![]() ![]() ![]() She is especially adept at describing interior spaces and the subtle ways in which brothers and sisters come to know about each other’s lives. Ng is herself a graduate of Harvard who grew up in an academic family in Ohio, and she renders the Lees with great precision and empathy. In her last encounter with her doomed daughter, Marilyn means to say, “I love you,” but instead urges Lydia to study harder: “Don’t let your life slip away from you.” To add a sense of urgency, Marilyn continues: “When I’m dead, that’s all I want you to remember.” Her mother’s words “sucked the breath from Lydia’s lungs.” But they aren’t especially loving either. James and Marilyn are never cruel to their children. To James, anything else was a failing,” Ng writes. “Though Nath dreamed of MIT, or Carnegie Mellon, or Caltech … he knew there was only one place his father would approve: Harvard. His ambitions hover like a cloud over the family, especially over his oldest son, Nath. Years later, he has not shaken his sense of loneliness. history at Harvard - but his students treated him like an exotic interloper. In the 1960s, he became one of the first Asians to lecture in U.S. At the same time, he has never quite felt he belonged anywhere, and not just because he grew up as the lone Asian student in a Midwestern boarding school where his father was the janitor. ![]()
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