Ep 3 – Everything I Never Told You and The Marvels

Lin liked Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You for its complex and unflinching portrayal of life as a racialized minority in 70’s America. The well-crafted story elicits strong emotions through the interwoven narrative strands that revolve around coping with grief and with oppressive social dynamics.

Another interwoven narrative, Brian Selznick’s The Marvels is a touching middle-grade story set against the background of the AIDS crisis in the early nineties. Margrit loved it for the way it unfolds like a mystery with ever higher emotional stakes and for the message that everyone deserves to find themselves reflected in stories.

Question of the episode: Do you have a found story of your own, one that you were so excited to find and really spoke to you for who you were, even if it made you angry with its stark realism? Have you ever had the experience of finding your own story?

Join the conversation on Twitter at @World_ofStories or email us at worldofstoriespodcast@gmail.com.

Transcript

Margrit 0:00
Hi, welcome to World of Stories. I’m Margrit and my pronoun is they.

Lin 0:04
I’m Lin and my pronoun is she and we’re here to talk about diversity in storytelling.

Margrit 0:08
Specifically today, we’re actually talking about books for a change, after all kinds of detours into all kinds of other stories. So what book are you talking about today, Lin?

Lin 0:18
I’m talking about Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. And it is a story that’s set in the 1970s about a mixed race family. The father is Chinese-American, who was born and raised in the US. And the mother is white American, and they’ve got three children. And the story opens with the death of their middle child, a daughter, and it’s–so the story is told in multiple timelines and the one timeline is present day as the family discovers that their daughter is missing. Then they find out she’s dead and then each family member is trying to process their grief in different ways. And trying to also figure out how she died or why she died. And then the other timeline starts when the parents are children, and how they grew up, how they met, how they got married and had kids and so you kind of see how their experiences as children and into adulthood end up affecting their decisions about how they interact with each other in the marriage as well as how they raise their kids.

Margrit 1:33
That sounds like a really cool structure. And this book has been on my radar for a long time, but somehow I just never got to it. So what did you think about it?

Lin 1:44
Yeah, I think the structure, it took a little bit of getting used to, because it’s unusual and most books don’t have that back and forth. Because it’s not flashback, it’s literally this narrator that just tells you the story and whenever they get to a point in the present day story where you need to know more information about the past in order to make sense of what’s happening now, then the narrator just diverts into what’s happened in the past. So it took a little bit of getting used to but um, but you know, once I got used to it, it was fine.

So I loved and hated the story in equal measure, it got me so angry at times, but angry in a good way in the sense that because, you know, it spoke to me and it struck a nerve that I think was very real and authentic. The story itself is beautifully written, the prose is very evocative and wonderful language used. So, the things that got me super, super angry was there’s a lot of racism in the story, like so much racism in the story. It just drove me up the wall. So like I said, the story is set in the 1970s, and, you know, earlier because the daughter dies in the present, the present tense, sorry, the present time story right in the 1970s. So, when the parents are children is obviously earlier, and there’s a lot of overt racism that the father experiences, and then the children experience as well, even though they’re mixed race, they still look very Asian. And so they get sort of lumped in as oh, they’re just Chinese when really they’re mixed race.

Margrit 3:37
There’s been many interesting conversations that I’ve seen on Twitter about being biracial and how that’s so much different and complicated than being sort of mono-racial, as it were. So I’m wondering how this book tackles that.

Lin 3:56
Yeah, you know what it doesn’t it, doesn’t talk about that very much. There are certain bits and pieces in there where they kind of touch on it from sort of the mother’s perspective or from the parents perspective, as they’re contemplating their relationship and what they want for their children, but not so much from the kids themselves. I think the kids themselves, have just internalized the fact that they are not fully white, and so they just categorize themselves as Asian. So that’s not as much, that’s not as big a part of the story.

So the father was the only Chinese person in his community for most of his life when he was growing up, when he was in school, when he was doing his PhD in, you know, in school and all of that, and so he was always the outsider. You know, the one that people made fun of or thought was weird because he looked different. And so his desire for his whole life was always to have friends and fit in and be popular and be one of the crowd. And so this very much influences the way that he understands his relationship with his wife, and also how he raises his children.

