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Celeste Ng
‘Complicated feelings’ about Amazon … Celeste Ng. Photograph: Kevin Day
‘Complicated feelings’ about Amazon … Celeste Ng. Photograph: Kevin Day

Amazon book of the year winner Celeste Ng: ‘Writing’s like shouting into the world’

This article is more than 9 years old

She has beaten Hilary Mantel and Stephen King to win Amazon book of the year. Celeste Ng, the biggest writer you’ve never heard of, explains why she feels conflicted about her prize

In Everything I Never Told You, a quiet but powerful literary thriller set in 1970s Ohio, a Chinese-American character encounters casual racism in a grocery store. “Oh, are you Chinese?” says a woman. “I could tell by the eyes.” She then pulls hers into slits.

“That was something that happened to me,” says Celeste Ng, whose novel has just trounced works by Hilary Mantel and Stephen King to the title of Amazon book of the year. “I don’t think the man meant any harm by it, but the fact that he didn’t realise it was a strange thing to say and do shows us we’re not in a post-racial society. I sort of laugh when anyone suggests that.”

We are sitting in a cafe in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Ng (pronounced ing) lives with her husband, a lawyer, and their four-year-old son. She’s animated and garrulous, buying us turkey-shaped gingerbread biscuits (it’s Thanksgiving soon) to go with our tea. Ng’s novel, which tells the story of a disappeared teenage girl, begins with audacious bluntness: “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” It’s such a careful and subtle work – exposing family secrets and detailing the regret and grief they trigger – I’d expected someone reserved and serious, but Ng is excitable and palpably thrilled about the Amazon accolade.

“Writing is like shouting into the world,” she says. “So when someone shouts back, it’s a really big deal. To have people who read hundreds and hundreds of books a year say, ‘Hey, we thought this was really great,’ that’s a huge self-esteem boost. All of this attention means, hopefully, I’ll be able to write another book.”

Ng does admit to having “complicated feelings” about Amazon, though. Earlier this year, the company was involved in a high-profile dispute with the publisher Hachette, which took issue with Amazon’s habit of discounting books to such a degree that authors and publishers struggle to make a profit.

“It’s hard to feel like the things Amazon was doing were not going to harm the industry,” she says. “Writers, most of them, don’t have a lot of resources. I know many people have reasonable questions about how Amazon operates. But the editorial staff, I think, are people who just really love books and want to promote them. They’re not the people setting company policy.”

Like her novel’s characters, Ng grew up in predominantly white neighbourhoods. Her parents, both scientists, moved from Hong Kong to the US in the late 1960s and Ng was born in a small, blue-collar suburb of Pittsburgh.

At her school, there were only two pupils who weren’t white: an African-American girl and her. She went on to study English at Harvard, ultimately graduating from the University of Michigan with an MFA. And then? “I did a lot of weird jobs, like most writers do.” Proofreading for textbook companies and writing PowerPoint presentations for doctors helped her “fill up the piggy bank a little and then write a little more”.

In the novel, Lydia is the favourite of three children born to Marilyn, a white woman, and James, a first-generation Chinese-American. It’s set in 70s Ohio, but Ng admits that when it came to the book’s racism, casual and otherwise, she didn’t have to do much research. I mention that there seems to be an assumption that non-white writers should make race their subject, yet few people expect white writers to interrogate whiteness in the same way.

“Absolutely,” she says. “There’s this sense that whiteness is the default and does not need to be questioned. That you’ve got a race if you’re black, or any kind of Asian, or any kind of Native American, but that you have no race if you are white. When I started writing, for a long time I was hesitant about writing any Asian characters.”

This was partly because she wanted to avoid it being seen as autobiographical. “But,” she says, “it was also me not yet feeling comfortable about writing about my own culture. Though I do feel a kinship, I didn’t grow up in China, I don’t speak Cantonese. Since I always felt a little bit of an imposter writing about Chinese culture, it was sort of a surprise that it ended up part of this novel.”

She’s also surprised by the fact that people are so keen to ask her questions about the book, since she’s only just coming to terms with the fact that it’s out in the world and being read. “It’s as if you’ve had a very vivid dream and you come down to the breakfast table. Without you saying anything about it, people start asking you questions about what happened in your dream. And you go, ‘Wait! How did you know what was in my brain?’”

  • Everything I Never Told You is published by Blackfriars, £8.99

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