The Weight of the Past: Mixed-Race Materiality in Post-Racial Asian American Literature

Abstract

Near the end of Celeste Ng’s widely lauded novel Everything I Never Told You (2014), the central character, Lydia, steps off a boat in the middle of the night and drowns. In her final moments, the long-suffering teenager has determined she will no longer ignore who she is in order to meet her parents’ expectations; jumping into the center of the lake and swimming to shore will be a way to start over. The symbolism of this gesture—Lydia is drowning in expectations, but she will be reborn from the water—is also intensely personal. Years before, Lydia nearly drowned in the same lake when her brother, jealous of her status as favored daughter, pushed and then pulled her from the water. This time, Lydia is determined to save herself. However, as readers have known since the novel’s opening pages, Lydia cannot swim and will instead drown. The revelation of Lydia’s death is ostensibly an answer to the suspense novel’s central mystery: how and why did Lydia die? Yet the description reveals a puzzling, ambiguous moment. Why did Lydia believe she could swim to shore? Was it wishful thinking? Suicide? Although questions about Lydia’s death remain unanswered in Everything I Never Told You, what becomes clear in this scene is Lydia’s steadfast belief in her own immateriality. In the moments before she enters the lake, Lydia feels “as if she were floating in space, completely untethered” (275). Like outer space, the lake is “a great void spreading beneath her” (276). Lydia does not step off the boat because she is under the illusion that she can swim but because she has imagined away the weight of her body. Of course, this belief is countered by the fact of her death. Lydia’s sinking, her body found in the lake a day and a half later, is belated evidence of her material existence. The revelation of how and why Lydia dies thus leads to another question entirely: why would Lydia believe in her own immateriality so insistently? Lydia’s death scene highlights an emerging representational mode in contemporary Asian American writing about mixed-race experiences: the mixed-race character as dematerialized. Echoing much earlier portrayals, where multiracial characters often die or disappear, these mixed-race characters from twenty......................................................................................................