this family holds back, never daring to say aloud to one another: the things they think about most deeply, fear most terribly, or desire most ardently. I devoured the novel the first time through, hardly believing that I was reading––for the first time in the pages of a book––a story about people who were really like me, mixed race Asian Americans located in the region that I call home. Ng’s debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, has achieved wide commercial success and won numerous literary prizes; it has been translated into more than thirty languages and is currently slated for cinematic adaptation.3 Literary scholar Roberta Wolfson notes that what makes Ng’s writing so widely appealing may be its “universal themes like the complexities of parent-child relationships, the growing pains of adolescence, and the impact of race, gender, and class on social interactions.”4 Yet, as novelist Toni Morrison has said, literature that is beloved for its universality is almost always “about a particular world.”5 In this article, I explore the particular world that Ng crafts for the Lees in Middlewood, Ohio, arguing that we read the novel as Midwestern Asian American literature. Very little scholarship on Everything has been published at this juncture though colleagues across Asian American and multiethnic literature studies are exploring its themes of mixed race intimacy; gender and sexuality; silence, trauma, and the transgenerational; mental health; and more. In that emerging work and in popular reception, I believe the particularities of the Midwest are overlooked; if addressed, Middlewood is often read as a signifier of racial and ethnic isolation in suburban America. Turning to popular reception, some Goodreads reviewers dismiss the place as an overwrought rhetorical trope. One writes, for example, that the small-town, Midwestern setting makes the racism the Lees experience feel exaggerated and unrealistic.6 Given that Celeste Ng grew up in Ohio herself and, admittedly, compelled by my own personal ties, as I join the emerging scholarly conversations, I read Middlewood as deliberately and expertly crafted to evoke questions about Asian American experience in the Midwest. On one hand, Everything’s rendering aligns with popular notions that characterize the...