Drenched

To be honest I haven't read such an overwhelming novel in ages.

Well technically any novels just to be fair.

It has everything a thriller should have: A missing/dead girl, a seemingly normal family that had something weird buried in somewhere, a strange but loving teenager that has something to do with the girl and the family while everyone seemed to be thinking of him as a prick.

And of course, there were secrets, lots of secrets.

But deep down, it doesn't feel like a thriller at all.

Deep down it's filled with those most sentimental pieces crafted and glued together by Ng's exquisite touches.

Well in order for this to be justified as a review I guess I should jot down something about what had happened in the book.

It might be fair to say that everything was laid out by James, a Chinese-American dad who had been trying his whole life to fit in but failed, when he tried to push her precious daughter further on the same way by gifting her daughter what "everyone's talking about" or "everyone wants" and Marilyn, the American mom and a medical school dropout who ended up this way because of James and the accidental baby, tried to pave the road as a doctor for her daughter.

Of course if it were not for Lydia, the D.O.A. middle daughter who knew exactly what her parents wanted out of her and therefore tried her best to "please" her parents, this delicate story just wouldn't exist. She was just too afraid of voicing what she wanted, although the sad truth was that she might not even know a tiny bit about what she had wanted.

But on the face of that, she handled the fragility of the family so well that no one except Nathan, the oldest kid of the three, would have noticed anything.

And there is Hannah, the youngest kid who wouldn't even be referred to as "she" in the family because "she" exclusively means Lydia in the family.

Oh and the family's lexicon was striking.

The way that the story is structured is also fascinating.

It opens with "Lydia is dead.".

As the story goes on the narratives switch constantly between the family's perspective and Lydia's before she sank into the bottom of the lake. And there would be sentences like "In 6 month Lydia would be dead.".

The word "oriental" might not even be a thing today, but I bet it was a bloody exotic word in that small Ohio town back in 1977.

It must have been.

And those oriental elements are just brewed to perfection in the book. Besides the consistently stubborn insistence of parents' expectation on themselves being pressed down hard to the next generation, there are also the typical feelings shame of losing faces as showcased in Alice Wu's "Saving Face".

It is effortless for anyone who have been born and raised in a typical Chinese family to understand all of these.

It must have been peaceful, to get drenched at the bottom of a dreadful lake.