论文总字数：29971字

摘 要

《无声告白》是美国华谊作家伍绮诗2015年出版的长篇小说，小说讲述了亚洲移民混血家庭中二女儿莉迪亚的死亡悲剧。作者使用错综复杂的时间线，于文章一开始交代了悲剧的发生，在回忆中抽丝剥茧。在这个跨族裔家庭看似平静的生活下隐藏的是各自不同的伤痛。父亲詹姆斯幼时被种族歧视的阴影，母亲被家庭所牵制的梦想，儿子内斯渴望冲破牢笼的固执，二女儿莉迪亚不堪重负的人生，以及小女儿在家中可有可无的存在……最终我们发现，这场悲剧的原因来自于个人，来自于家庭，也来自于社会。

关键词：无声告白；家庭；种族；性别；个体成长

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 2

3. Brief Analysis of This Subject 3

4. The Reasons for the Tragic Ending of Lydia 3

4.1 From Society: Race and Gender 3

4.2 From Family: Trust and Sharing 6

4.3 From Individual: Independence and Pressure 8

5. Conclusion 12

Works Cited 14

1. Introduction

Celeste Ng, a Chinese-American writer who conquered the literary world of Europe and America. Growing up in Pennsylvania and Ohio, her parents are scientists. She is the second generation of Hong Kong immigrants. She graduated from the English Department of Harvard University, and later entered the Graduate School of the University of Michigan, where she received a master"s degree in creative writing. Before the publication of Everything I Never Told You, she had been writing for many years. Her novels and prose works were mostly found in various literary journals and magazines. Celeste Ng’s first novel, Everything I Never Told You, was written within six years. Its story arrangement is exquisite and meticulous, and its style is steady and restrained.

Before the publication of Everything I Never Told You, she had been writing for many years. Nearly thirty years have passed since Amy Tan published her famous Joy Luck Club. Wu Qi"s poems have come into being, filling the gap between Chinese writers in the mainstream literary circles of Europe and America.

At the beginning of Everything I Never Told You, The Lee’s sensible and clever second daughter Lydia was dead. Was it homicide or suicide? Behind this seemingly calm family, conflicts of the past erupted because of the death of her daughter .In the process of the investigation, the long-suppressed past also gradually emerged: her father James’ Asian identity made him extremely eager to integrate into the crowd; her mother Marilyn"s sharp feminist ideas made her eager to become a leader; her brother Nath wanted to escape this unfair family and her youngest daughter Hannah"s near-transparent existence at home... For various reasons, an invisible web was woven and drowned Lydia at the bottom of the lake. This article, synthesizing many theories, summarizes the reasons into three aspects: society, individual and family. It is analyzed from three perspectives: the background of the times, the concept of individual and the meaning of collective. The significance of this article is to find out that: during the process the growth, finding truly me is the most important thing.

1. Literature Review

The study of Everything I Never Told You can be divided into four aspects: 1. the analysis of the characters in this article, 2. the analysis of the causes of the tragedy in the story, 3. the analysis of ethnic orientation, 4. the analysis of the writing techniques, narrative angle and overall value of the article.

Firstly, in the aspect of character analysis, many authors have made a concrete analysis of the specific character in the book. Most of the analysis of specific characters focuses on the impact of the original content, such as Wang Yanxue"s Comparison of Lydia and Marilyn in 2016. Then, others tried to analyze roles by linking well-known ideas, such as Niu Yue"s Personality Structure of James According to Freud"s Psychoanalytic Theory. The last one is to locate the specific roles in the story to a particular group of people and demonstrate them with examples in the book. Those writers, such as Gui Zijin and Yin Yan, have published literature on the identity of marginal people and people in the cultural gap.

Secondly, the characterization of the characters, the analysis of the plot of the article is also an important classification. Most of the analysis is to explore the tragic causes of the book. Based on the text, we can interpret the tragedy of Everything I Never Told You, exploring the reasons for the tragic ending, or analyzing it from the perspective of psychology, such as under the theory of Fromm"s love by Yan Rui. In addition, the original works are analyzed from the perspective of trauma. For example, trauma writing, mental trauma and Cultural Trauma published by Niu Yue and Zhang Luyao.

