The books interview: the bestselling US author on family, fitting in and giving a voice to those without power in her new book, Little Fires Everywhere

Celeste Ng’s first novel Everything I Never Told You opens with 16-year-old Lydia Lee found drowned in a lake. She was her parents’ favourite, the opposite of a troublemaker, an innocent. How did it happen, who was responsible for her death? And can the family survive?

The mystery of Lydia’s fate propels the narrative, which is tightly focused on one couple and their mixed-race children in 1970s suburban America – the secrets that have been kept, the hopes dashed, the sense of not fitting in. A page-turning literary thriller that is also a thought-provoking exploration of parenthood and family life, the novel enjoyed huge success – critics’ accolades, big sales and selection by Amazon editors as their 2014 book of the year.

Ng’s follow-up, Little Fires Everywhere, also begins memorably, with a large, elegant house on an affluent street in flames. It belongs to Elena and Bill Richardson, a picture-perfect married couple with four teenage kids. “The firemen said there were little fires everywhere,” one of the children reports: “Multiple points of origin. Possible use of accelerant. Not an accident.” Another mystery: who did it and why? On the same day, bohemian Mia Warren and her daughter Pearl, who have become closely entangled with the Richardsons, pack up and leave town.

When we meet at a stop on her long US promotional tour, Ng (whose Twitter account is @pronounced_ing) talks about how her new book, already highly praised and a bestseller, addresses “race and class and privilege” – though it also continues her fictional investigation into motherhood, the secrets in families and failed attempts to leave one’s past behind.

Little Fires Everywhere is set in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where Ng lived from 1990 until she left for university in 1998 – a prosperous, notably progressive community. The starting assumption of the novel, which is set in the 1990s, is that the city’s leading families are liberal and well meaning, but they are also blind to their privilege, and are soon forced to confront the limits of their good intentions. We often suppress racial and cultural biases in ourselves, Ng has suggested, even when “we can identify them in someone else”.

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“I mean we’re lucky. No one sees race here,” fair-haired Lexie Richardson says in the book, which speaks to the 1990s’ heralding of a “post-racial” era. The illusory, facile nature of that idea is exposed in the novel. But Ng also asks whether progressives who politely say sympathetic things yet give up nothing that really costs will ever achieve meaningful change. The surface may appear smooth but lurking problems (race, class) will eventually rise; disruption is required for truths to be revealed. Ng says her book “resonates with everything happening now … I’m happy that readers are finding it relevant”.

“From the start I had these two families, the Richardsons and Warrens, two poles around which the story was going to rotate.” Elena is set on “doing the right thing” but she is also “all about order and stability and legacy; her family has been in Shaker Heights for several generations, and she has the big house and the cars and the husband and the children and steady job”. Then Mia arrives, a peripatetic artist and “free spirit”, who has “deliberately eschewed” all that Elena has sought; she doesn’t care about money or own anything that doesn’t fit into her old VW car. “She has nothing tethering her; her north star is art. And everything in her life is directed to that.”

Elena, “coasting along on what she believes is the right path”, is forced to confront the messiness lurking beneath the polished surface of her life; meanwhile her creative, combative daughter Izzy looks to Mia as a more suitable mother-figure. In turn, Mia’s own daughter Pearl, who craves stability and wants to belong, is “dazzled” by the Richardsons’ “easy confidence”, and drawn to the “soft smells of detergent and cooking and grass” of their home.

Mia rents a property owned by the Richardsons, who are always looking for someone suitable to help. She is also employed to cook and clean. But the two families end up on opposite sides when Shaker Heights is split by a custody battle over an Asian-American baby girl, May Ling Chow. Her mother, Bebe, an impoverished Chinese immigrant left May Ling on the steps of a fire station during a spell of postpartum depression. Having recovered, she wants her back – but the one-year-old, now called Mirabelle McCullough, is the treasure of a wealthy white couple, friends of the Richardsons, who have long been hoping for a child. The adoption process is not yet complete, and the custody battle goes to court.

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“It was a lovely place to grow up,” Ng says of Shaker Heights. “The houses are beautiful and the schools are excellent. You walked under a canopy of green.” It wasn’t until she went to university that she “realised it wasn’t typical at all”. It is, in fact, a highly unusual planned community, built more than 100 years ago as a garden suburb, a utopia enforced by strict rules. Residents are fined for not mowing their lawn; the city conducts annual house inspections, inside and out, to ensure regulations are being followed. It isn’t Stepford: every house has to be individually designed by an architect, but “on garbage day, you can’t put your trash out front” as it’s too unsightly: special trucks pick it up down individual drives. And apartments – rented by less well-off residents – are disguised as single-dwelling family houses. Appearances are “carefully policed” and, Ng says, “you are not to show anyone your messy side, ever”.

From the 1950s, Shaker Heights began to pride itself on being an exemplar of racial diversity. “I took it for granted that race was a big topic of conversation,” Ng recalls. “Everybody was made aware of it … Financial assistance was given to black families to move into white neighbourhoods and vice versa.” Schoolchildren had racial sensitivity training in which they learned about the dynamics of prejudice (Ng remembers the kudos of being selected for the student group devoted to race). The city, with its “rule-oriented wholesome progressivism” had a strong sense of its own virtue and purpose. Elena Richardson is, in this sense, “the human embodiment” of Shaker Heights.

