Everything I Never Told You: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

The narrator claims that everything began with Lydia’s parents and their own parents before them. Marilyn herself had once disappeared and she had always wanted to “stand out,” whereas James wanted to “blend in”—both of which turned out to be impossible. In Marilyn’s first year at Radcliffe in 1955, a professor asks why she wants to take physics, and Marilyn explains it is because she wants to be a doctor. The professor asks if Marilyn doesn’t really want to be a nurse. However, Marilyn was the top of her high school class in physics on every test, and based on these grades the professor allows Marilyn to “try chemistry—if you think you can handle it.” In the lab, Marilyn is the only girl and is constantly harassed by men who insist on helping her with the experiments; however, by the middle of term she is once again at the top of the class.

In high school, Marilyn had asked her principal if she could take shop instead of home economics. Home ec was required of all sophomore girls, and Marilyn’s mother, Doris Walker, was the teacher. Marilyn had been at the top of her class since sixth grade, but the principal still denied her request, telling her that she would find the shop equipment difficult to use and that she would be a “distraction” to the boys in the class. In home ec, Marilyn sulks and thinks about the phrase “keeping house.” When Marilyn was three, her father left, but her mother continued to wear makeup at all times and changed outfits before dinner “even though there was no husband to impress.” Marilyn purposefully messes up all her home ec assignments, and her mother warns her that she knows she is trying to “prove” something but that she will fail her daughter anyway.

Doris grew up eighty miles from Charlottesville and has never left her hometown. When Marilyn is admitted to Radcliffe, Doris tells her daughter how proud she is and assures her that she will meet “a lot of wonderful Harvard men.” It always bothers Marilyn that her mother ended up being right about this. At Radcliffe, Marilyn remains intensely dedicated to her academic work, stimulated by the vision of herself in a doctor’s white coat. She is determined to make a life for herself that doesn’t resemble her mother’s in any way. However, in the beginning of her junior year she meets a man, “just as her mother predicted.”

Marilyn sits in the lecture theatre of a popular new course called “The Cowboy in American Culture.” The instructor is listed as James P. Lee, a fourth-year graduate student whom Marilyn expects to be Southern. However, when James walks into the room Marilyn is surprised to find that he is “Oriental.” She has never seen an Asian person before and she is entranced by him. To Marilyn, James looks like “a little boy playing dress-up.” She is surprised to hear that his accent is entirely American, unlike the racist stereotypes she has heard about how Chinese people speak. The students begin to leave, and one of them shouts “Yippee-ki-yay-ay!” as he walks out of the door. Although James does not seem to have noticed, Marilyn is desperately embarrassed on his account and squirms in her seat.

After the lecture, Marilyn goes to James’ office hours and nervously introduces herself. She explains that she is pre-med, and asks if history was his favorite subject in school. James asks Marilyn why she is there and she responds that she wants to apologize for the boys who shouted in lecture. As they talk, Marilyn notices that his eyes are brown and that he has the body of a swimmer. James tells her that his favorite subject in school was paleontology, and suddenly she leans over his desk to kiss him. During the next lecture, Marilyn blushes and avoids catching James’ eye. She’d “surprised herself” by kissing him, but had felt a sudden impulse to do it because she felt that James understood “what it’s like to be different.” Although he would never admit this to Marilyn, James had not noticed her during the first lecture; however, this is precisely what appeals to him about her—the fact that she “blended in so perfectly.”

At the end of the second lecture, James asks to speak with Marilyn. He reminds her that he is her teacher, and that it would therefore be inappropriate for him to have a romantic relationship with her. Marilyn is embarrassed, and she thinks of her insistence that she did not come to Radcliffe to find a “Harvard man” but rather “for something better.” However, the next day Marilyn informs James that she has dropped the class, and soon they spend all their time together. Though James is outwardly reserved, Marilyn likes how she is able to make him feel at ease. Being with Marilyn makes James feel “at home” in a way that he has never experienced before. Although he was born in the United States and has never left, James has never felt accepted as an American.