The third category of literature deals with ethnic and gender issues arising from the cross-racial families in the book. Such as Zhang Dongmei"s Racial and Gender Discrimination, American Women"s Identity Anxiety in the 20C70S, and Meng Chang"s Cross-ethnic Family"s Survival Dilemma and Regeneration.

The last one focuses on the writing technique and application of this book. There is some simple analysis of the writing methods. Such writers are: Li Yue, Huang Ying, Li Mingzhu and so on. They analyze the book from the perspective of narrative characteristics, narrative strategies and values. Later, there are also writers who link writing techniques with teaching, such as Du Shengman"s The Application of the Novel in English Literature Writing Class.

1. Brief Analysis of This Subject

With an intelligent use of flashbacks, writer announces Lydia’s death at first. then with the development of plot, we exclude more and more possibilities of homicide, finding out the truth of this event is suicide. However, this book is not a detective novel, who killed Lydia is not so important. What should be paid much attention is why Lydia, a teenager chose death. suicide is just a phenomenon, what hides behind it should be analyzed seriously. The core problem in Everything I Never Told You is why Lydia committed suicide, so if we find the reasons for this, we can conclude something helpful for nowadays problem. Based on nowadays higher and higher teenager suicide rate, this book gives a good example to explain the reasons for them, and we can find some similarities between this book and the reality.

Many other papers analyze the reasons for death from outside reasons, which is reasonable. However, when I finish reading this book, I find out this book solves a critical subject worrying most of teenagers even adults, that is “who am I”. Connecting the stories happened in my friends, I study this topic, and want to help more and more people solve growth problems. Finding true self is an abstract idea, I write this paper is to concretize this idea, explain it more straightforward. That is why I choose this book as a project.

1. The Reasons for the Tragic Ending of Lydia

4.1 From Society: Race and Gender

We need to notice that, Lydia is not a direct victim of racial and gender discrimination in this article. The direct victims of racial and gender discrimination are her parents, James and Marilyn.

Racism refers to a person"s attitude of contempt, disgust and exclusion towards people other than his own race, which is expressed in speech and behavior. James, as an Asian, was taunted by society from an early age. During his life, he struggled to get rid of the shadow of childhood. He longed to be an ordinary, neglected man and integrated into the crowd. He longed to be a normal American. He even went to study a professional "cowboy history" that the locals didn"t like to try to integrate into American culture. That phenomenon is precisely because of the status of Asian Americans in American society. There is a concept here to explain the background of that time, the so-called "model minority". This is a political discourse dominated by white consciousness in the 1960s when emphasis is placed on the hardworking character of Asian Americans in the United States. And this concept was put forward under the background of the continuous civil rights movement in the United States. The mainstream media call Asian Americans "models", which is not only served as a warning to Asian Americans, but also emphasizes the authority of white culture. Considering the background of that time, as a "stowaway" false son, James was inferior from childhood, trying to integrate into the crowd desperately, trying to avoid differences. (Ng 42) In this way, he finally developed the character of cowardice and hesitation. However, this personality is what her wife, Marilyn, who has feminist ideas, doesn’t want to accept definitely.

Contrary to James, Marilyn"s lifelong pursuit is to "reject mediocrity and be different." In those days, the most suitable place for typical white girls was the kitchen. Marilyn"s mother is such a typical example, as a home economics teacher, doing housework and cooking all her life. At that time, the ultimate goal of most American women was to become a housewife. If they went out to work, their husbands were likely to be regarded as "incompetent". However, Marilyn is different. Marilyn is fed up with stereotypes, so she wanted to be a doctor, not a secretary or a nurse, proving she was special. She took biology, chemistry and became the only female student in the class getting A. Then she fell in love with James most because he"s a different man-- an Asian with yellow skin.

