book review on our missing hearts

Celeste Ng’s Dystopia Is Uncomfortably Close to Reality

“Our Missing Hearts” explores a fictional world where Chinese Americans are spurned and books are recycled into toilet paper.

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• Sept. 22, 2022
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OUR MISSING HEARTS, by Celeste Ng

The definition of “dystopia ” in the Oxford English Dictionary is bald and to the point: “An imaginary place in which everything is as bad as possible.”

Literature is full of examples. In “The Time Machine,” the Morlocks feed and clothe the Eloi, then eat them. “The Handmaid’s Tale” deals with state-sanctioned rape. The firefighters in “Fahrenheit 451” incinerate books instead of saving them. In “1984”’s infamous Room 101, Winston Smith is finally broken when a cage filled with rats is dumped over his head. In “Our Missing Hearts,” Celeste Ng’s dystopian America is milder, which makes it more believable — and hence, more upsetting.

Noah Gardner, known as Bird, is a 12-year-old Chinese American living with his father in Cambridge, Mass. His mother is a fugitive, on the run because she wrote a supposedly subversive poem titled “All Our Missing Hearts.” America is living under PACT — the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act — which became law during a confused and economically disastrous period known as the Crisis. (We’re given more details about this Crisis than we actually need.)

Before the Crisis, Bird’s father was a linguist. Now he works in a library, shelving books. In Ng’s version of the American Nightmare, there’s no need to burn books. “We pulp them,” a helpful librarian tells Bird. (Bird doesn’t tell her he’s picturing book bonfires, but she intuits it.) “Much more civilized, right? Mash them up, recycle them into toilet paper. Those books wiped someone’s rear end a long time ago.”

Less gaudy than firefighters burning books, but more believable. The empty shelves Bird sees in his father’s library speak volumes.

Under PACT, the children of parents considered culturally or politically subversive are “re-placed” in foster families. When Bird is given a clue to his mother’s whereabouts he goes in search of her, and much of Ng’s firmly written and well-executed novel deals with his adventures along the way. In that sense, the book is a classic tale of the hero’s journey, said hero young enough to make the trip from innocence to experience with surprisingly little bitterness directed toward the parent who has abandoned him. That his mother, Margaret Miu, had no choice would make no difference to most children, it seems to me; abandoned is abandoned.

We have heard this tale of government scapegoating before, which adds to its power rather than detracting from it. Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany’s economic malaise. Trump told us to fear migrant caravans full of “bad hombres.” Here it’s Asian people in general and Chinese Americans in particular who are held responsible for everything that’s gone wrong — blame those who don’t look like White America. In New York’s Chinatown, street names have been censored: “Someone — everyone — has tried to make the Chinese disappear.” Flag pins decorate every lapel.

Because Ng’s storytelling is so calm — serene, almost — the occasional explosions of violence are authentically horrifying, as when Bird observes a man punch a Chinese woman, knock her to the ground, then kick her repeatedly. There is no reason except for her otherness … and perhaps the fact that she looks well off. He then kills her little dog, breaking its back “the way he might crush a soda can, or a cockroach.”

On another level, “Our Missing Hearts” is a meditation on the sometimes accidental power of words. Why are Mr. Gardner’s library shelves so empty? Because students must not have access to books that “might expose them to dangerous ideas.” This isn’t dystopian fiction but actual fact, as rancorous school curriculum meetings and protests across the United States have proved. The Florida Parental Rights Bill, signed by Governor DeSantis in March of this year, is basically a free pass to text censorship.

When a Black girl is shot dead at an anti-PACT rally, the phrase “Our Missing Hearts” — emblazoned on the sign she was carrying; she’d read Margaret’s poem — becomes a rallying cry. Bird’s mother had no intention of achieving fame or infamy because of that line; it was from a poem about — of all things — pomegranates. Rodney King (“Can’t we all just get along?”) and George Floyd (“I can’t breathe”) weren’t intentionally phrasemaking either. King’s line was an off-the-cuff plea for peace and Floyd only wanted to get the cop off his neck before he died. Yet these lines resonate. Governments are right to fear words. They can change hearts and topple tyrannies. By the same token, they can increase the chokeholds of some tyrants: witch hunt, fake news, I rest my case.

I won’t give away the splendid conclusion of Ng’s book; suffice it to say, the climax deals with the power of words, the power of stories and the persistence of memory. It’s impossible not to be moved by Margaret Miu’s courage, or to applaud her craftiness. Is her final word to the world a kind of propaganda? Yes, but sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.

There are peculiar lapses that must be noted. Covid-19 doesn’t exist in “Our Missing Hearts,” although there can be no doubt that the pandemic has given rise to dark conspiracies having to do with China, where Covid first appeared. Donald Trump and others were happy to call it the China Flu. Ng likewise ignores social media — there’s a single glancing mention near the end of the book — although few innovations in human history have done more to focus and amplify racist tropes. In fact, social media encourages large numbers of people to deliberately turn away from the truth.

Ng succeeds in spite of these occasional blind spots, partly because her outrage is contained and focused, and mostly because she is often captivated by the very words she is using. Bird’s father’s oldest habit, we’re told, is “taking words apart like old clocks to show the gears still ticking inside.” The gears in this story for the most part mesh very well. And Bird is a brave and believable character, who gives us a relatable portal into a world that seems more like our own every day.

Stephen King’s latest novel is “Fairy Tale.”

OUR MISSING HEARTS, by Celeste Ng | 352 pp. | Penguin Press | $29

An earlier version of this review referred incorrectly to Wuhan, China. It is the capital city of Hubei Province. It is not a province.

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Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng review – an all-too-close dystopia

A boy’s search for his mother, a freedom-loving poet who opposes America’s authoritarian regime, makes for a shaky follow-up to Little Fires Everywhere

I n a not-too-distant future, following economic and social turmoil, an authoritarian government has taken power in the US. Civil liberties have been rolled back. Wrung out by years of crisis, the population largely aquiesces in its loss of freedom. The country’s leaders stoke fears about the rise of China, pass draconian laws to enforce patriotic behaviour, ban books and foment hatred against PAOs: People of Asian Origin.

Depressingly, not much about the dystopian setting in Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts seems that far-fetched. Even the passing of a bill entitled “Preserving American Culture and Traditions” feels like a plausible extrapolation from current events. “PACT will protect us from the very real threat of those who undermine us from within,” the unnamed president tells the American people. The bill’s provisions include wide-ranging measures to stamp out all forms of internal dissent, and it gives the government the power to remove children from parents deemed un-American.

Amid this creeping oppression, in Cambridge, Massachusetts – once a bastion of liberal tolerance and academic excellence – 12-year-old Noah is growing up under the care of his dad, Ethan. Ethan is an affable, bookish man, but like almost everyone else, he’s unwilling to challenge the forces of reaction. Demoted from his academic post to working as a librarian, he advocates keeping quiet and carrying on.

