Written by | Gong Zhaohua
Born in Pennsylvania, USA, Ng is the second generation of Hong Kong immigrants. After being published as a debut novel in 2014, Silent Confessions was well received. What makes readers so appealing is that it tells a very universal story.
Will we also encounter such a dilemma - your parents obviously care about you, but you still feel very uncomfortable; back at home, surrounded by the company of relatives, but you will only feel more lonely; your parents will give you good suggestions for the future, but in your eyes, those suggestions are like nightmares...
If you have these troubles, then "Silent Confession" may also be a novel that you will like. Next, let's get into its story.
Bibliography of this issue
"Silent Confession", author: [United States] Wu Qishi, translator: Sun Lu, version: Reader Culture, Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House, July 2015
/ / /
The family can affect people's growth, but this influence does not have a mechanical causal relationship, and in many cases, even members who grow up in the same family will have very different personalities because they encounter different things. The personalities of the family members in Silent Confessions are not particularly complicated, but the life experiences behind them lead to the surprising alienation of these people although they live under the same roof. Although the family is full of warmth and mutual care on the outside, the embarrassment is that the care they give to each other most of the time plays the opposite role. Although the background of the novel "Silent Confession" has the factors of Chinese immigrant life, it actually narrates the common dilemmas of every family.
The story of the novel begins with the disappearance of the family's second daughter, Lydia. Eventually, her body was found in the lake by police. Why this usually docile second daughter ran away from home, whether she committed suicide or was murdered, her relatives gave different reactions to this.
The family's father, James Lee, is of Chinese descent and works in college on the bizarre american cowboy culture and paleontological history. He falls in love with his student Marilyn during class. In the social atmosphere of the United States in the last century, the marriage of white women to Asian men was not accepted by most people. Wu Qishi wrote in the book, "They fought for four years. It was another four years before the court recognized their marriage. However, it wasn't until many years later that their relationship was recognized by those around them. But some people, like Marilyn's mother, would never accept that. ”
Marilyn marries James Lee with romantic fantasies, but the shadow of her mother lingers on her. This shadow is not only her mother's opposition to Marilyn's marriage to Asians, but also the way Marilyn's mother spent her life. It was a woman who had never left the surrounding eighty kilometers in her life, her concept was conservative, and her life task was to get married and have children at home. After the marriage, Marilyn fell into a contradictory mood, and she found that although James was gentle with her, over time, this tenderness gradually fell into exhaustion, and she was afraid that the rest of her life would become as empty as her mother. She once chose to run away from home and take a few favorite courses at university, but was checked out by the hospital a few weeks later to be pregnant and had to go home again.
Marilyn's condition also affected James Lee. He never wanted to betray Marilyn, but was dominated by natural romantic fantasies and had an extramarital affair. Their son Ness knew about it, and in the face of it, Ness's way of dealing with it was to look up at the stars—when you set your eyes on the universe, everything on Earth becomes extremely small. He was also a good student in school, with the goal of an acceptance letter from Harvard University. With the help of many ivory tower fantasies, Ness escapes the real family situation around him.
Therefore, daughter Lydia actually plays a rather lonely role in the family. Both parents want to realize their unfinished life ideals in her - her father, James Lee, who is Chinese-American, encounters the isolation of the local community in the United States and hopes that his daughter will make more friends. He would force his daughter to call classmates he didn't know well, which he thought was a good way to help Lydia grow. The mother, on the other hand, learned from her family and insisted on raising Lydia to be a physically independent woman, not dependent on men, not dependent on marriage and procreation to live in the world.
There is a scene in the novel that best reflects the "warm loneliness" that Lydia experiences at home. It was Christmas, and she was expecting her family to give her a gift that girls would love. As a result, her father gave her a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence Others, and her mother gave her a gift of Women Pioneers in Science and Basic Physiology. They all thought that the gift they gave to their daughter was the best thing for her, but they didn't think that these books were not gifts at all.
Her brother, Ness, was busy with acceptance letters from Harvard. The two children are caught up in the stage of competing for favors, taking turns to attract the attention of their parents in their own way. Failed, Lydia decides to let loose, her test scores are declining, and she meets a notorious boy named Jack.
In the end, in loneliness, Lydia chose to commit suicide. His brother Ness insists that the boy Jack is the killer, and her father, James, turns the case over to the police because in his eyes, Lydia, who can call friends, is a person who does not lack friends, and the daughter will not have the problem of loneliness
(In fact, Lydia dials a number every time and then wearily acts out into an unanswered microphone)
。 Her mother believed that her daughter was an independent person she had carefully cultivated and could not give up her life. All their care, all their knowledge of Lydia proved one thing— they didn't know Lydia herself at all.
This is a common situation in the family and explains why some parents are very caring for their children at home, but it only backfires. "Silent Confessions", as Wu Qishi's masterpiece that took six years to write, became the annual bestseller of the New York Times after publication, and it was also because it stabbed the silent family pain of many people in a way that transcended race, nationality and culture.
The author | Gong Zhaohua
Editor| LuoDong; Zhang Ting
Proofreading | Liu Jun