The best-selling debut novel by Celeste Ng titled “Everything I Never Told You”, a dark story centering on a family with a Chinese American father and white mother living in 1970s small town America grappling with an unimaginable tragedy, will be developed into a TV series, as reported by Variety.
Back in 2014, when Celeste Ng first came out with her novel, I had the honor of interviewing her for HippoReads. Here’s an excerpt of what I wrote about the novel:
Everything I Never Told You touched me on a personal level. Naturally, I was drawn to the family at the heart of the story. I write about Asian interracial relationships and am married to a Chinese national, so it was refreshing to read a book featuring an Asian father and a white mother raising mixed-race children. More importantly, Everything I Never Told You perfectly captures the insidious nature of race-based discrimination in America and reminds us that Asian Americans are not in any way exempt (despite the pervasive “model minority” stereotype about Asians which I previously debunked on Hippo Reads). While Celeste Ng set her novel in the 1970s, my husband (who lived with me in the US for nearly eight years) also faced discrimination similar to what the novel’s father, James Lee, suffered in the story. When I was reading Everything I Never Told You, I felt as if the Lee family’s sorrows could easily have been my own. It was an incredibly cathartic experience.
If you haven’t yet read “Everything I Never Told You”, you can find it at bookstores including Amazon, where your purchases help support this blog.
This is fantastic news! I think one of the most powerful scenes in the novel is when James enters the room to teach his course on the American cowboy and the majority of students leave. Their rationale is that an Asian man can’t “really” be American and understand the cultural zeitgeist surrounding the wild west.
I read one review of EINTY that pointed out that the family treated their eldest son differently because he “looked the most Asian” and embodies a lot of anti-Asian stereotypes like asexuality and overachieving. Their daughter, even though she’s a tragic character, was favored for her blue eyes. What are your thoughts, Jocelyn? I also found it interesting that Celeste Ng made the book semi-autobiographical, but purposely made it an AMWF story.
WARNING TO ALL:
THIS BOOK AND ITS AUTHOR IS A SLANDER AGAINST AMWF by (who guessed it) a toxic Asian female who hates Asian men, disses Asian Men, hates AMWF, and publicly dissed r/hapas – their own mixed-race kids, which wm/af always does.
My comment keeps getting removed, so I’ll summarize: Toxic Asian female author who constantly shits on Asian Men while being in toxic wm/af and publicly hates hapas (their own mixed-race kids, another theme in this crappily written hack book), and which the author based on the wm/af people she knows IRL, then SWITCHES THE RACES, and makes it about how evil and fucked up AMWF is in her fictional book, slandering AMWF, and continues publicly talking shit about AM and AMWF…
I’m so pissed off, I’m just going to ask that you read what’s already been covered by r/hapas and DISCOVERED BY A AMWF HAPA about the evil shit this wm/af author constantly does to diss Asian men and slander AMWF:
1)
https://www.reddit.com/r/hapas/comments/60qljg/hapa_female_lays_down_the_truth_on_celeste_ng/
2)
https://np.reddit.com/r/asiantwoX/comments/60d44j/ends_319_celeste_ngs_everything_i_never_told_you/df65e0u/?context=3
3)
https://www.reddit.com/r/hapas/comments/99t4pq/celeste_ng_is_aware_of_hapas/
This book to TV adaption will be bad in my opinion.
Celeste Ng is known for being self-hating and has strong hatred towards Asian men. This isn’t just a one-time incident. Other examples can be found:
A year or two ago, she tweeted that she received an email harassment and the email address came from an individual that happened to have an Asian name coincidently. She then proceeded to generalise and blame all Asian men with regards to the email’s content. What she fails to comprehend is that the email’s content should only be held accountable towards that individual and not all Asian men in general. Secondly, she quickly and falsely assumed that the individual who sent the email harassment is Asian because it has an Asian name but she fails to understand that anyone on the internet can claim/pretend to be something that they are not therefore just because the supposed harasser has an Asian name doesn’t mean that it is from an Asian man.