Things are not so simple for Noah. Half Asian on his mother’s side, and therefore already suspect, he’s a quirky, sensitive child who insists on being called Bird, a nickname of his own invention. And his absent mother, Margaret, who abandoned the family when he was eight, is widely regarded as a traitor to the new regime.

As the novel opens, Bird has just received an unexpected message from his mother. Just enough backstory is sketched in for us to grasp the nature of Bird’s world and the terrible dilemma in which he finds himself. Will he stick with his compromising father, or follow the clues in the message in the hope of finding his way back to his politically undesirable mother?

It’s not giving too much away, I hope, to reveal that Bird chooses the second option and goes on a journey that reveals the moral bankruptcy of the regime and introduces him to the handful of people resisting it.

Our Missing Hearts follows the blockbuster success of Ng’s second novel, Little Fires Everywhere , an international bestseller which was adapted for television. That too is a book about a failed utopian experiment, though on a more modest and naturalistic scale. Set in the planned community of Shaker Heights, Ohio, during the 1990s, Little Fires Everywhere took the form of a whodunnit, the solving of which anatomises the moral failings of the privileged Richardson family and their friends, and explores themes of motherhood, class, art and identity.

In other ways, Our Missing Hearts feels like a deliberate and almost defiant break with the previous novel. Little Fires Everywhere was written in unflashy prose that built a credible, specific world through the accumulation of patiently observed details. It packed a large number of characters into a tight, naturalistic space and forced them to interact, running several interlocking stories. Our Missing Hearts opts for a swooning lyrical style that dispenses with quotation marks the better to illuminate its major themes – racial oppression, motherhood, the redemptive power of story and myth – but is populated by barely half a dozen characters. Bird’s quest resolves very quickly, and halfway through the book, the only real question that remains is how far Margaret and the opposition movement are willing to go to challenge the regime.

Margaret, a freedom-loving poet, is clearly a descendant of Mia in Little Fires Everywhere, a freedom-loving photographer-artist whose passion and integrity expose the conformity and moral blindness of Shaker Heights. As a depiction of the clash of two value systems, Little Fires Everywhere was simplistic, reserving its sympathy only for those characters who clearly had the author’s approval – Mia, her daughter Pearl, the migrant Cantonese worker Bebe, hardworking Mr Yang. The book’s moral flavour of judgment and deserved comeuppances was too overt, but at least it depicted its monsters with brio: the repressed busybody Elena Richardson, the childless McCulloughs and the racist music teacher, Miss Peters.

Presumably, the brutal world of Our Missing Hearts is held together by a mixture of fanatics, timeservers and decent people who believe they’re doing the right thing. But the author doesn’t dramatise the machinery of oppression or attempt to present the viewpoints of its sympathisers. As a result, the dystopia feels underpowered and generic, and opposing it doesn’t seem as dangerous as it ought to. The parallels between the author’s invented world and ours are clear enough – banned books, enforced patriotism, attacks on racial minorities – but it lacks strangeness and specificity. It’s conscientiously rooted in today’s crises, but doesn’t take us any further. There are no imaginative leaps comparable to Margaret Atwood’s handmaids, Orwell’s Newspeak or Room 101, or the rag-bag troupe of players performing Shakespeare in Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven . As dystopias go, the world of Our Missing Hearts ends up seeming considerably less bad than life in, say, Xinjiang or North Korea, never mind Gilead or Airstrip One.

The book’s major theme is storytelling, as, deprived of his mother, Bird treasures the stories she shared with him: “Stories about warriors and princesses, poor brave girls and boys, monsters and magicians . The brother and sister who outwitted the witch and found their way home. The girl who saved her swan-brothers from enchantment. Ancient myths that made sense of the world, why sunflowers nod, why echoes linger, why spiders spin.”

In exile, Margaret’s work becomes a source of hope for the opposition and a collective memory for those who are suffering and silenced. “Telling the stories that those who needed to tell could not say, now grieving, now angry, now tender, a thousand people shouting through her mouth.” This sentence contains an allusion to Requiem by the Soviet poet Anna Akhmatova – a reference that appears at multiple points. Like Margaret, Akhmatova’s work memorialised the victims of political terror, and Akhmatova lost contact with her only son, Lev, who spent years in the Soviet penal system.

It is a telling but uneasy parallel to pursue further. Lev eventually emerged and became a government-approved ideologue whose work is cited as an inspiration for Putinism. Such is the moral complexity of the real world – and the kind of unexpected twist that this book lacks. Our Missing Hearts, like Margaret, insists on the redemptive power of fairytales. And within their unambiguous moral worlds, happily-ever-afters are achievable. But in real life, we know that simplistic narratives are just as likely to be the road into dystopia as the road out of it.

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Review: ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ author Celeste Ng ventures boldly into the dark future

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'Our Missing Hearts'

By Celeste Ng Penguin Press: 352 pages, $29 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

At the entrance to the Planet Word museum in Washington, D.C., stands a remarkable sculpture designed to resemble a weeping willow. However, instead of leaves, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer ’s tree has tiny speakers drooping from each branch that play 360 different spoken languages, creating a deliberate Tower of Babel, a cacophony of voices that immerses visitors in our shared human need for expression.

When you finish Celeste Ng ’s stunning new dystopian novel, “ Our Missing Hearts ,” you’ll understand why this sculpture comes to mind. The simplest way to put it without spoiling anything is to say that at the core of Ng’s narrative — a 12-year-old boy’s epic quest to find his missing mother — is the all-important question of how we communicate.

Yes, Noah Gardner, whose mother called him Bird, will leave home, endure trials and perform feats, just like any classical hero. But Ng — whose spectacular 2014 debut, “ Everything I Never Told You ,” was followed by 2017’s equally trenchant “Little Fires Everywhere” — roots her hero’s journey in books and libraries.

Bird’s mother, Margaret Miu, a daughter of Chinese immigrants, is a poet of some stature whose career ended when the United States took a turn into hard xenophobia and passed PACT. The Preserving of American Cultures and Traditions Act encourages bigotry against many groups, particularly Asian Americans , partly in response to China’s increasingly powerful role in the global economy after “The Crisis.”

After Margaret’s disappearance, Bird’s father loses his prestigious position as a linguistics professor. Given a low-level archives job, he must move with his son to a tiny apartment where they face each day with grim resignation. Bird’s main consolation is a friend named Sadie, whose memories of her storytelling parents fill Bird with longing. He remembers his own mother’s stories, and, after receiving a strange missive from her — a page covered with drawings of cats — he also recalls a book she once read to him. The clues begin to constitute a treasure map, leading to the local library he’s been discouraged from visiting.

