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Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
Creating Community and Wielding Control with Food
Food can help create feelings of comfort and community, but in Everything I Never Told You, it has other important uses. The novel references specific foods such as SpaghettiOs and Swanson frozen dinners to lend detail to the 1970s setting. What the characters are eating is often mentioned. Nathan, for example, adores hard-boiled eggs. But food does not only bring pleasure; it is also a form of control or a weapon to be wielded. This notion is most obvious with Marilyn, who discovers that feeding her family is negatively linked to her sense of self. When she returns home after a failed attempt to regain her career, she stops making the delicious home-cooked meals her family enjoys and has come to expect. Instead, she merely opens cans of soup or toasts frozen waffles. This, she quietly decides, is the “price” of her return. Marilyn learned that the preparation of food has multiple meanings from Doris, who used food to generate the illusion of the happy home she did not have. As a girl, Marilyn rejects Doris’s priorities, and she repeats that gesture when she refuses to make the foods her family craves.
For immigrants, the power of food can be even more important. When James bites into a steamed pork bun, he is flooded with memories from his childhood. He calls the bun by its Chinese name, char siu bau. This is the only Chinese phrase in the novel, and the pleasure James gets from the food has many layers, some from the food itself and others from the feeling of the Chinese language in his mouth, both of which are likened to a kiss. Because the pork bun is made by James’s lover Louisa, a Chinese-American graduate student, this sensual experience is associated with illicit desire, underscoring how much he has abandoned so as to assimilate into American culture. This was a deliberate choice: across the novel James rejects Chinese food. As a boy, he asks his mother to stop preparing Chinese food for his meals, and as an adult, he prefers not to eat it. James’s mother works in his school’s cafeteria, linking the preparation of food with class anxiety.
The Emptiness of Space
Everything I Never Told You uses the idea of spatial expanse as a powerful symbol for freedom. Sometimes space refers to outer space: stars, the solar system, the cosmos. Not only does interest in outer space situate the novel in its historical moment, a time when rockets were being sent to the moon, but it also provides the language to depict Marilyn and James’s excessive focus on Lydia. She becomes the center of their universe in that they orbit around her. When Nathan becomes fascinated by space, his interest at looking up at the stars provides him a way to escape the claustrophobic atmosphere of his family home. His desire to be an astronaut provides him with a way to break out of the fields of gravity created by his parents’ obsession with Lydia, his blue-eyed sister.
For Hannah space is structured differently. Even though Nathan is represented as an astronaut in the novel’s closing pages and Lydia is the center of the family’s “cosmos,” Hannah, as the youngest child, grows up in a home that does not have or make space for her. She prefers small or hidden spaces, in corners or nooks, where she can remain out of view and unnoticed. Her bedroom is in the attic, and she hides under the table during moments of discord. Marilyn observes that life systematically strips women of the people and things they value, leaving them alone in “empty” space. Though outer space, despite the lack of air and gravity, is exciting to explore, the empty space on earth is comparatively suffocating. On earth, empty space lacks room to breathe, and the gravity of being taken seriously suggests that one is often judged without consideration of their value, which creates an encompassing sense of emptiness within the individual.
Embracing Differences in Cultural Identity
Characters in Everything I Never Told You are aware of the way their cultural identities differ from others, but they respond differently based on their experiences. For James, a Chinese immigrant, difference means standing out and being the object of scrutiny. He learns as a child that his often-mocked physical appearance is a source of shame, a perverse effect of racism that assigns blame to the victim. As a result, James hides his Chinese heritage, asking his mother for American food in his lunches, selecting an ultra-American topic, cowboys, for his teaching and research, and opting not to speak Chinese or eat Chinese food as an adult. Although he does not have many friends, he desperately wants not to be different, and chooses not to embrace the Chinese aspects of his identity. He just wants to “blend in.” James experiences his difference as a stigma.
For Marilyn, whose cultural identity is American, difference means being exceptional or extraordinary. For her, being distinguished is something to be sought after, for it would mean that she stands out from the crowd. The novel carefully juxtaposes the alternative ways that difference works in a culture that limits people for various reasons. Gender and race are both categories of difference, and each of them limits the individual possibilities that these characters otherwise have available. Lydia’s genetically rare blue eyes mark her as different and both of her parents see in her, albeit for divergent reasons, the possibility that her differences could bridge the gap between wanting to assimilate, like James, and wanting to stand out, like Marilyn.