In my opinion, the start of this marriage is not love, but Marilyn"s pursuit of "special" and the stimulation of Marilyn"s mother"s mediocre life. As we can see from the passage, Marilyn has shown great disgust at home economics class since childhood. So she chose physics, chemistry and biology class to pursue her medical dream, maybe more for the sake of "special". Her love for James also stems from this. At the first class, her classmates don"t like this "special" Asian, although she doesn"t like it either, she still wants to be the special one, so she tries to be close to James. So does Marilyn really love James? Not necessarily, she just wants to get rid of the secular vision and prove herself with her own distinctiveness. Although Marilyn"s ideas are not entirely "gender equality" in feminist ideology, she still expresses a totally different idea from that time, and there is a germination of feminism in her thoughts.

These two "twisted childhood experiences" of Marilyn and James have not been erased even as they grow up, and even become more evident as the formation of families. This is the latent period of trauma: after certain events, although traumatized patients were shocked at the time, the consequences of trauma began to show over time. Because trauma is incomprehensible and experience can not be absorbed, trauma will appear in the form of delays, which determines the continuous depression and regression after traumatic events. The whole process is the latent period of trauma. (Wang 41). James and Marilyn both wanted to minimize the impact of discrimination on their children from childhood. This wish was the silent influence of childhood trauma on them, so they did not really get out of the trauma. The influence of society on parents is indirectly transmitted to their children in family life. James asked Lydia to make more friends and become a collective child. Marilyn wanted Lydia to get rid of stereotype and pursue her unique dream. It is right that the indelible influence of society prevents fathers from suffering in the future. But in my opinion, James and Marilyn did not consider that although their original wishes were beneficial, their actual operation was very difficult to appear at the same time for an individual. Marilyn"s jumping of Lydia"s class has actually cost Lydia a lot of opportunities to get along with her peers. David Parkingham, author of Death of Childhood, said: "Children have been deprived of the concept of childhood in the process of growing up, which has become the primary theme of popular psychology." (Ruiamp;Fan 32). In this book, Lydia was deprived of her normal childhood, growing up too fast, not get along with her peers day and night, and the older people would despise her. So James"s wishes were doomed to fail slowly in this situation.

It can be said that because of the impact of racial discrimination and gender discrimination on the parents, so it indirectly caused the lack of various elements in Lydia"s growth process. Under this social background, Lydia was under too much pressure. She had to be an ordinary person who can fit in with the group. At the same time, she had to be a top student in the leaps and bounds. Such things are very difficult to happen. Here comes an example, the so-called youth classes, where "gifted" children cannot experience a process like their peers, but skip many links to become a person in the future. They can"t take part in the topic of emotional development of their peers because people who have gone through those stages and have little resonance to develop such feelings surround them. Therefore, although not directly affected by discrimination as their parents, it is undeniable that a large part of the tragic outcome comes from this.

4.2 From Family: Trust and Sharing

In terms of family reasons, the first thing I want to elaborate is sharing.

The most direct reason why Lydia committed suicide was that she was too tired. As a teenager, she had so much to carry that she could not breathe. There was basically no one to help her except Nath. She was so desperate that eventually she chose to die.

Is it the other family members who don"t want to help her? No, it"s Lydia hided herself so well that James and Marilyn ignored her. She pretended that she had many good friends on the surface and could easily accept senior courses on the surface, so her parents had no idea what her problems are.

Brothers and sisters, though more or less felt that she was not so bright on the surface, but because Lydia herself denied, could not really help her. Sister Hannah, who knew many of her little secrets and maybe a global insight, was rejected for her indifference. Brother Nath, who really understood her in the family, and who she also depends on, was about to leave home. For a child, the family is the first group that comes into contact with him during his growing up. (Wang 104) When Lydia"s life was just beginning, no one in the first group she met gave her hope, which also doomed her to have no hope for the future, so she finally chose to die.

