Novelist Celeste Ng on her new book, rules to be broken, and why she isn’t set on writing the Great Chinese-American Novel
Ng has followed up her debut hit Everything I Never Told You with a warts-and-all look at her hometown. She tells us about portraying shortcomings as well as strengths and why she hopes to write a novel set in Hong Kong
Celeste Ng stunned international audiences with her 2014 debut novel, Everything I Never Told You. The story is about a Chinese-American teenage girl who is found dead in a lake, plunging her aspirational immigrant family into despair and chaos. It soared up The New York Times bestseller list and won an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature.
Ng now returns with her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, about a white family based in Cleveland, USA, that attempts to adopt a Chinese-American baby. The author set the story in her own hometown, Shaker Heights, a progressive planned community.
Book review: Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng
In an interview with the Post, Ng talks about the “Great Chinese-American Novel”, the possibility of writing a book set in Hong Kong, and breaking rules.
Q: Your debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, was written from the perspective of a member of a Chinese-American family. In this second novel, you write from the point of view of members of a Caucasian American family. What was different about the process?
A. There’s a saying in writing: the writer’s job is to make the unfamiliar feel familiar, and the familiar feel unfamiliar. In the case of Everything I Never Told You, my goal was to make the experiences of a family that had always felt marginalised feel accessible and understandable even to people who’d never been in that situation.
