Review: All That’s Left Unsaid (by Tracey Lien)

My Rating:  5 stars

When I first read the premise for Tracey Lien's debut All That's Left Unsaid, I knew this was a book I wanted to read.  Comparisons to some of my favorite authors (Liz Moore, Celeste Ng, Brit Bennett) aside, I was intrigued by the case at the center of the story:  17-year-old Denny Tran attends a dinner at a local restaurant in Cabramatta, Australia (a suburb in Sydney) with his friends, but before the night is over, he is brutally murdered in plain sight of over a dozen witnesses, yet all of them claim not to have seen a thing.  The Tran family is devastated, but faced with an indifferent police force in a refugee enclave where the proliferation of drugs (specifically heroin) as well as violent crime have become commonplace, Denny's parents seem to have no other recourse but to accept the "bad luck" of their beloved son's murder.  But Denny's sister Ky refuses to let things simply get swept under the rug.  Desperate to assuage her feelings of guilt for leaving the family in order to pursue her own life in Melbourne (an act akin to "abandoning" the family and is severely frowned upon in traditional Asian households), Ky returns to Cabramatta and, after her brother's funeral, decides to seek out and interrogate each of the witnesses herself in order to find out the circumstances behind Denny's murder.  With each person she speaks to, Ky gets closer to understanding what happened to her brother, but at the same time, she discovers the myriad complexities and difficulties of navigating the path to justice and closure for her family in a community where its citizens are mostly resigned to their fates.

There was honestly so much to unpack with this story that it is impossible to cover every angle in a brief review such as this one (personally, I highlighted so many things in this book that were significant to me, it would take me pages and pages to parse all of it).  I will attempt to relay a few thoughts that stood out, but I encourage people to actually read this book in order to get the full experience.  

I do want to start off by saying that this book is technically incorrectly classified under mystery / thriller.  While it's true that the plot overall revolves around unraveling the "mysterious" circumstances behind Denny Tran's murder, it quickly becomes obvious (a chapter or so into the story, in fact) that his death is actually the trigger point for a deeply complicated and intricate exploration of community, society, class struggle, immigration, culture and assimilation, systemic racism, family bonds, parent-child relationships, generational trauma, mental illness, abuse, etc (and that's just scratching the surface).  The "mystery" itself was easy to figure out, which essentially rendered the ending anti-climactic, but the gut wrenching process of getting to that point was really the crux of what made this story work so well.  With its "social commentary" angle, I feel like this would've fit more appropriately into literary fiction, though from a time and place perspective — Cabramatta (which was an actual place in Australia) in the 1990s, during which time there truly was a heroin epidemic — there was also a historical element to the story as well that I didn't expect, but made the story even more compelling.

Before I go into talking about the characters, I wanted to comment on the title and structure. This book actually has one of the cleverest titles I've ever seen: it complements the book perfectly because when we peel back the layers, the story is essentially about "the many things that are left unsaid" by every character in the book — not just the witnesses from that night, but also the parents, Denny, and even Ky herself.  So in this sense, there is a deeper meaning to the title that can only be understood after reading and reflecting on the entire story.  Structure-wise, I love how the narrative alternated between various perspectives — sure, we got Ky's perspective primarily, but there were also chapters narrated from the perspectives of the witnesses as well as Ky's parents.  Through these chapters, we were able to get the backstories to the various characters, which helped us understand what ultimately drove each character's decision that fateful night.  Structuring the narrative this way not only made the story more powerful and poignant, it also helped make the characters realistic and relatable, which I felt was very important to this story overall.

Speaking of the characters, I truly appreciate the brilliant job that the author Tracey Lien did in the area of character development, especially with Ky and Minnie.  Reading this book was actually quite an emotional roller coaster for me because of the resonance I felt with the characters and so much of what they went through.  With Ky especially, I saw so much of myself in her — from her struggles with  identity and acceptance, to her analysis of her own shortcomings and insecurities, her feelings of anxiety related to the environment in which she grew up, and most significantly, her relationship with her mother.   I've always been drawn to stories about parent/child relationships, but those between Asian mothers and their daughters are especially resonant with me because of my cultural background and the hope that reading about these relationships will help me navigate the complex dynamic that exists there.

One of the other things I loved about this book was how, through the character of Ky (and Minnie to some extent), Lien so accurately expressed the realities of life for many Asian women like myself — daughters of immigrants (and/or refugees) who may or may not have been born in the Western countries where we grew up and currently live — and how many of the conflicts that we constantly deal with, be it the cultural expectations or the societal pressures that come with being Asian and female, greatly inform how we end up interacting with our parents (and with others as well).  I wanted to share the below passage from the book, which blew me away when I read it because it hit the nail on the head and made me feel "seen" in a way that so few books I've read in the past have been able to do.

"To anyone else, [his] reason would have been baffling. But Ky understood. She hated how well she now understood. After all, hadn't she kept every hurt she'd ever experienced from her own parents? Hadn't she hidden the bullying, the name-calling, the cruel acts of strangers, the times she'd been told to go back to where she came from, the ching-chongs, the pulled-back eyelids, the blondies with the Cabbage Patch Kids, the way she was forced to play the monster, the way she was asked why she couldn't just take a joke, the times she was told that Asian women were ugly, kinky, docile, crazy, nerdy, unworthy, the way she was dismissed by men, the way she was dismissed by white men, their comments about what Asian women were and weren't, what Asian women could or couldn't be, the way she smiled with her tongue pressed against her teeth even as an ache beat in tandem with her heart—hadn't she hidden all of that? And hadn't she lived her own ambitious, exciting, anxious, uncompromising life while knowing that she could never, ever, ever, ever tell her parents about what she had been through? Because knowing would break their hearts. Because she had to help them believe that their sacrifices had paid off. Because she had to help them believe that moving to a country where they didn't speak the language and weren't seen as individuals had been worth it. Because she had to convince them that they'd done right by their children, that no one had failed, that no one had been let down, that they were one of the lucky ones who'd followed the path and found success. It made perfect sense. You lied to protect. You lied because of love."

This is a book I definitely recommend and will likely want to re-read myself at some point. However, with that said, a word of warning that this is not going to be an easy read  — it is sad and heart wrenching, it presents truths about our society that may be difficult to face, and it may take you places that you would rather not be, especially with some of the things going on in the world at the moment.  But is is a worthwhile read — I would even say that it's a necessary read — for those who are up to it, of course.  This was a fantastic debut and I definitely look forward to what Tracey Lien has in store for us next.

Received ARC from William Morrow via NetGalley.