How the Lee Family was Already a Flawed System

In Everything I Never Told You, author Celeste Ng creates the Lee family: a "perfect" family system that collapses with the death of Lydia, their child. Ng portrays the Lees as a stereotypical happy family with genuine emotion, dreams, and goals for their children. The family went through their small issues together as a tight-knit community. They didn't have it all, but Ng depicts the Lees as a happy, working family system. Ng, however; only depicts the Lees as having a stable family structure to create contrast with their life after Lydia’s death; in reality, the Lee family system had many problems, threatening to disrupt the system even without Lydia's death.

Ng glorifies the times that the Lee family had before Lydia’s death to show contrast with the Lee’s life after. The only way to see what the Lee family was like before their daughter went missing is through flashbacks. Ng writes one telling paragraph which really glorifies the previous life of the Lees. She depicts a typical day at the beach for the Lee family: “Nath and Lydia would don swimsuits and spread towels across the grass, [...] while their parents would come too.”(105) These great memories of the Lees’ previous life are meant to create contrast between the Lee's old and new lives. The Lees go from frolicking on the beach to the parents constantly arguing, with their surviving children feeling ignored. Marilyn especially takes the tragedy badly, becoming angry and hysterical at the investigators trying to find out what happened to Lydia. The Lee family system at this point is clearly broken, with no fix in sight. By glorifying the previous life of the Lee family and accentuating the troubles in their system following Lydia’s death, however, you could miss out on how flawed the system already was.

Hannah especially feels ignored while her parents argue

Though it seems that the Lees had a perfect system connecting the family before Lydia’s death, there were always underlying problems that could've broken the system at any time. For example, James’s affair with his teacher’s assistant, Louisa, proves preexisting problems in the Lee family. At one point, he meets her at lunchtime in her apartment. She “leads him straight to the bedroom,” and James senses that “everything about her is different,”(71) implying that his affair had been going on before Lydia was found. Despite his affair, Ng still depicts James as perfectly happy in the family, which is clearly not the case. The affair is definitely a problem, but James wouldn't have cheated on his wife in the first place if there weren't already problems in his family. If Marilyn ever found out about James and Louisa, it would have destroyed the supposedly perfect Lee family system before Lydia ever died. Looking deeper, however, it becomes clear that this is just one of several major problems underlying in the Lee family.

Ng makes the Lee family look like a perfect family frolicking on the beach, but it actually has many problems.

The things that Lydia kept from her parents were threatening to the Lee family system.  James and Marilyn raised Lydia to be a perfect child, and they were oblivious to all of Lydia’s vices until after her death. She smoked and snuck out to be with Jack at times behind her parents’ back. When Jack recalls the last time he saw Lydia to police, he remarks that “we were sitting in my car and smoking,”(67) but her parents never imagined that Lydia would smoke or misbehave in any way. Every child does things that their parents wouldn't approve of, but the Lees expected their daughter to be perfect. Marilyn especially had specific dreams for Lydia; that she would be “a grown woman, confident and poised, [...] a doctor.”(57) Had Marilyn found out about her daughter’s true nature or relationship with Jack, the Lee family system would have been damaged forever. While it is easy to overlook problems in the Lee family before Lydia’s death, the supposedly perfect system was plagued with issues that could have blown up at any time.

The Lees had a perfect idea of who they wanted their child to be, and were oblivious that their child was not perfect.

Although the Lee family was devastated after Lydia’s death, it was doomed to fall apart one way or another. Ng’s decision to paint the Lees as a perfect, solid family system before their daughter’s death makes it easy to overlook their problems. The family system was under stress from both Lydia’s secrets and James’s affair, either of which could have ruined the system before Lydia turned up dead. By glorifying the Lee’s previous life, Ng shows how badly Lydia’s death affects the family. In reality, however, the Lees lead a far from perfect family, and barely even knew their daughter. Idealized memories of the Lees’ original family system fail to recognize the system’s numerous issues.