She has toxic Asian Feminist allies which includes Jenny Fang and Esther Ku. For those who don’t know who Jenny Fang is, she wrote an article on her blog (linked here: http://reappropriate.co/2014/05/masculinity-vs-misogylinity-what-asian-americans-can-learn-from-ucsb-shooting-yesallwomen/ ) about Elliot Rodger (who is half Asian and half White) and blamed his killings towards Asian men despite Elliot Rodger having white supremacist ideologies and no Asian men figure in his life. This right here is gold-level mental gymnastics and whataboutism.
Elliot Rodger’s full manifesto can be found here: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/1173619/rodger-manifesto.pdf
With regards to Esther Ku, she’s a racist “comedian” who mainly panders to the 4chan white-male Yellow-fever crowd. Despite knowing this, Celeste Ng is a strong supporter for Esther Ku which can be shown here:
https://planamag.com/content/images/2020/01/1_2gv-YIHXCQ2TInFhp2C-IQ.jpeg
Even though Celeste Ng is married to a white man and has a mixed raced son, she still reminds everyone how she doesn’t like/hate Asian men.
If this was any other normal woman of another race, she will respond by saying “Not interested, I’m already in a relationship”. But of course, she has to add damming insults like many self-hating Asian women has done before towards Asian men, proclaiming “they remind me of my cousins”. Evidence can be found here:
https://i.imgur.com/tAVMMAP.jpg
No other women of another race have so much hate towards their counterpart than a self-hating Asian women.
Celeste Ng cleverly switched the social dynamic problems and dysfunctionalities prevalent in WMAF relationships towards AMWF relationships.
In the book, the son is treated differently because he looked “mostly Asian” and embodies a lot of anti-Asian stereotypes like asexual and over-achieving implying that Asian men in general are asexual and can’t attract females despite other factors that come into play such self-hating Asian women having “no Asian men policy” and poor portrayal in media prominently by Hollywood (i.e. emasculation) for decades now. As for over-achieving, Celeste Ng flips the concept overachieving associated amongst Asian Tiger mum onto White women. I have yet to see an overbearing white Tiger women parent that stresses achievement above anything else in real life other than an Asian Tiger mum. A prominent example of this is Amy Chua.
The daughter is somewhat favoured by the parents because she has blue eyes. This deceiving subtlety implies that the Asian men in the relationship is white-worshiping even though this is far from the truth as it is mostly self-hating Asian women who white-worship. A real-life example would be like this:
https://planamag.com/content/images/2020/01/1_VglhGaMUJeht3qMPTJBgxQ.jpeg
In other words, Celeste Ng made the book semi-autobiographical but purposely made it into an AMWF story in order for WMAF pairings not to look bad.
Knowing Hollywood and its strong hatred for Asian men in general whether it’s being non-existent in many films, no love interest or having to play stereotypical roles, this book to TV adaption could go different ways:
A) Make the Asian man look even worse than its book version. For example, in the book the Asian man cheats but given the current world trends such as the #MeToo movement, the Asian man could be portrayed as a serial cheater, abusive or even a rapist or all three negative traits.
B) Make the Asian man an incel, no love interest thereby fulfilling a social-engineered stereotype.
C) Make the Asian man gay which in turn kills two birds in one stone (satisfying the LGBT agenda and having a PoC character).
D) Whitewash the Asian man role and replace him with another non-Asian actor. Hollywood tends to whitewash roles meant for Asian man and replace them with someone else, see examples of films such as:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_(2008_film))
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That%27s_My_Boy_(2012_film))
The film “That’s My Boy” was inspired by Mary Kay Letourneau’s rape incident, the victim was a Polynesian (an Asian admixture ethnicity) boy. In the film, the woman ethnicity was the same but the ethnicity of the boy changed to white. Coincident? Absolutely not – it was intentional planned, and socially-engineered.
I guess hating on Asian men vigorously will earn you more job opportunities especially in the media.