Parenting In Ng's 'Everything I Never Told You'

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Parenting, a topic that transcends generations and distance, strikes me as the focal point of Everything I Never Told You. Ng forces her readers to question the “right way” to parent and points out the parenting dilemmas that James and Marilyn face. One instance of this is when James takes Nath to the pool and Nath is singled out and bullied; James struggles to react in a way that will teach Nath how to handle these types of situations. The narrator voices James’s internal conflict, “So part of him wanted to tell Nath that he knew: what it was like to be teased, what it was like to never fit in. The other part of him wanted to shake his son, to slap him. To shape him into something different. . . . When Marilyn asked what happened, James said