Body Writing In Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You

Celeste Ng(1980-)is a new Chinese-American female writer.Her debut book Everything I Never Told You(2014)had been highly praised by readers and critics as soon as it was published,and became the “Best Book of 2014” in the United States.Different from other Chinese-American writers whose attention is on cultural clashes and identify of the immigrant families,Ng’s novel puts emphasis on struggle,pain and helplessness of a mix-raced family.The novel begins with Lydia’s death.Surrounding the mysterious death of Lydia,Ng interweaves the present and past lives to reveal the causes of her death and writes body disciplines of American society to the interracial family.In light of Foucault’s power and body theory,human body is the object of disciplinary power,and the power makes body useful by using a set of political techniques to force body to product,and mark it,and manipulate it,which makes human lose their subjectivity.This thesis analyzes docile bodies,disciplinary methods on docile bodies and characters’ resistance under disciplinary power in Everything I Never Told You.The main body of the thesis consists of three parts.A docile body is productive,marked and manipulable.Hence,the first part reveals docile bodies in the interracial family:James,a Chinese-American,and the body of Marilyn,a white female,are both madeproductive and marked;and how the body of Lydia,their mixed-race girl is manipulated.They all lose their subjectivity.The second part reveals the interracial family’s survival predicament by illustrating how James’ body,Marilyn’s body and Lydia’s body are disciplined respectively under hierarchical observation,distributions in space and normalizing judgement.The third part focuses on the characters’ resistance to different disciplinary powers,including James’ emotional resistance,Marilyn’s spatial resistance and Lydia’s life resistance.By writing the disciplinary bodies in the interracial family,Ng expresses her sympathy and attention to woman’s survival predicament,and also reveals her concern on the predicaments of Chinese-Americans in their struggle to achieve racial integration in the American society of white supremacy.