When James’ parents immigrated to the United States, they had to do so under a false identity, as all Chinese immigrants except the children of American citizens had been banned. While most Chinese immigrants settled in California, James’ parents moved to Iowa to work in the kitchen of a small boarding school. They were eager to take the position due to the fact that the children of school employees could attend the school for free if they passed the entrance exam. In hindsight, James realizes that the school had no intention of admitting the students of the children of unskilled employees, who they assumed would not have a chance of passing the entrance exam. However, at only six years old James was exceptionally gifted and a voracious reader, and thus he passed the exam. James was the first Asian student to attend Lloyd, and he was harassed and bullied by the other students. He avoided his parents, unsuccessfully trying to pretend that he was like everyone else.

James attends Lloyd for 12 years, yet fails to make any friends. He hopes his social life will improve at Harvard, but it does not; after 7 years as an undergraduate and then graduate student, James still has no friends and he feels like an imposter. This changes, however, when he meets Marilyn. On the first afternoon they spend together in bed at his apartment, he feels that their bodies fit together “as if they were two halves of a mold.” James loves Marilyn’s “honey-colored” hair and her “easy laugh.” However, he worries that he has been too lucky in finding her and he fears that she will “disappear.” James cuts his hair and buys clothes he thinks Marilyn will like, and the two of them paint his apartment yellow.

At Thanksgiving, Marilyn decides not to go home. She claims that it’s too far, but, in fact, she worries about what she would (or wouldn’t) tell Doris about her relationship with James. Marilyn explains to James that Doris is a home ec teacher and that “Betty Crocker is her personal goddess.” James has told Marilyn that his parents worked at a school, but failed to specify that they were cafeteria workers. He stopped speaking Chinese to his parents in the fifth grade due to his fear that it would taint his American accent. He tells Marilyn that his parents are dead, which is true. Both of them have a kind of pact not to ask too many questions of each other.

In the spring, James waits to hear if he will be hired into Harvard’s history department. The head of the department has hinted that James is at the top of his graduate class, and, although James has interviewed for positions at other Ivy League schools, he feels confident that he will be hired at Harvard. Meanwhile, Marilyn makes plans to attend medical school, calculating how far each university will be from James in Cambridge. However, in April James is told he has not been given the position at Harvard, and he is forced to accept a job at “humble Middlewood College” instead. Meanwhile, Marilyn is pregnant, and, because of that, she plans to marry James instead of heading to medical school. She reassures James that the baby will be “so much better” than their original plan, although she secretly tells herself that when the child is older, she will finish her studies and become a doctor.

Marilyn phones Doris and tells her that she and James are getting married. She explains that James is just finishing his PhD in American history, and her mother is thrilled. Marilyn feels relieved, thinking that she has “done just what her mother had hoped.” She explains that the wedding will be a small ceremony; Doris leaves Virginia for the first time to attend. When James and Marilyn meet Doris at the train station, Doris looks at James in shock. That night at dinner, Doris asks Marilyn if she’s sure James isn’t using their marriage to get a green card. Marilyn, furious, tells her mother that James was born in California.

On the day of the wedding, Doris takes Marilyn aside to “touch up [her] lipstick.” Doris is already upset that Marilyn is wearing a cream dress instead of a white one and that the ceremony is not at a church. She tells Marilyn “it’s not right” and says that she will regret marrying James. She urges Marilyn to think of her future children, saying “you won’t fit in anywhere.” Marilyn storms out of the bathroom, and when James asks what’s wrong she replies with a laugh that Doris wants her to marry “someone more like me.” Marilyn kisses James, thinking that her mother is being ridiculous. Only days before, Richard and Mildred Loving were married in Virginia, and in four months they will be arrested for breaking miscegenation laws. James and Marilyn’s wedding takes place. It is the last time that Marilyn ever sees her mother.