But is the lack of shared conscious Nath merely Lydia"s fault? No, the whole Li family was seriously lacked in this sense of sharing. From her mother"s point of view, Marilyn"s desire to attend medical school had been silent and stolen away from home. Hannah had been neglected since she was a child, and she had only suffered silently. Everyone is trying to restrain what, and of course, restraint is a kind of respect, but excessive restraint will eventually only let people close themselves, which leads to the lack of intimacy in-group life.

Another huge loophole in Li"s family is that family members do not really understand what trust is. From parents to children, everyone shows a lack of trust in others. Starting with his father James. At the beginning, James naively believed that unlike other women, Marilyn treated all races equally. However, after a big fight with his wife, James thought he should marry an Asian woman, "a woman who looks like him."(Ng 202). He was convinced that his wife would not really understand his ethnicity, so there was a subsequent derailment. So did Marilyn. Mother Marilyn had always dreamed of becoming a doctor, but she missed the chance because of her marriage and pregnant. She did not give her husband and children full trust, so she decided to leave home secretly and return to her family after taking a university degree. It was her departure that completely disrupted the family"s sense of trust.

The lack of trust is also reflected in children, who lived in worries all day long and felt that their mothers would disappear at any time, which is the manifestation of their distrust of their parents. Lydia was desperately trying to perform well to keep her mother. She dared not tell her mother that she did not want to learn anything she asked her to do, nor did she want to tell her father that she did not like the communication books he sent. After Nath went to college, she unilaterally thought that her only life-saving straw Nath would abandon her completely, although Nath did not think so. In this way, Lydia believed that the family would break up because of her disobedience, which also reflected her distrust of "love" among family members. Maybe they did not believe in love, so the family relationship was so fragile, so the mother would suddenly disappear, so the father would derail, so the brother would be far away from the family and abandon himself.

All family members seem to be isolated from each other. Everyone had his own thoughts. They only reached a consensus on some painless issues, but the core issues were never mentioned properly, or even unknown. The lack of trust kept every family member from communicating on the core issues. Even if they had enough burdens, they never took the initiative to ask the people around them to share, or took the initiative to ask for the people around them to share.

Lack of trust, so unable to share, unable to achieve real integration, led to the family not only failing to provide Lydia with support, to give Lydia the power and the hope of life, but also to exerting more pressure on Lydia. The Lee’s family apparently failed to do so, which is also an important cause of Lydia"s death.

4.3 From Individual: Independence and Pressure

Last month, a student in Shanghai jumped from the bridge, ending his life in front of his mother. Countless people have mentioned "pressure resistance" in summarizing this matter. That means, the child"s resistance to pressure is too poor, or he can’t afford a little bit of trifle but to choose suicide. We don’t know what he has experienced before his death, but what we can ensure is that he must face something he thought he can’t overcome, that is the same as Lydia. Although it"s too extreme to say so, it"s reasonable that the lack of compressive resistance is indeed the individual fuse that caused Lydia"s death. In this family, the life trajectory of the three children can be said to be totally different. Nath, the eldest son, insists on the space dream that his parents scorn. However, James didn"t want Nath look different from others, so he opposed his dream desperately. But stubborn Nath refused to change his goals, bought books secretly for his own research, and eventually succeeded in admitting to Harvard University. But even if he got the admission notice from Harvard, the family"s focus was still on Lydia. Even Lydia"s failure in physics was more important to parents than Nath"s admission to Harvard. Lydia, the second daughter, carried the whole expectations from her parents. Hannah, the third daughter, was like a marginal person, and nobody cared about her. Parents would even forget their little daughter"s existence. Once time, Marilyn even placed only four plates, until Hannah appeared, she realized there were five people in their family. No matter parents or siblings, when Hannah approached, what they only wanted to do was stay away from her. So Hannah learned to hide herself from childhood, under the table, in the corner, so as not to be hated by her family, so as to observe everyone quietly. We can see that, the common thing happened in these three children is that each of them has tremendous pressure, and at the same time they have their own aspirations for life. Unfortunately, under their own pressure, Lydia finally chose to die. So why do Nath and Hannah, who also bear their own pressures, insisted in their own circumstances? Is it because the pressure is not as great as Lydia"s? Not necessarily. In my opinion, Lydia is not as powerful as Nath and Hannah. Nath"s space dream was watered clean by James"s pot of cold water just as it sprouted, but he chose to buy books and study them silently. Hannah’s family has never valued Hannah since she was born. Even Marilyn has a little "resentment" towards her. Compared with her sister"s unique role in this family, she can"t get the attention of her family at all. This is an unacceptable thing for any child. After all, not everyone can be the same as Nath, even though the whole family sniffed at him, he still held mindless pursuit of goals, and not everyone can be the same as Hannah, indifferent to the family silent submission. Everyone was under pressure, but Lydia was the first one to collapse.

