The Hunch of Racism: Racial Paranoia and Microaggressions in Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You (2014)

Abstract: This article argues that a contemporary work of Asian American mystery, Celeste Ng’s novel Everything I Never Told You (2014), operates through racial paranoia, in which there is a fundamental epistemological uncertainty around what racial harm is and how it occurs. Paranoia has typically been approached as something to be “solved” by identifying the clear presence of racial harm. However, Ng’s novel sustains rather than dismantles racial paranoia by narrating various linguistic microaggressions that a mixed-race Chinese American family suffers, even as she refuses to neatly link these microaggressions to the death of their child. Paranoia is endemic to the Asian American mystery genre, which swirls around the assimilatory potential of Asian Americans who often experience racism in the minor key of mundane, everyday interactions. Yet rather than reading Ng’s novel as a politically conservative text in which Asian Americans are model minorities who do not suffer from “real” harm, I argue that the novel’s racial paranoia fosters productive uncertainty, in which racial harm and repair exist side by side with neither taking precedence over the other. Asian American racial paranoia has deeper implications for how we narrate minority identity overall, challenging us to cultivate a gentler relationship to historical loss through the realm of feeling.