And then, yeah, and then the mom who is, is coming from almost the entirely opposite perspective. She’s white, blond hair, grew up in the south, in kind of this debutante type of environment, and was expected by her mother to get married, have kids and be a housewife. And that was what a lot of her peers were expected to do. But she was actually a very accomplished student, very smart, and she always wanted to become a doctor. And so that’s what she had gone to university for was to study medicine and become a doctor. She wanted to stand out. She wanted to be unique. She wanted to be a successful career woman. And the fact that she did end up getting married and having kids and being a housewife really…

Margrit 6:22
Put a damper?

Lin 6:23
In a way, yeah, exactly. Put a damper on her life. And so then she ends up being a little bit… at times she ends up being a little bit bitter about the situation that she ends up in and then she pushes her kids to be not what she ended up being.

Yeah, so I mean, obviously the racism made me super super angry. But what I found was I was less angry about the racism in society, but more angry about how the parents intereacted with each other and with their kids, because there was complete lack of communication. You know, like the fact that the mom and the dad obviously had somewhat traumatic, I don’t know if tramatic is the right word, but, you know, experiences in their younger selves that have influenced the way that they think of themselves in society. They never told each other that, you know. The dad never told–or the husband never told the wife that like, hey, I’ve been the victim of racism. And so that makes me think this way in that way.

Margrit 7:40
So it’s very sort of plausible to the time period and realistic like, I have a hard time imagining my parents talking about–to one another–about the anti-semitism they’ve experienced in their lives. It’s inherent in that generation, right? So I yeah, I can see it.

Lin 8:02
I guess that is very suited for that generation because I guess like, my parents don’t talk about stuff like that, either.

Yeah. And then the wife never tells her husband that she wants to be a doctor, and she doesn’t want to be a housewife, you know, and at some point, she brings up the idea that maybe she can work part-time at the university as a research assistant. And he’s like, no, you shouldn’t have to work. And she never says to him, it’s not about having to bring in money for the family. It’s to get out of the house and like, do something other than cook and clean.

Margrit 8:46
Again, it sounds like it’s very plausible to the period and like, rigid gender roles. Although, like, the 70s like the hippie generation had been around and so I don’t know. I don’t know what to say about that.

Lin 9:02
I don’t know. But I guess the story is set in, partly in Boston and then partly in Ohio, which I guess is not, is more of a small, in a small town in Ohio, so I think, it kind of had different dynamics there.

Yeah, anyways, it just drove me absolutely nuts. So they don’t talk to each other. And then they don’t talk to their kids either. So they don’t explain to the kids like… Well, okay, so there’s, they have a lot of favouritism, right? And so the middle daughter is the one that they both favoured over the older son and the younger daughter. And so the father kept pushing the daughter to be popular and have friends and wear the latest fashions and have the latest toys, but she was more of an introvert and she didn’t have a lot of friends and she didn’t know how to make friends so much. And then the mom kept pushing her to be good at school and get good grades and study all these, like, take extra classes and college courses in the summertime. And she was not that great of a student. She started failing her classes and would hide the, her, like test results from her mom. So there was a lot of pressure that they put onto her. And I just, got me so angry because the parents are being super selfish. You know, they are like trying to force their daughter to be someone they wish they wanted to be, rather than letting her live her own life.

Margrit 10:43
So they’re trying to vicariously sort of supplant their own losses and the things that they felt that, and sort of push their kids to live the lives that they wish they had been able to.

Lin 10:55
Yeah, exactly. But that’s like, I don’t know. It’s just very selfish, I find. And then the other thing is that they did that to the detriment of their other two children. So the older son is, was in the story is very, very smart, like amazing grades. He wanted to be an astronaut. But the mom completely ignored all of his academic accomplishments because she just, I don’t know, she just didn’t care what kind of grades he got. And then they have this younger daughter who everybody just ignores. And she’s just like, you know, she’s like, her sister’s just died, and she–

Margrit 11:37
So they don’t know what to do with their grief and how to process it together.

Lin 11:40
Yeah, yeah. So I just felt terrible for the younger daughter because it’s like, clearly not her fault. And she’s very young, right? And she’s very susceptible to everyone’s emotions, and she sees all the stuff that’s happening, but no one takes the time to explain to her what’s going on. No one checks in to make sure she’s okay.

Margrit 12:00
Right. So it sounds to me like it’s a very complex story in terms of like, every character has their own sort of very clear motivations and inner conflict and stuff like that, because you talk to them as if they were real people. And obviously, they’ve sort of given you very real emotion.

