Everything I Never Told You Analysis

After evaluating Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng, Hear Me Now by Sophal Leng Stagg, and The Three Boxes by an unknown author. Each of these stories follow specific individuals in an environment different from their own culture and explains the difficulties and struggles they encounter. Living in a setting where you are out of place promotes an inability to acclimate therefore potentially making new people feel a loss of their cultural identity, encourages isolation, loneliness, and, in a lot of cases, prejudice. This behavior is exacerbated by xenophobia.
Discrimination is a root cause of unrest for people in a cultural, class, or religious setting other than their own. Within the novel Everything I Never Told You, the entire Lee

A prime example of this would be Anna Maria in “The Three Boxes.” She is all alone and treated as if she were a servant. Her stepmother ordered her to do impossible things, such as “mak(ing) a garment that should be as shining as the sun” (The Three, par. 4). On a separate occasion, her stepmother ordered her to “spin a linen garment, fifty ells broad, yet that might be passed through a finger-ring” just to make her do it (The Three, par. 5). In a third, and final, instance, Anna Maria’s stepmother instructs her to “build a castle all of glass, as high as the highest mountain” (The Three, par. 7). As if building a castle of glass like that is even possible for a single person to do. Instances of forced labor like this also happened to the subject of “Hear Me Now.” The girl was involuntarily separated from her parents and her siblings and was forced to work in a labor field. In the poem, she referenced these events pleading “Mother please stay with me. Don 't go, please stay close to me” (Stagg, par. 5). Thirdly, in Everything I Never Told You, the Lee kids, and particularly Lydia, were not as popular as the other kids, they were not invited to go out on the weekends, they never to birthday parties, and they were not the recipients of after school phone calls to chat about the drama that happened at school that day. During lunch, “Lydia sits silent while others chatter,” because they are not really her friends (Ng, 15). Hurt by the fact that no one will be friends with her due to the fact that she is a different race, Lydia “sits for hours on the window seat on the landing” pretending she is on the phone with friends when, in reality, she is “rattling off assignments” to herself with no one on the other end of the call (Ng, 15-16). The malefactors of these discriminatory and xenophobic acts, whether they were