4 ideas
In 1977 Ohio, sixteen-year-old Lydia, the favoured middle child of Chinese-American James and white Marilyn Lee, is found drowned in the town lake. Marilyn had pushed her toward the medical career she herself abandoned, and James had pushed her to be popular and fit in as he never had.
When a parent's own ambition is thwarted, they often transfer it wholesale onto one child, who becomes the vessel for the life the parent didn't get. The child learns that parental love depends on performing this borrowed dream, so she hides failure and says yes to everything. The resulting silence feels like harmony to the parent until the pressure breaks the child.
In a family, attention is finite, so concentrating hopes on one child creates two kinds of damage. The chosen child is crushed by expectation, and the overlooked siblings grow up invisible, becoming the only ones who actually see what is happening. To judge a family's health, look past the star child and ask what the unwatched children know.
A parent who was made to feel foreign or conspicuous, as James was as the only Asian boy in his schools, may treat 'fitting in' as the supreme good and demand it of a child. That turns his own injury into a standard the child is then measured against. Because the child is visibly mixed-race in the same town, the demand reproduces the parent's isolation rather than curing it.