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There, a librarian accidentally reveals that her collection is also a way of transmitting messages to underground fighters. Many members of the resistance use bright red hearts in their campaigns (such as a truck filled with heart-marked pingpong balls dumped in a river) in a nod to Margaret’s best-known poetry collection, “All Our Missing Hearts.”

In essence, his mother’s poetry becomes a weapon, a tool of resistance — and also a way back to her. Naturally, an epic hero needs a deputy; Bird’s first act is to find Sadie, who has been taken from her home — her Black mother was automatically suspect — and sent to live with a set of bland, compliant foster parents.

One of Ng’s most poignant tricks in this novel is to bury its central tragedy — the forcible separation of children from their parents — in the middle of the action. This raises the narrative from the specific story of a confused boy and his defeated father to a reflection on the universal bond between parents and children, a core value sacrificed on the pyre of Ng’s populist authoritarianism.

Sadie is more than an archetypal sidekick; she is a prod to action. Juggled between foster parents, the rebellious young woman has always found ways to stay true to her upbringing. Early on, she cut her own mass of curly hair with kitchen shears rather than endure a caretaker’s comb. Even in early adolescence, Sadie believes in resistance, and she believes her parents (and Bird’s) belong to it. “She’s one of them,” Sadie insists to Bird. “She’s out there somewhere … Just like my parents.”

As Bird ventures into danger, we begin to understand his father’s extreme caution and fear differently; he seems less a man shut down by adversity and more a valiant protector of his son. We also understand what often grounds true rebellion: Sadie, like Bird, has known parental love, the kind that allows people to stop fearing “What if?” and start insisting “Even if ... “

Things get much busier in the second half of “Our Missing Hearts.” Bird and Sadie wind up in a Manhattan as chaotic as ever, though even scarier, sheltered by a rich eccentric from Margaret’s past (essentially the deus ex machina here). Coming together, even in small communities, makes a difference during dark times. We all understand that now, having hunkered down with pandemic pods of our own. Comrades inspire bravery in big and little ways.

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This is where Margaret departs from her own group. Yes, she’s still alive, and yes, she’s been on the run; neither of those facts spoils the book’s denouement. Margaret reminds us of true moral courage, plotting a nonviolent but highly effective scheme to disrupt the PACT regime. As Ng tells us at the end of an Author’s Note, “ Václav Havel ’s classic 1978 essay ‘The Power of the Powerless’ changed my thinking about the impact a single individual could have in dismantling a long-established system. I hope he’s right.”

Like many of her fellow writers of dystopian fiction, including Margaret Atwood , P.D. James, Philip K. Dick and Hillary Jordan, Ng harnesses the power of the David-and-Goliath story — a prototypical quest story that has the benefit of maybe being real. Or if it isn’t, it accords with history. The asymmetrical power of a smaller group pitted against a large, corrupt state is more than just a great storytelling trope. It has happened many times in recorded history. It is happening today, for instance in Ukraine .

While briefly reunited with his mother — this book is also a parent-child love story — Bird believes Margaret when she says she will return to him after she’s accomplished her mission. But we already understand that the government will find her. We also know that, while she acted alone, she isn’t the lone resister. Others exist; others will rise up.

The author concludes with the same controlled tone that opened the novel, showing us a new generation of resisters, including Bird and Sadie and their confreres, who start to think about what comes next for them as friends and human beings. “Our Missing Hearts” will land differently for individual readers. One element we shouldn’t miss is Ng’s bold reversal of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. It is the drive for conformity, the suppression of our glorious cacophony, that will doom us. And it is the expression of individual souls that will save us.

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Patrick is a freelance critic who tweets @TheBookMaven .

Book Club: If You Go

What: Novelist Celeste Ng joins the L.A. Times Book Club to discuss “Our Broken Hearts” with columnist Patt Morrison .

When: Dec. 8 at 6 p.m. Pacific .

Where: Live streaming online. Sign up on Eventbrite for tickets and autographed books.

Join us: Sign up for the book club newsletter for latest news and events.

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OUR MISSING HEARTS

by Celeste Ng ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 4, 2022

Underscores that the stories we tell about our lives and those of others can change hearts, minds, and history.

In a dystopian near future, art battles back against fear.

Ng’s first two novels—her arresting debut, Everything I Never Told You (2014), and devastating follow-up, Little Fires Everywhere (2017)—provided an insightful, empathetic perspective on America as it is. Her equally sensitive, nuanced, and vividly drawn latest effort, set in a dystopian near future in which Asian Americans are regarded with scorn and mistrust by the government and their neighbors, offers a frightening portrait of what it might become. The novel’s young protagonist, Bird, was 9 when his mother—without explanation—left him and his father; his father destroyed every sign of her. Now, when Bird is 12, a letter arrives. Because it is addressed to “Bird,” he knows it's from his mother. For three years, he has had to answer to his given name, Noah; repeat that he and his father no longer have anything to do with his mother; try not to attract attention; and endure classmates calling his mother a traitor. None of it makes sense to Bird until his one friend, Sadie, fills him in: His mother, the child of Chinese immigrants, wrote a poem that had improbably become a rallying cry for those protesting PACT—the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act—a law that had helped end the Crisis 10 years before, ushering in an era in which violent economic protests had become vanishingly rare, but fear and suspicion, especially for persons of Asian origin, reigned. One of the Pillars of PACT—“Protects children from environments espousing harmful views”—had been the pretext for Sadie’s removal from her parents, who had sought to expose PACT’s cruelties and, Bird begins to understand, had prompted his own mother’s decision to leave. His mother's letter launches him on an odyssey to locate her, to listen and to learn. From the very first page of this thoroughly engrossing and deeply moving novel, Bird’s story takes wing. Taut and terrifying, Ng’s cautionary tale transports us into an American tomorrow that is all too easy to imagine—and persuasively posits that the antidotes to fear and suspicion are empathy and love.

Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-593-49254-3

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Penguin Press

Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | DYSTOPIAN FICTION

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by Celeste Ng

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PERSPECTIVES

SEEN & HEARD

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

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by Max Brooks

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Celeste Ng is back with a dark parable of America’s history of child removal

The author of Little Fires Everywhere’s new book, Our Missing Hearts, brings Cold War dystopia into the present.

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Our Missing Hearts , the new novel from Little Fires Everywhere author Celeste Ng, takes place in a retro sort of dystopia, a Cold War kid’s nightmare. It’s the kind of world where people spend a lot of time worrying over un-American values and threats to the American way of life , where kids are taught to inform on their neighbors, and everyone still rides their bike to school.

