Autopic (Re)membering: Racial Exclusion in <i>Everything I Never Told You</i>

Abstract Celeste Ng’s nonlinear novel Everything I Never Told You (2014) centers on the suicide of Lydia Lee, a mixed-race Chinese American teenage girl, and her family’s attempts to understand her death. An autopsy performed on Lydia informs the Lee family that she drowned near their home, but the report fails to truly answer their questions as to how and why she died. In response, they perform their own autopsy of Lydia’s life, their pasts, the remains of her life, and the ruin of theirs left in the wake of Lydia’s death, which, like medical autopsy, is defined by its retrospective and backwards problem-solving processes. Reflecting the retrospective processes of autopsy, the backwards temporality of the Lees’ autopsy reveals unspoken intergenerational experiences of political and social racial exclusion extending back to the era of Chinese Exclusion. Relating these memories to Lydia’s suicide, their autopsy implies a relationship among racialization, exclusion, and death. While these factors heavily contributed to Lydia’s demise, they are not considered during autopsy. The Lees’ dissection of their individual and collection memories highlights how modern autopsy decontextualizes death from relevant historical, cultural, and political contexts, which has served to obscure and sustain US racial necropolitics. Framing my analysis through the analogous relationship I observe between processes of remembering and autopsy, I suggest that reading Ng’s novel through a lens of autopic re(membering) offers a different perspective for investigating death that emphasizes the importance of broader contexts to the practice of autopsy.