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Mercy Adewale Analysis Essay Dr. Allison Craig Three Generations, One Cookbook, and One DNA: Reflection of the Past in Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You. It is one thing for one’s daughter to die, it’s another thing to find out the cause and realize one was part of it. Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng is about a biracial Asian- American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. James and his wife, Marilyn, had different upbringings that resulted into a conflicting style of parenting. While James wanted his favorite child, Lydia, to have many friends and live an enviable social life, Marilyn wanted her to be different and also become a doctor. As the story unfolds, Ng describes the impact this had in the life of Lydia and her other two siblings. The first sentence in the book is “Lydia is dead” (Ng 1). The subsequent chapters then discussed in details what led to this unfortunate occurrence. Marilyn was very passionate about finding out everything she never knew about her daughter’s death. In this very interesting scene, Marilyn again checks out Lydia’s room as she had always done since her death. This time she decides to destroy everything that reminds her of what her daughter could have been. As she stomps all the science books on the floor, she comes across the big red cookbook. Could this be the same cookbook Lydia told her long time ago that she lost? In bewilderment, Marilyn opens the book and all the pencil marks her mother, Doris, had made were still there. It was then clear to her that the cookbook had something to do with everything that had happened. The cookbook although talks about food and how to make them, is really like DNA transpiring through the lives of Marilyn and Lydia, molding them to reflect the past.
The cookbook originally belongs to Doris, Lydia’s grandmother. Although Lydia never met her grandmother, she had in her possession something that symbolized her presence. The first time Ng introduced the cookbook was when Marilyn went to Doris’ house. Eight years had passed since Marilyn saw her mother, and this time the only reason she is back to her house is because she is dead. Doris was very particular about keeping house, baking a perfect pie, and she wanted to raise her daughter with such potential. Marilyn, however, did not appreciate all her mother’s effort because she wanted to become a doctor. As she searches through her mother’s house in case there was anything worth keeping, she finds the cookbook in the kitchen. Marilyn opens it only for her to read same words her mother had read to her years back. As reiterated in the pages of the cookbook Marilyn opened to, she reads “if you care about pleasing a man—bake a pie. But make sure it’s a perfect pie. The man you marry will know the way he likes his eggs…so it behooves a good wife to know how to make an egg behave in six basic ways”( Ng 82). How could it be that Marilyn’s life was nothing different from what her mother had wanted? Marilyn realizes that she hadn’t achieved any of her big dreams and might end up like her mother. To Marilyn, her mother lived a small life which she describes as the “furthest thing she could imagine…where sewing a neat hem was a laudable accomplishment and removing beet stains from a blouse was cause for celebration” (Ng 30). The similarities between her life and Doris’ scared her so much she furiously took the cookbook just so it could motivate her never to end up like her mother. This time, she wanted to go back to medical school and achieve her dream. Her decision was therefore influenced by the cookbook whose role was simply to replicate the small life previous generation lived. Lydia’s first contact with her grandmother’s cookbook was the beginning of sad, innocent promises she made. She found the cookbook in the kitchen where her mother left it.
Later in the novel, it’s revealed that Lydia did not lose the cookbook. She kept it in her room under heavy science books that her mother bought for her. Even though she was struggling to get good grades in science classes, she still kept to the promise of making her mother happy, until a limit was reached. At this point, we shall examine the peculiarities of the cookbook and why it’s likened to DNA. How could a book that talks about food be passed from Doris to Marilyn to Lydia and end up influencing their lives? DNA, an acronym for Deoxy Ribonucleic Acid, does exact same thing. It contains genetic information passed from parents to offspring. This information is important for expression and important for molding present generation to reflect the past ones. The cookbook served this very purpose because the idea of living a small life kept recurring. Marilyn that could have become a doctor ended up as a wife and good cook, just like her mother. Lydia is dead, just like her grandmother. Even more sadly, Lydia ended up not becoming a wife, mother, cook or a doctor. What a small life indeed! In a story titled “Our Secret”, Susan Griffin explained some very interesting features about DNA which illuminate parts of Everything I Never Told you. She says the life plan of the body is encoded in the DNA molecule, a substance that has the ability to hold information and to replicate itself” (Griffin 340). She went further to introduce the character of Heinrich Himmler, who lived a life similar to his fore-fathers. As a child, Heinrich was trained never to express his weak emotions in his diary. With this built-up rigidity, Heinrich becomes the Reichsfuhrer SS, President of Bavarian police. He uses his authority to order the killing of millions of people and even buys a mobile killing truck to ease the job of the killers. Was Heinrich destined to be hostile or was it his choice? Griffin revealed that “Johann, Heinrich’s grandfather, was a sergeant in the royal police force of Bavaria ... a heroic soldier” (308). Same goes for his father, Gebhard, who was known to be rigid as a young man and taught Heinrich to be prudish. It is therefore more
likely that Heinrich was destined to be a serial killer. But at what point in his life did his choice outweigh the cruelty running in his veins? Griffin claims that “One is never allowed to see the effects of what one does. But ignorance is not entirely passive. For some blindness becomes a kind of refuge, a way of life chosen” (325). It is then true that Heinrich made a choice “to be a soldier. And above all he wants a uniform” ( Griffin 310). This goes to mean that not all expressions are accounted for by DNA. The smallness of Marilyn’s and Lydia’s lives is not entirely associated with the cookbook either. As important and powerful DNA is, there are factors that control its expression. These factors could be internal or external. Rachel Rettner defines Epigenetics “as external modifications that turn off or turn on DNA” (n. p). An example of epigenetics is chromatin condensation that leads to silencing of a gene. For purposes of understanding epigenetics in Everything I Never Told You, we would consider things Marilyn and Lydia did that turned off or turned on what the cookbook represented in their lives. One of the reasons Marilyn quit medical school the first time was because she was pregnant. This prompted her marriage to James earlier than the time they were supposed to. If not for the pregnancy, Marilyn could have become a doctor. Even at her second attempt to go back to medical school, it was her third pregnancy that stopped her. The cookbook didn’t cause all these to happen, but they are factors that contributed to its manifestation. At the time Nathan pushed his sister, Lydia into water unintentionally, while he felt guilty, Lydia had “felt relief so great she had sighed in a deep choking lungful…she had staggered so readily, fell so eagerly”(Ng 154). The feeling of being drowned in the water the first time was a catalyst to Lydia’s option of going out to the lake the night she died. The gravity of living to her parent’s expectations could only disappear when she was under water. Had Nathan known that Lydia would hold on to the drowning-feeling, he wouldn’t have let it happen in the
Works Cited Griffin, Susan. “Our Secret.” Blackboard. n.d. Web. 6 April 2015 Ng, Celeste. “Everything I Never Told You”. New York: Penguin Press, 2014. Print Rettner, Rachael. “Epigenetics: Definition and Examples.” Live Science. com. 24 June 2013. Web. 6 April 2015