But the America of Our Missing Hearts isn’t fretting over secret Russian communists. In the process of recovering from a vaguely detailed economic meltdown that’s become known simply as “the Crisis,” America has turned on China, and on every “Person of Asian Origin” who might either come from China or be mistaken as having done so.

The resulting society, as all successful dystopias do, bears an unsettling resemblance to our own, retro vocabulary be damned. In Ng’s world, Asian Americans are harassed and attacked in the streets . Books are banned from schools and libraries , then pulped and turned into toilet paper. Most urgently, children are taken away from any parent who’s been reported as holding un-American ideas, placed with foster families in faraway cities, and given new names so they never find their way back to their old homes.

Bird, the 12-year-old boy at the center of Our Missing Hearts , has not been taken away from his family. Instead, his mother, Margaret, has vanished. An Asian American poet whose famous line our missing hearts has become a slogan of the protest movement, Margaret disappeared three years before the beginning of the novel. Bird has been left with his terrified single father and a thousand questions. As the novel begins, Bird is in the process of making up his mind to look for Margaret.

Bird’s quest powers Our Missing Hearts forward through the first and strongest of its three sections, as he makes his way through secret library networks, hunting down missing books laced with clues. There is something both sweetly old-fashioned and subtly horrific about Bird’s fairy tale-inflected search for his missing mother, his slowly dawning realization that the world in which he lives is deeply flawed. It reads like a classic kid’s book you half-recall picking up in the fifth grade. It’s giving The Giver .

Once we leave Bird’s narration and move into Margaret’s more adult voice, however, Our Missing Hearts begins to falter. Margaret is amorphous, less a real character than a political cipher who exists to draw emphatic underlines below all Ng’s real-world parallels.

When Margaret first becomes outraged over her country’s child removals, Ng has her begin to learn “things she’d been able to not know, until now,” about the brutal historical removals of Indigenous children and migrant children and foster children — as though Ng doesn’t trust her readers to recognize those parallels on our own. When Margaret encounters the Black parents of a woman killed at a political protest holding a sign with Margaret’s poem on it, she spends pages thinking about the troubled political relationship between Black and Asian American communities. The eventual understanding she reaches with the parents in question becomes “a small tug at a complicated knot that would take generations to unpick.” Whenever Margaret is talking, this book has a tendency to swing from interestingly polemic to disastrously didactic.

In contrast, Ng’s writing about parenthood is tender, lucid, and unsentimental. One parent telling a story about their lost child can’t remember if the story took place when she was 5 or when she was 15, because of “how slippery and elastic time was in the fact of your child, how it seemed to move not in a line but in endless loops, circling back again and again, overwriting itself.” Margaret teaches Bird “to pluck honeysuckle blossoms from the vine and touch the end to his tongue: such sticky sweetness.” In her love for Bird, Margaret resolves at last into a real person: in the specificity of it, the sensuality.

Ng had her breakout hit with 2017’s Little Fires Everywhere , a beautifully observed novel of suburban motherhood that was adapted into a Hulu series starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington . Our Missing Hearts is a weaker outing than its predecessor, clumsier and less grounded in character, too ham-fisted in the political points it’s determined to make. Still, it shines in Ng’s language, and in the dark fairy tale she conjures forth.

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In Celeste Ng’s ‘Our Missing Hearts,’ a boy fights for freedom

It’s tempting to imagine that evil is clear and tangible, that it can be easily smothered and the world made safe. Unfortunately, things are rarely so simple. Good and evil can be complicated, even intertwined. As Nietzsche warned, one must be careful when fighting monsters not to become one.

In the world of “ Our Missing Hearts ,” by “ Little Fires Everywhere ” author Celeste Ng, America, following some of today’s political inclinations to their most dire ends, has become rigid and paranoid, with those in power frantically attempting to suppress voices of dissent or free thought. But in this novel, as in life, a state of intense repression will lead inexorably to an explosion.

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The novel opens several years after Bird Gardner’s mother, Margaret, abruptly walked out of her son’s life. Her departure has haunted Bird ever since. Now living a peaceful, if very cautious existence with his father, 12-year-old Bird receives a mysterious letter: a page covered with cat doodles. He wonders whether it’s from his mother and begins to revisit the questions that once haunted him. With this unexpected summons, Bird begins to realize he is no longer content to follow the careful instructions of his teachers and father: to keep quiet and avoid drawing attention to himself — especially to his face, which echoes that of his Chinese American mother.

The America of “Our Missing Hearts” is obsessively preoccupied with perceived threats from outsiders and “others” — from China in particular. Hypervigilant colleagues and neighbors report each other for supposedly subversive activities. Children are frequently taken from their family and placed with fosters as a form of “protection” and to ensure compliance and silence from terrified parents. Bird’s father, who stopped teaching to take a lower-profile position in a library, lives with the daily fear of losing his son. He will do anything to keep what’s left of his family intact.

Review: Celeste Ng's 'Little Fires Everywhere'

Up to this point, Bird has followed his father’s lead, both of them quietly complying with the authoritarian state, trying to stay under the radar, hoping that by passing as a white-ish child, Bird will be safe. But “Our Missing Hearts” makes clear such a strategy results in a double-betrayal — of one’s community as well as of oneself. Bird witnesses acts of casual, public violence against the vulnerable and elderly, anyone who isn’t able to hide, and he begins to understand the importance of speaking up for those who can’t speak for themselves — that silence is in fact complicity.

Working in the tradition of “ The Handmaid’s Tale ” and “ 1984 , ” “Our Missing Hearts” is at its core a parable about the wages of fear, how it can lead to bigotry, racism and institutionalized hatred. Painted with broad strokes, it’s also reminiscent of works like “ The Old Man and the Sea ” — with its elevated, mythic quality — and it can seem a little message-driven at times. But this is a function of its oracular style — the broad, slightly abstracted tone of a truth-teller — depicting the workings of control and domination throughout a culture and a nation.

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Bird embarks on an epic adventure to hunt for Margaret. The writing tightens with suspense as new questions arise about who he’ll encounter and what he’ll learn about his missing mother. Bits of the mystery are answered through Margaret’s backstory, delivered in the second half of the book, which reveals that not all heroes are born heroic. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she was instructed by her parents to play it safe through aphorisms like, “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.” Within Margaret’s section is an especially beautiful tribute to the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova whose work was censored and who serves as a source of inspiration to those who never expected to resist. “At dawn she touched a match to the paper and reduced her words to ash,” Margaret says of the poet. “Over the years her words repeated this cycle — resurrection in the darkness, death at first light — until eventually their lives were inscribed in flame.”

An intriguing and multifaceted character, Margaret writes poetry, which inadvertently becomes a touchstone for the resistance movement. The notion of the accidental warrior is one of the many generous and compassionate aspects of Ng’s story — the idea that there is something brave in everyone — if only it can be reached. In this novel, both mother and son are called upon to look within themselves and connect with their deepest reserves of strength.