Secondly, from my point of view, why Lydia"s resistance to pressure is somewhat bad is because she has lost her independence and she didn’t not know who she is. In Bildungsroman, "let teenagers gain moral awareness by listening to adult debates, or let the results of behavior bring beneficial rewards and compensation to affirm the right behavior, let tragedy and punishment to warn immoral behavior is a common technique.” (Ruiamp;Fan 163) Lydia in this article, through Marilyn"s emotion, judged whether a thing is right or wrong. Marilyn is her yardstick, and that"s what she"s missing from Nath and Hannah. In her childhood concept, she has no right or wrong standards; right or wrong comes from her mother. This was reflected in her pursuit of questions. Undoubtedly, like Nath, Marilyn"s willful choice in her youth was also under tremendous pressure, but it was their own independent choice, with their own criteria of non-judgment, which was enough to support them to overcome failure and pain. According to Frettonberg, the most basic task in adolescence is to acquire a clear and stable self. (Ruiamp;Fan 78). We can"t evaluate the success of Marilyn and Nath in their lives, but it"s clear that Marilyn and Nath"s task in adolescence was fulfilling and that they knew what they needed to do. But compared with Marilyn, Lydia not only did not express her wishes bravely and resolutely as Marilyn, but also did not regard herself as an individual. In fact, this is gradually abandoning her own "individual". Among the teenage idols, Luke said to Jane, "Although we have done a lot of things for everyone and seldom considered ourselves, they are basically post-work comfort work, no pre-intervention efforts" (Cabot 128). If the family is a universe, Lydia is undoubtedly the center of the universe. She had never thought of changing her roots to strive for her right to be independent. What she did was to repeat her family"s instructions day after day to make them happy. As a result, they gradually lost their enthusiasm for life and were gradually overwhelmed by reality. She"s just a machine, a machine that works for her parents. If Lydia can"t win her mother"s love, her self-worth will be weakened. When the machine cannot meet the high standard operation requirements no matter how it is upgraded, scrapping is also a reasonable thing. The main reason for the tragic ending of Everything I Never Told You is that members of the Lee’s family did not recognize the concept of "individual is independent". Not only Lydia, but also Marilyn and James did not understand. Just like Marilyn"s mother, she could choose to be a housekeeping teacher, because that"s her dream, and the profession won"t become cheap because her daughter wanted to be a doctor. The same applies to Lydia. Whatever Lydia"s dream is, she has the right to choose, not to fulfill Marilyn"s long-cherished dream of "Doctor".

There are four ways in which adolescents acquire self-knowledge. The fourth way is to identify with or worship certain special people and accept their influence. (Ruiamp;Fan 86). Lydia"s self-perception in this article comes from her parents’ influence. Psychologist Eriksson pointed out that the main requirement of children aged 10-20 is to build their identity. They need to understand their value, future, social identity and social value in adolescence. （Meece 323）And Marilyn and James are desperately instilling what Lydia calls their "expectation" puppet, so Lydia has no idea what kind of person "I" really is and what kind of person she can be. They neglect that the child is a separate individual, not an appendage of the parents.

