Homecoming:Loss And Recuperation In Everything I Never Told You

In her novel Everything I Never Told You,Celeste Ng tells a heart-wrenching story about a Chinese-American family.The narratives center around James Lee,a secondgeneration Chinese American,father and husband in the family.James Lee’s Chinese American experience is psychologically traumatic.He teaches American History in an American university and thus believes himself to be 100 percent American,yet he is not accepted as such in the mainstream society.He marries a Caucasian woman,hoping the Americanness of his wife will make him more American and ground him in a sense of home and belonging.Against what he desires from his marriage,his indiscriminate identification with American culture results in the loss of his masculinity and his cultural identity.In a horrible accident,his daughter Lydia,symbol of his American dream,is killed.He runs away from home,totally lost and disoriented in pain and suffering.This thesis looks at James Lee’s homecoming story which is his journey of recuperation from loss and pain to finding a sense of home and belonging and rebuilding his cultural identity as a Chinese American.His homecoming is also a journey to reconstruct his masculinity.The analysis focuses on how James Lee comes home after running away from it in American society by resorting to Chinese culture and Chinese cultural roots and by empowering himself as he reaffirms his Chineseness and takes pride in his Chinese heart.In analyzing the cultural dynamics that make his homecoming a positive step towards self-reaffirmation of his masculinity and Chinese American identity,this paper suggests a psychic healing process at work to transcend his consciousness of pain and loss to recreate a sense of home and belonging.This paper illuminates the way James Lee finally grounds himself in home through a “third space” where he finds a sense of wholeness in his cultural identity as he embraces both his Chineseness and his Americanness that make who he is.