Bird’s voyage is bold and inspiring as he discovers the possibilities of art. In so doing, he learns unpleasant truths about the nature of the world, but he also comes into his power. Unintentional or deliberate, being a freedom fighter isn’t easy, but Bird perseveres and grows in the process. Faced with the choice between quietude and resistance, he quickly learns that a life of submission is no life at all.

Diana Abu-Jaber is the author of “ Birds of Paradise ” and “ Origin .” Her most recent book is the culinary memoir “ Life Without a Recipe .”

Our Missing Hearts

By Celeste Ng

Penguin Press. 352 pp. $29

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Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts Is a Timeless Depiction of Motherhood and Adolescence

The “Little Fires Everywhere” author’s latest is a galvanic and urgent novel of social and familial upheaval.

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Can storm clouds have silver linings? Celeste Ng’s politically charged Our Missing Hearts is a dark landscape on which anti-Asian hate, book bannings, family separation, and other forms of oppression rage. But the tale is also shot through with vivid color and rising hope, an unflinching yet life-affirming drama about the power of art and love to push back in dangerous times.

With two stellar prior novels, numerous short stories, and a Guggenheim Fellowship to her credit, Ng has quickly become a leading chronicler of modern American angst, race, and class. Her 2014 debut, Everything I Never Told You , topped best-books lists, and her second novel, the number one bestseller Little Fires Everywhere , made an even bigger cultural splash: It was turned into a much-talked-about Hulu series starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington.

Our Missing Hearts treads a similar line between literary fiction and social thriller, but this time with a more prominent political through line. It shares some literary DNA with The Handmaid’s Tale . In a near-future, quasi-dystopian, and increasingly authoritarian America, a 12-year-old nicknamed Bird goes on a quest for his mother, Margaret, who disappeared from his life without explanation three years prior. His father, Ethan—a former linguist now relegated to shelving books in a library—is broken, but not for the reasons Bird thinks. What’s really happened to Bird’s family and others is the novel’s central mystery.

In flashbacks, we learn who Bird’s parents were before him and how they fell so completely in love. When Margaret first met Ethan, she was a bike messenger and a poet. Though she had been raised to conform (according to her Chinese immigrant parents, “To be noticed was to invite predation; better to blend seamlessly into the foliage”), she’d thrown off that advice, moving to New York City, where “no one noticed you...Which meant you could do anything, be anything.”

As an adult, Margaret defied everything she’d been taught, resolving that “if the world was on fire, you might as well burn bright.” Ethan was her opposite: a cautious, squarish, white Midwesterner. He treasured and marveled at her, and she grew calm in his presence, loving the stillness and “the way he handled her, like butter to be licked off a finger.” When they were able to shut out the world together, poems came to Margaret “like timid animals emerging after a storm.” With days consumed by work and child-rearing, the life the couple crafted for themselves and Bird was a sanctuary even as turmoil propagated outside their doors. Margaret didn’t dwell on those external threats, though, preferring to focus on “her poems, her garden, her husband. Bird.” But after Margaret’s obscure volume of poetry, Our Missing Hearts , is taken up as a symbol and rallying cry against the government’s repressive actions—through no fault of her own—the family is shattered.

In the decade since his mother went missing, Bird has been taught to disavow her—to not draw attention to himself. Children of dissidents can be relocated under current laws and extreme measures taken to preserve “American culture.” But a cryptic letter Bird receives prompts a change in his perspective, and sparks a quest to reunite with his mother.

Our Missing Hearts: A Novel

Ng’s portrait of an America roiled by instability and violence and racked by fear is one the author says she felt compelled to draw as real-world events began to intrude on her writing process. And while that portrait is a devastating one, Ng’s brilliance lies in leaving the reader with an unshakable belief that against all odds, people will find the courage to resist, revolt, and defend. Like many before her, Margaret is a reluctant but spectacular revolutionary. How her journey unfolds, and how that affects both Ethan and Bird, is at the beating heart of this remarkable novel, one that is as much paean to art and family as it is chilling cautionary tale.

Carole V Bell is a Jamaican-born writer, culture critic and communication researcher focusing on media, politics, and identity. You can find her on Twitter @BellCV. 

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Books are banned, internet searches are monitored and neighbors are encouraged to spy on one another in Our Missing Hearts , a heartbreaking new novel by Celeste Ng ( Little Fires Everywhere ).

Set in a dystopian near future, “in a version of America that's like ours but maybe with the volume turned up a little bit,” as Ng explained to NPR , Our Missing Hearts centers on 12-year-old Noah “Bird” Gardner. Bird lives with his father, a former college linguistics professor who now works at the college library shelving books. His mother, the Chinese American poet Margaret Miu, vanished without a trace three years earlier, around the time her work became considered controversial amidst the passing of PACT (Preserving American and Culture Traditions), an act opposing foreign cultural influences that allowed the U.S. government to rehome children whose parents are accused of being un-American.

Out of the blue, Bird receives a mysterious letter, a page covered with drawings of cats. Knowing it’s from his mother, he sets off to find her in the book’s central plot. It’s a dangerous mission; this is a world—scarily similar to the one we’re living in—in which people with Asian features are attacked in broad daylight. Still, Bird’s resolve is unflappable. Traveling to New York City, where the letter was postmarked, he connects with an underground network of librarians dedicated to rescuing disappeared books, some of which inspired anti-PACT demonstrations and forced his mother to go underground for the sake of her family.

Though Bird does ultimately find his mom, it’s a bittersweet reunion; Ng makes it clear there’s no happy ending here. The second part of the book, narrated by Margaret, outlines how America got to this place, beginning with a period of economic turmoil known as “The Crisis” that led to the creation of PACT.

Our Missing Hearts is a departure from Ng’s previous novels, but her talent is as apparent as ever. The novel shines when narrated by its innocent, precocious protagonist. Bird is wise beyond his years, holding little to no resentment toward his mother for leaving and maintaining a modicum of hope that they’ll be a regular family again someday.

A poignant and timely commentary on anti-Asian hate, child separation and book bans, but also a celebration of the power of words and stories and the love between mothers and their children, Our Missing Hearts is a gut-punch of a novel that should serve as a cautionary tale. As Ng writes, “Bird and Margaret’s world isn’t exactly our world, but it isn’t not ours either.”

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Wellness Director

Review: Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

Editorial note: I received a copy of Our Missing Hearts in exchange for a review. All opinions are my own.

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng is an impactful story about a mother’s everlasting love.

This novel was one of my most-anticipated of the year. I quite enjoyed Celeste Ng’s previous novel, Little Fires Everywhere , and the Hulu series as well. Her stories have this precise quality to draw you in with sophisticated writing and vivid details. It’s so readable and everlasting—her words truly stay with you for a long time.