In the individual problem, both sides have great responsibilities, one of which takes the other party"s personal rights into account and places great expectations on them. While the other side struggles with this arrangement, it does not even realize that its existence is not for others. In this case, the tragedy is bound to happen.

The book revolves around Lydia"s death and cocoons the family"s past. What was the cause of Lydia"s death? Is it because of parents" pressure, or because of their weakness? In my opinion, the pressure of James and Marilyn is only an indirect cause of Lydia"s death. Lydia"s life is a puppet. She obeys her parents but has no life of her own. So her life is like a boat sailing on the sea. Without a lighthouse, what she could do is at the mercy of waves. Although not everyone can find the goal of life-long struggle like Nath, and not everyone can have the same psychological endurance as Hannah, people who want to live in the world full of hope must find their true self, and must consider themselves as an independent individual. Only in this way can we not be trapped in other people"s praise and criticism. The process of growth is to find a true and independent self, which is not only the essence of growth, but also the meaning of growth.

1. Conclusion

Through the analysis of the text, we divide Lydia"s death into three main causes. First, the oppression caused by racial discrimination and gender discrimination in the social context. Second, the whole family lack trust and sharing consciousness. Third, the weakening of the individual"s ability to resist pressure and independence. These three reasons cause Lydia to be overburdened and finally choose to die. In the analysis of this paper, social and family reasons as supplementary factors stimulate individual causes to a serious extent, leading to the deterioration of Lydia"s own problems. Moreover, Lydia"s death is linked to family tragedies and social tragedies, such as the cage of marriage between parents, the shackles of love, the contrast between reality and ideal. Her death also proves that racial prejudice and gender discrimination can occur all the time in the world, bringing disaster and trauma to people.

At the end of the story, everything seems to be better: James and Marilyn are back together, parents notice Hannah, and Nath has found a partner with who works side by side... But there is no doubt that Everything I Never Told You is a very depressing novel. In the process of describing, the author combines social contradictions with family contradictions and throws them into a small girl as the background. The conflicts between race and gender, father and son, and peers are expressed vividly. The inherent contradictions of society make the family doomed to not be calm, while collective distrust widens the original distance between family members. Individual loss and blindness make Lydia completely collapse under heavy pressure. Finally, in the quiet night, a person silently plunged into the cold lake water to end her life. She didn"t want to resist to her family, so she chose to die. Her death represents her deep love for her family. It is her sincere and tragic confession to her family. Lydia"s death is a personal tragedy, a family tragedy, and a social tragedy. In fact, if one’s life is for rent and she doesn’t learn to buy, she may deserve nothing, just because nothing she has is truly hers. The cry of Lydia’s death also makes us understand: "In our lifetime, what we have to do is to get rid of the expectations of others and find ourselves."

Works Cited

Cabot Meg, Teen Idol. Macmillan(2004) 125-128

Edgar Z. Friedenberg, The Vanishing Adolescent . 13^th edition, Dell (1970): 15-45

Meece, Judith. L. Child and Adolescent Development for Educators. McGraw- Hill (1997): 320-325

Ng. Celeste. Everything I Never Told You. New York：Penguim Press (2014): 10-292

付如初，《无声告白：那些我从未告诉过你的恐惧和爱》 .《经济观察报》.2015.09

[Fu Ruchu, Everything I Never Told You: Fear and Love which I Never Told You. The Observer of Economics, 2015.09]

金学品，《“模范少数族裔”理论及其族裔意识形态考》.《英美文学研究论丛》. 2013（2）：266-275.

[Jin Xueshuan, A Textual Research on "Model Minority" Theory and Ethnic Ideology. Series on Anglo-American Literature Studies, 2013 (2): 266-275.]

芮渝萍，范谊,《成长的风景—当代美国成长小说研究》. 北京：商务出版社，2012

[Rui Yuping, Fan Yi. Landscape of Growth: A Study of Contemporary American Bildungsroman. Beijing: BusiNath Press, 2012]

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