Celeste Ng grips the reader immediately with the first few words of Everything I Never Told You - "Lydia is dead."
The Lee family has many struggles, mostly due to misconceptions of Chinese people or often the family's perceived views that others have of them. Lydia's father, James, finally finds someone who accepts him. But Marilyn is white and her mother is very much against her marrying an Asian man but Marilyn wishes to escape her mother's view of how Marilyn's life should be (a mother and homemaker, preferably to someone of her own race) and stifles Marilyn's dream to be a doctor. After her oldest child, Lydia, is found drowned, each of the family examines their lives, their dreams and their own hurts from living out what others want from them.