While her other novels are set in a present day format, Our Missing Hearts is technically dystopian fiction, but yet, the world doesn’t feel so dissimilar to our current reality.

While there’s no impact from a pandemic in this version of the U.S., there’s economic and political turmoil. Devastating loss of jobs, protests turned violent and overall unease and a fearful mentality approach to day-to-day life.

Still, at the heart of the story is the relationship between mother and son. And despite everything that happens and is discussed, that is the key.

What’s the Story About

We meet twelve-year-old Bird who lives with his father at a university. His mother Margaret, a Chinese American poet, left the family when he was nine years old. Bird’s father does not speak much of Margaret, other than proclaiming she held unpatriotic ideas.

Margaret was a poet and activist—which stands against the PACT (Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act) act. PACT is designed to uphold American ideals and anyone who seems unpatriotic, the government will take action. The authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic.

Bird can’t help and wonder about his mother. When he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her. He will embark on a big journey where eventually it will take him to New York City, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change.

Perspectives

For about the half the book, we read the story from Bird’s perspective. The PACT Act had been in place for most of Bird’s life so he doesn’t know what a world is without these rules. So it’s interesting to learn about PACT from Bird. You can tell he doesn’t quite think it’s right but doesn’t yet fully understand the actual ramifications of it.

For him, he believes his mother was an active voice against it and he doesn’t understand why she would choose her protests over him. But of course, he’s so curious about what happened to her and the drawing might be the key to finding out.

I will say, as great as a character Bird is—I was a little unsure of reading an entire novel in his perspective as then it trends to more of a YA book to me. But about halfway in, we get a shift, which I think served the story well.

The Setting

The setting is flat-out eerie—mainly because it feels realistic. Sometimes dystopian fiction really goes out there but not in this case. I can tell that Celeste Ng wrote this novel from a place of pain, as well as fear of where the country is heading.

In the wake of the pandemic, there was a rise in racism and violent hate crimes against the Asian American communities. A report states that anti-Asian hate crime increased by 339 percent in 2021.

In what felt was drawn from the headlines, Celeste established a somewhat alternative U.S. where those kinds of acts against Asian American communities are not denounced and most often, ignored. It’s not an easy read—there’s quite a bit of violence and trauma showcased.

And while never overly graphic, just the simple mention of the violence leaves a horrific imprint. Especially because it does happen every day in the U.S. The parallels between this alternative world and the one we live in is striking and scary.

Mother and Son

Despite the chaos and uncertainty, this story is truly about the relationship between a mother and son. Bird has so many wonderful memories of his mother and can’t reconcile this image with the activist one who would leave behind her family.

His journey to find her is memorable and full of poignant scenes.

As a mother to a young toddler son, I kept putting myself in Margaret position. I found this story so emotionally charged, even shed a tear at a couple spots, which to be honest, I don’t do often when I read.

Our Missing Hearts is a great novel. Perhaps the best novel of 2022. Touching and so timely. In many ways, it’s a quiet story about one family but also a warning about the dangers of silence and complicity. So while there are some poignant scenes, there is quite bit of a hardship too.

Again, it is a difficult read. But it’s an important one.

There’s so much to discuss with this one. Check out my book club questions here .

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Book Reviews

Celeste ng's powerful new dystopian novel reflects our headlines back to us.

Maureen Corrigan

Our Missing Hearts imagines a world of governmental cruelty — and the armies of citizens who both facilitate and resist. It's a masterful work that epitomizes the possibilities of storytelling.

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Celeste Ng is best known for her 2017 bestselling novel "Little Fires Everywhere," which was set in the upscale suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio. That novel was made into a Hulu series starring Kerry Washington and Reese Witherspoon. Our book critic, Maureen Corrigan, says Ng's latest novel, called "Our Missing Hearts," is set in a world that simultaneously reflects and amplifies our current anxious realities. Here's her review.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: That classic no-win option comes courtesy of Robert Frost's 1920 poem "Fire And Ice," in which he imagines the end of the world arriving via all-consuming desire for conquest, perhaps, or icy hatred. Frost's general categories still hold up in contemporary dystopian fiction, whether it's the fever of a pandemic, as in Emily St. John Mandel's "Station Eleven" or Ling Ma's "Severance," or the subzero misogyny of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale." Celeste Ng's latest novel, "Our Missing Hearts," also leans towards ice as it imagines the ends of things - in this case, the end of American democracy being precipitated by the chill of mass indifference. Fear muffles freedom of expression and obliterates any books or people suspected of dissent. In her author's note, Ng says that the world she's summoned up in "Our Missing Hearts" isn't exactly our world, but it isn't not ours, either. It's the novel's close congruity to our current off-kilter reality, so easily tipped here into "The Twilight Zone," that makes "Our Missing Hearts" even more unsettling than are many other more extreme dystopian visions.

The opening section of "Our Missing Hearts" has the feel of a YA crossover novel, starting with our main character, a 12-year-old boy named Bird, who lives with his father, a former college professor, now mysteriously demoted to shelving books in the campus library. Bird's mother, Margaret, a poet, vanished without explanation some three years earlier. Margaret was a PAO, a person of Asian origin, a Kung Pao, as some of Bird's classmates taunt. They also call her a traitor, someone who violated something called the PACT law - Preserving American Culture and Traditions.

Bird learns early from his white father that it's better not to respond to provocation. Just keep on walking, his father says if passersby stare, their gazes like centipedes on Bird's face. One day, Bird receives a letter - a sheet of paper, really - filled with ballpoint drawings of cats. Bird knows the letter is from his mother. He recognizes the handwriting on the envelope and dimly remembers a Japanese folktale she'd tell him about a boy and cats. How do you find information in a world where conducting research is dangerous, given the fact that all electronic devices are under surveillance?

Bird stumbles on the answer by visiting a place considered too obsolete to monitor - the good, old brick-and-mortar public library, filled with print. There, he eventually connects with an underground network of librarians dedicated to rescuing disappeared books and people. That ingenious plotline alone about librarians as resistance fighters is enough to garner "Our Missing Hearts" a whole lot of love from readers and, of course, the American Library Association. But it's in the second section of this novel, a flashback, where we learn how what's called the crisis happened in America, where Ng's writing becomes richer and her story more disturbing in its near familiarity.

Here are excerpts from Margaret's extended recollection, beginning with an economic downturn. (Reading) It started slowly at first, the way most things did. Shops began to shudder, here and there at first, like cavities in teeth. And suddenly, whole blocks were empty all over the country. Almost imperceptibly, the story of the crisis had begun to solidify. Soon enough, it would harden like silt from turbid water, settling in a thick band of mud. We know who caused all this, people were beginning to say, fingers pointed firmly east. Suspicious eyes swiveled to those with foreign faces, foreign names.