Lin 12:17
Yeah. No, I thought it was amazing. I loved the book. It’s very well written, but like you said, it’s very realistic. And so it triggers a lot of very strong feelings. Really strong reaction. But um, yeah, I highly recommend it. You should go check it out if you have time and it is available in audiobook form from the Toronto Public Library. So that is a plus.

Margrit 12:44
That is very awesome. And probably other places, too if you don’t live in Toronto.

Lin 12:50
So what have you been reading, M?

Margrit 12:52
Oh, I’ve been reading a lot of books, but I’ve just finished, this morning, I’ve just finished The Marvels by Brian Selznick and I am just in awe of it. I, I adore his books. His a very well known author-illustrator of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which won a bunch of children’s literature awards, like the Caldecott Medal, but was also made into an Oscar-winning movie that was directed and produced by Martin Scorsese.

Lin 13:23
Yeah, I remember that.

Margrit 13:25
Yeah. And so he’s pioneered this new style of mixing text narrative with illustration in a completely different way than what we’re used to. So it’s not really graphic novels with panels, or, you know, the regular kids books with, you know, half a page of illustration. It’s just he usually has two parallel stories going on. One of which is like a full page illustration, and the other one is in text narrative. And they seem parallel for the longest time until the relationship between them is revealed and that’s just such a treat. Like it’s a treat of layering and nuance and the way that stories can be told in so many different media, and still be really emotional and really affecting.

And so in Hugo, I don’t know if you remember, if you’ve seen the movie, it’s a story of an orphan boy who lives in a train station and takes care of that clock. And in parallel or in conjunction, it’s the story of movies, basically. And it’s focused on this really imaginative early French filmmaker, and then the boy just stumbles over that. And so it’s really, I think, like just fantastically emotional and just wonderfully built characters. And his books always unfold like this sort of mystery where you, until you get to the connection between the two narratives, and it’s very emotionally charged and we get to see everything through the eyes of a child who is 12 or 13. So it’s got that amazing sense of wonder, which I think is really difficult to capture. And so we get, as readers, we get to see it through their own, through really wonder-infused eyes, actually one of his other books is called Wonderstruck.

Lin 15:22
How appropriate.

Margrit 15:23
Yeah, no. And it’s it’s very, very good. And so I just adored this book. I think this is my favorite of the three books I’ve read by him.

Lin 15:32
Oh, wow. Okay.

Margrit 15:33
And it’s not easy to talk about it without spoilers, because it’s just so tightly interwoven and, and just structured. But basically, it’s the story of a boarding school student, a boy who runs away from school, because he’s looking for his friend, his best friend whose father took him away without leaving a forwarding address or anything. So our protagonist, Joseph, runs to his uncle’s house in London in the working class neighborhood of Spitalfields. And Joseph’s story, so the present starts in 1990. But it is preceded–so basically the first half of the book is all full-page illustrations. And it’s a completely different story that starts in 1766 on a boat that capsizes and ends in 900–1900. One thousand nine hundred. What are numerals anymore? And it’s the story of several generations of a family of actors in the theater.

I’m not going to reveal what the link between the two stories are because it’s just too well done for me to just ruin it with spoilers, but I just want to say that Joseph’s story is actually on the background of the AIDS crisis. And it finds its way in really, really subtle hints in the narrative. And again, I’m forever in awe of the craft of children’s books, children’s literature writers, who managed to talk about such heavy subjects in a way that not only makes it understandable, but also emotionally, gives it the proper emotional weight.

Lin 17:24
Yeah, you know, I find that really interesting because I don’t think I ever noticed it when I was younger and reading children’s books or books written for a younger audience. But now when I look back on some of those books, they’re like, they’re quite heavy. They talk about some pretty dense topics that, you know, as adults, we would be hesitant to, to talk to each other about. So it’s quite a skill. I’m pretty impressed with like children’s authors who can take very heavy stories and break it down in a way that, one, that kids can understand, two, that is not overwhelming and dark.