Ng is full of praise for the city’s refusal to ignore race, to prevent backsliding. Yet “what I remember about race relations in the 1990s,” she says, “is that you showed your awareness by saying you didn’t see race, that you were colour-blind”. Shaker Heights was much more advanced than other places but “the assumption was still that everybody is equal, we can overcome racism. Now our understanding is more complicated. Everyone is not equal – we have a bigger understanding of privilege.” The decade was, in general, one of optimism; it was “placid … a little self-satisfied”.

Little Fires Everywhere cites schoolyard jokes about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky: they heighten the teenagers’ perception that everything is “saturated with sex; everywhere it oozed out, like dirty honey”. But the jokes also help to fix the historical setting. “When the news hit, we thought: you’ve tarnished the presidency,” Ng says. “Well, compared to what is happening now …!”

Ng’s parents moved from Hong Kong to the US in the 1960s. Her father was a physicist who worked for Nasa, her mother a research chemist; her older sister became an engineer. “As soon as I could write, I was writing stories,” Ng says, but “coming from a family of immigrants and also a family of scientists, very practical people”, she never took seriously the idea of becoming a writer: it was always something to be pursued alongside a “proper job”. After attending Harvard, however, she earned a master of fine arts in writing, won awards and eventually published her first short stories.

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Growing up, she encountered very few Asian families like hers (even in Shaker Heights). “I have an interest in the outsider,” she says. “In fiction you’re not often writing about the typical, you are interested in outliers, the points of interest. Part of it comes from feeling I was the only Asian or person of colour … another part comes from my personality: I’m an introvert, and my usual survival mode in a large group is to stand by a wall and watch everybody.”

In her first novel, she drew on the experience of feeling “out of place but also conspicuous … continually other”. She has said that “every example of racial discrimination” in Everything I Never Told You – experienced by James Lee, the son of Chinese immigrants, and his children – “is something that’s actually happened at some point to me, my family, or others I know personally”. Rocks are thrown at James’s car, a woman pulls her eyes into slits. Ng recalls the demand: “Where are you from? No, where are you really from?”

Ng’s husband is white; they have a biracial son, and her first novel is interested too in the idea of feeling “other” even within one’s own family – how two parents can view the same events in contrasting ways. There are occasions when Ng and her husband are still brought up short by the realisation they have “lived in two different worlds”. At moments of tension – one incident at airport security, for instance, or another while getting their son a passport – he assumes he’ll be given the benefit of the doubt, she says, whereas “my understanding is that you have to toe the line or you’ll be in trouble”.

But the question of wanting clearly to “be seen” raised by Everything I Never Told You is universally relevant. Miriam Lee, so ambitious for her daughter Lydia, is crushed to have her own goals overlooked, while Lydia wants to be seen “as her own person, rather than a blank screen on which her parents project their own desires”. And as in all families, there are many things not talked about that should be.

Before her first novel was published, Ng wrote an essay entitled “Why I Don’t Want to Be the Next Amy Tan”, about how minority writers get put in boxes: “Somewhere in the Commandments of Reviewing must be written: Thou shalt not compare Asians to non-Asians … Let’s focus on the writing itself.” She has felt fortunate in her publishers, who have “appreciated the Asian-American aspects of my work without ever trying to pigeonhole me … The problem is never being seen as an Asian-American writer; the problem is with being seen only as an Asian-American writer.”

When you’re in any marginalised group, your existence is politicised for you, whether you like it or not

Ng has said that while on one level she has become more political following the election of Donald Trump – at which point “the stakes became much higher for me as a woman, a woman of colour and a child of immigrants” – she has “always been political, because when you’re in any marginalised group, your existence is politicised for you, whether you like it or not”. After the November 2016 election, she popularised the hashtag #smallacts on Twitter, and every week called for small-scale but meaningful gestures of resistance to combat intolerance and inspire others. The acts could be “donate, volunteer, call your senator, write a letter of solidarity to your local mosque … the response was overwhelming”.

The politics of Little Fires Everywhere is subtle but saturates the novel. Elena Richardson says of the transracial adoption controversy: “Honestly, I think it’s a tremendous thing for Mirabelle. She’ll be raised in a home that … doesn’t care, not one infinitesimal bit, what she looks like.” When the case goes to court, the adoptive mother, Linda McCullough, is questioned by the lawyer representing Bebe Chow about how she intends to keep the child “connected to her birth culture”. There is a long silence, then: “Pearl of the Orient is one of our very favourite restaurants.”

Other answers, equally “cringeworthy”, as Ng puts it, follow. The McCulloughs, buying a teddy bear, have been careful to choose a panda; they have always shopped for toys made in China. “I wanted the reader to have double vision at that point. To squirm, but also to see that she had good intentions and that the resources available to her were limited.” The novel’s editor at first thought such issues of representation were anachronistic, but Ng’s mother “bought every children’s book she could find that had Asian characters in it … she always tried to buy me an Asian doll, but there weren’t any. So at one point I got a black doll, because at least she wasn’t blond.”

As the custody hearing begins, the omniscient narrator reveals Bebe’s story, making explicable her postpartum crisis. Ng uses this authorial view in both her novels (“Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet”) and resists the idea that it’s old-fashioned because “we no longer believe in a single authority who can tell us these things”. Unlike classic “omniscient” authors, she does not try to tell the reader what to think. Yet her use of the technique is vital to her whole project, and especially in a book about privilege it “felt so right”. After all, in life there are “certain people who always get to talk”, but in her fiction Ng can ensure that everyone – not just those who take their power and virtue for granted – gets a chance to be seen and “to have a say”.

• Little Fires Everywhere is published by Little, Brown. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.