Anti-Asian violence, children taken away from their parents by the government, nativist resentment in the land of immigrants - "Our Missing Hearts" reflects our headlines back to us. But it also powerfully and persuasively offers hope for changing those headlines. In a final moving turn, the novel dramatizes how bearing witness through art and simply speaking up can melt indifference. That sounds sentimental, I know, but Ng's own masterful telling of this tale of governmental cruelty and the shadow armies of ordinary citizens who both facilitate and resist is its own best testimony to the unpredictable possibilities of storytelling.

DAVIES: Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "Our Missing Hearts" by Celeste Ng.

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DAVIES: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Therese Madden, Ann Marie Baldonado, Thea Chaloner, Seth Kelley and Susan Nyakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross, I'm Dave Davies.

Copyright © 2022 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

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Our Missing Hearts

by Celeste Ng

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A chilling novel set in an alternate present in which state-sanctioned violence against Asians and Asian Americans tears families and communities apart.

Celeste Ng's dystopian novel Our Missing Hearts wowed readers in our First Impressions program. All 22 who reviewed the book gave it four or five stars. What it's about: The author holds up a mirror to our present world with all its division, anger and paranoia. Bird and his father are forced to live apart from Bird's mother, who is Chinese American, to keep them all safe from the new law of the land – the Preserving American Culture and Traditions (PACT) Act. Anyone of Chinese birth or ancestry is considered a danger to PACT. Chinese children are removed from their homes, books are banned and freedom of speech is only acceptable if you agree with PACT. As disturbing as the premise is, it is still a story of a family, of love, of faith in humanity and the fallibility of people trying to do the best that they can (Peggy S). It tells the story of a 12-year-old boy, Bird, who lives with his father in Cambridge, MA. Bird's mother has left the family because her Asian ethnicity could put them at risk. It's been three years since she left but Bird still misses her, and, without his father's knowledge, decides to find her based on a letter he receives with a New York return address (Joyce M). Though the book has a dystopian premise, it was appreciated by many who do not normally read this genre: Our Missing Hearts is a story that should be classified as dystopian but is so close to reality that to call it dystopian would diminish its impact. Ng has done something wonderful and heartbreaking with her third novel. She takes a mirror to our society, one that presents reality with just enough distortion to both reflect it and warp it into something unsettling but no less true (Lori S). I do not enjoy reading dystopian novels. They make me angry and anxious. But Celeste Ng wrote this and I would read a phone book if she wrote it. Although the setting and plot are both very dark, the characters are so well drawn and loving I found this novel to be uplifting, hopeful and inspiring (Shirley L). I'm not usually a fan of dystopian fiction. But this novel held my attention and I suspect will be a big bestseller. I hope the message is heard loud and clear (Karen S). Some readers admired how Our Missing Hearts attests to the power of books and libraries: The author addresses how poetry is a life force; folktales preserve the past's wisdom; society unlearns lessons and then must go to extremes to stop repeating the past's dysfunctions; art is protest; and written and spoken words matter because of their potential power for both good and evil. I was touched by the example of the efficacy of libraries in the communities' resilience and librarians as a vital source of protection for the survival of both literature and children (Rule B). Among other things it is a love letter to libraries and those who protect free speech (Pam S). The characters are well-developed and Ng's use of public art displays, rallies, poetry and folktales to spread messages about the past and the future add depth to the story (Amy A). As well as how it reflects our current political climate: This book is set in a dystopian world that is scarily comparable to where we may be heading. Many of the themes are ones that have already occurred, are presently happening, and could happen if we continue down the path some people in power want us to follow (Donna C). This is one of the best books I have read in a long time. It is a terrifying and all too believable fable that imagines a not-too-distant future America (Pam S). This book hit close to home for me as someone who has lived on the edge between being a Chinese person and being an American — finding it hard to fit in at school or in the community because of looking and acting different. Ever since the rise in Asian hate crimes across the country, my parents have constantly told me to keep a low profile and keep my head down. This book gave me chills (Alice L). Many also noted that it's a great read for book clubs: Our Missing Hearts would be an excellent choice for a book club. The masterfully written subplots broaden our understanding of real-life situations encountered by many Americans in our current (and past) cultural climate. I can't wait to discuss this book with my own book group! (Laurie L). This book is dark, emotional, and also hopeful. I definitely recommend it and think it will be great for readers that have loved Celeste Ng's other books and a great one for book club discussions (Alice L).

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Book Review: ‘Our Missing Hearts’ by Celeste Ng

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng transports us to a near-dystopian future where Asian Americans are sidelined in society due to security fears soaring too high over China, and their contributions, especially in the arts, are being systematically eliminated from public consumption.

Bird is a 12-year-old boy who lives with his university librarian father. His mother is out of the picture, but he doesn’t know where she is. She was known as Margaret Miu, a Chinese American poet whose indie-published poetry collection became a target under PACT, or the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act. The poem, “Our Missing Hearts,” remains a rallying cry for the disenfranchised, which includes Asian Americans, now known as Persons of Asian Origin, and other people of color who are still seen as threats. At school, Bird only has one friend, Sadie. Outspoken about being taken from her “Chinese sympathizer” parents, Sadie brings up the memories of her peaceful home and how the current politics destroyed it. Being a biracial girl, Sadie has a hard time staying with foster families. Within a split second, Sadie is transferred out of their community. But Sadie’s stories about her parents have already influenced Bird, who is tapping into his memories of his mother. He receives letters he feels are from his mother with illustrations of cats. He tries to solve the riddles, yet he needs more information. His father refuses to bring up his mother, but Bird is getting older and has questions that lead him on a journey that thrusts him into a world of advocacy. 

All over the country, a scattered network of librarians would note this information, collating it with the Rolodex in their minds, cross-referencing it with the re-placed children they might have learned about. Some kept a running written list, but most, wary, simply trusted to memory. An imperfect system, but the brain of a librarian was a capacious place.

In the real world of banned books impacting libraries, the story shows a deep connection to libraries and librarians acting as justice-seekers. Bird’s father is a linguist whose connection to Margaret has relegated him from professor to librarian. Because he is White, he can raise Bird, but he fears the times when someone may detect Bird’s Asian ancestry in his son’s facial features. This fear forces Bird’s father to remain a quiet librarian who refuses to break the rules. On the opposite side, when Bird sneaks off to the library, librarians search for Margaret’s book or another related book such as one featuring Asian fairy tales on Bird’s behalf. They know these books have been banned, but they still hold out hope they can be found. Someone requesting a banned book may be an advocate. The librarians are sharing notes between pages of books as a secret communications channel for advocates. 