Margrit 18:09
Totally, yeah. And it becomes really compelling. And then that becomes part of, you know, the worldview of that child when they have access to that book, you know, and it’s, it’s really interesting to see. So in Joseph’s story, his uncle lives in a house that he’s restored to look like it did in the 18th century. And his uncle has very bizarre rituals. He loves to light up all the fires in all the rooms even though he lives alone. And he has a dinner party table that he polishes and sets with full place settings every night and, you know, fills the glasses with drinks and leaves food on the plate. So it’s a really sort of, the descriptions are lovely and wonderful and embedded–adds to the sense of mystery because we see it through Joseph’s eyes and we wonder and we don’t understand what is happening. But the bottom line is that it’s such a fundamentally queer story because the mystery is emotionally driven by Joseph’s desire to find a family. His mom and dad are alive, which is quite weird for a middle grade story, but they’re just, they are summer gallivanting around the world. They’re just so important and that’s why they put him in, in a boarding school. And so he just is looking for the place that he belongs to. And he is adamant that he deserves to know where he belongs and he deserves that place. And in his search in his uncle’s house, he’s always looking for like paintings that look like him. And he finds this Latin saying all over the place that says Aut Visum Aut Non!, which means, you either see it or you don’t.

Lin 20:00
That’s good pronunciation. I mean, I don’t know how it’s being pronounced, but it sounds good to me.

Margrit 20:06
Romanian is a romance language. So it’s…

Lin 20:10
Well, you have a leg up then.

Margrit 20:17
I want to read a little tiny passage from the book, just something that really speaks to me. And I think that it encapsulates the message of the story. So, here goes.

Billy need dozens of new tiles for the fireplace and sinks. They look like 18th century designs, but the images are people in the neighborhood, their friends. There’s one flaw in the carriage. I’m sure you haven’t noticed them. They’re very hard to spot unless you’re looking for them. I saw some when I was cleaning the fireplace in your room. I remember there was one of two men holding hands. That’s me and Billy. You either see it or you don’t, said Joseph. Exactly. Those are Billy’s words, they became the house motto. I see it. I know, Joseph, you’re the first one since Billy died. That’s why I’m telling you this story. Joseph didn’t know what to say. Thank you didn’t seem like enough and what words were there really for a moment like this. He ran his hands across his velvet suit, as if he could touch the story somehow, as if he were wearing the story itself.

So that’s the little passage.

Lin 21:29
It’s really beautiful.

Margrit 21:30
Right? And the whole book is just tremendously emotional. Fantastic. And I think it’s, you know, starting from that Latin phrase, you either see it or you don’t, it’s such a tremendous little phrase that ever so subtly goes back to the erasure of all kinds of marginalized people from history and especially from histories of empire, right? How many historical movies have we not seen that are just only white people, only straight white people, as if you know marginalize people have not existed throughout history. And so one of the messages of this book is that we have to be adamant about seeking, seeking out and writing and creating our own stories and putting them out there in the world.

Lin 22:11
I like that a lot. And I think what you were talking about before, where Joseph was trying to find his family, finding a place where he belongs. That sounds like a found family to me, you know? Yeah, a lot of us don’t, are not born into families where we fit in, even though biologically we might be related but in a lot of other ways, we clearly just don’t fit. And some people are, are, end up finding other other members of their family that they’ve chosen to, to surround themselves with that are healthier.

Margrit 22:56
Community, finding your own community and making your story or excavating your stories are a really, really important thing.

Lin 23:03
Yeah, yeah, I agree.

Margrit 23:04
Yeah. So do we have a question for our listeners today? I think the question that I would like to ask is, do you have any found stories of your own, some that you were so excited to find and really spoke to you as to who you were, even if it made you angry? Or even if it made you cry? Or anything like that. Have you ever had the experience of finding your story?

Lin 23:30
Yes. That’s a great question. I love it. So if you would like to comment on our question of the episode, you can do that on Twitter @World_ofStories or you can email us at worldofstoriespodcast@gmail.com. We’d love to hear what you think.

Margrit 23:51
We’ll also talk about your answers. If you want to, unless you tell us it’s totally private. We will talk about your answers on our podcast.

Lin 23:59
Yes, we will, because this is conversation, there is back and forth. And if you’d like to support our podcast, you can do that by subscribing wherever you listen to your podcasts, and you’ll get new episodes as they drop. And you can also leave us a review on iTunes or Google Play or Spotify or wherever you’re listening to us or tell your friends about us or share us on social media. We would love all of that.

Margrit 24:28
Yes, and join the conversation. We love talking as you can see.

Lin 24:32
We really, really do. Thanks for listening.

Margrit 24:37
Okay, bye.