Intersectional Awakenings: Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You as Dialectical Reprisal of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman”

This essay defies the literary ghettoization of Asian-authored narratives and interrogates the space delineated as mainstream American feminist literature by placing Ng’s Everything in dialogue with Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Kingston’s Woman Warrior (focusing on the first chapter, “No Name Woman”). It proposes a dialectical reading of Ng’s contemporary novel as a synthesis of Chopin’s and Kingston’s works and shows how Ng accounts for the reality and complexity of our intersectional identities—mixed racial parentage, nonbinary sex, or gender. Ng underscores the urgency of considering intersectional bodies and communities, especially relevant to our current times. It calls for a reading that accounts for both White people and people of color, both men and women, and both straight and queer. It reevaluates the thorny questions of the ethics of motherhood and intergenerational trauma that Chopin’s and Kingston’s narratives explore. This article encourages ongoing conversations about interethnic and intersectional fissures and affinities.