The advocates are seeking racial justice. Asian Americans are in hiding or have been removed through imprisonment or deportation. When one group is being disenfranchised more than ever, then other historically disenfranchised groups do not feel safe. It’s why Marie Johnson, a first-year college student who’s African American, went to a protest and used “Our Missing Hearts” as a rallying cry for the first time. She is killed by a police officer’s stray bullet. The event puts a target on Margaret’s back. That’s when she lives her life on the run, especially since Child Protective Services threatened to take Bird away. Margaret finds herself at Marie’s parents’ house, where she believes they could provide a haven. They are upset that this Asian woman has shown up at their door when her poetry inadvertently led to the events that killed their Black daughter. It forces Margaret to reconcile how she saw her parents react fearfully in the presence of African Americans in the past and how most people react fearfully toward her now as an Asian American. 

She thought, belatedly, of the Asian and Black worlds, orbiting each other warily, frozen at a distance in a precarious push-pull. In her childhood: a young Black girl shot, Los Angeles on fire, Korean stores aflame. Her parents had fumed, reading the news, indignant at the damage, the delinquency . And then, years later, a young Black man dead in a stairwell, a Chinese American cop’s finger on the trigger. There’d been outcry on all sides — an accident, police brutality, scapegoating — until the circles separated again into an uneasy truce.

Margaret’s line of thought goes to the uprising known as the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, which kindled after the acquittal of the police officers who had viciously beaten Rodney King. The uprising inflamed with the burning of Korean American business owners’ stores because of the death of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, a Black teenager who was killed by a Korean American grocer the year before. In 2014, Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old Black man, was killed by an Asian American police officer in an apartment building in Brooklyn, New York. In both cases, the punishments were reduced to probation. The aforementioned events emphasize the community relationships fractured by the hierarchical racial caste system that has been turned on its head in the story with Asian Americans at the bottom compared to African Americans who had historically been at the bottom. The story emphasizes how discrimination toward any group harms the entire society as productivity goes down by raising widespread fear and accusing people of not being American enough. 

Margaret eventually becomes a part of the resistance in New York City by trying to raise the volume on the injustice. As Margaret hides from society the best she can, Bird finds himself in hiding as well on his quest to search for the mother he barely knew and for the solution that would bring his family together again.

Overall, the story hits a timely chord as a believable dystopia as anti-Asian hate peaked amid the COVID-19 pandemic and security concerns out of China. The thread on banned books and the authors who wrote them being shunned is also a real issue that penetrates the media every day. Seeing how these relevant issues interplay in a society driven by fear is eye-opening, especially through the lens of a boy who only wants to know where his mother is and how he can find her. Family separation, particularly for Indigenous Americans and people of color who are immigrants, is another issue that has spanned centuries in North America. Bird’s innocence and determination to get answers about his mother’s whereabouts soften the edges of the distressful storyline. The poetic storytelling helps move the mundaneness as the characters seek justice.

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Review: Our Missing Hearts

Our Missing Hearts , Celeste Ng. New York: Penguin Press, 2022.

Summary: Bird Gardner and his father spend life trying not to be noticed, even as Bird wonders about his mother, the stories she told, why she left them, and where she has gone in a country that turned against her poetry even as one phrase became a rallying cry for all those separated from their children.

This is a haunting work because one sees all the elements except for a PACT act. Economic crisis. Anti-Asian prejudice and violence. The use of blaming foreign powers and actors for our problems. The use of state power to separate children from their parents. The removal of books from schools and libraries. The surveillance state we have lived in since 9/11.

All of this comes together around a twelve year old boy, Bird Gardner, living with his father, who works in an academic library, who loves words, and desperately is working to avoid anything to raise suspicion that could result in Bird being taken away from him. Bird’s mother Margaret left them when he was nine. A book of poems she wrote when she was carrying him, and one poem in particular with the line “our missing hearts” became associated with the rallying cry and symbol of a resistance movement to the forced removal of children from their homes for the least suspicion of violating the PACT Act (Preserving American Culture and Traditions).

Although his father has taught Bird that they must disavow her and have no communication with her, he both misses her and wonders why she would leave them and what she is doing now. Sadie, a school friend, and one of the removed children, thinks his mother is part of the resistance movement that, out of nowhere puts up protest installations of hearts or other symbols of the missing children.

But Bird doesn’t learn the true story until a series of clues that begins with a letter without return address covered with cat drawings leads to looking in a closet in their former home (still owned but closed up while they live in a dorm apartment), where Bird finds an address in New York City.

With the help of a librarian, who is part of an underground network of librarians who are collecting a database of parents and missing children, Bird figures out how to get to New York where he reconnects with his mother through a rich mutual friend, Dutchess (Domi) who lives at the address he’d found. Over several days in a derelict house, his mother tells the story of her life–how she and Domi survived the Crisis which led to the passage of the PACT act, how she met Bird’s father, wrote a book of poetry with paltry sales until the death of one protestor carrying the words “our missing hearts” was captured in a photograph at the moment she was fatally shot. The book was found among her effects, sold like crazy until the authorities shut it down, and vilified the author, who’d never meant to spawn a resistance.

She tells of the decision to leave to save Bird from being parted from both parents, and her awakening as she learned of what had happened to so many children that she had avoided knowing. She tells the story as she makes bottle cap devices with wires and transistors and “seeds” these throughout the city for her own act of resistance.

I have not heard the audio version of this but the voice I hear is one of quiet, but insistent wondering, both of Bird, and then of Margaret. Each is trying to unravel a story, Bird of his mother, Margaret of all the lost children, beginning with the young woman who died in protest. Both are engaged in a quiet resistance rooted in the pursuit of truth–unwilling to accept any longer the “comply and keep your head down” ethic fostered by PACT. Even Bird’s decision at the very end reflects that quiet, resistant pursuit of truth.

The haunting thing about this book is the awareness that the dystopian state Ng portrays is not that far removed from our present day reality. As I mentioned in the beginning, nearly all of the pieces are there. I suspect most of us are, like Margaret, among those who do not want to see, who think, this cannot happen here. The author of Little Fires Everywhere could have called this Little Resistances Everywhere. Ng portrays what a resistance of truth that will not bow to power might look like. And in doing so, this book feels like it is Ng’s own quiet act of resistance.

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5 thoughts on “ review: our missing hearts ”.

The PACT Act puts me in mind of the edict issued by Texas Governor Greg Abbott earlier this year requiring Child Protective Services to investigate, (with the potential for child removal) families who sought transgender care for their children. No matter what one believes about this issue, the state intervening in these families lives this way is all about attempts to “protect American culture and traditions”, at least as viewed through the lens of the Texas government’s far right Evangelical Christianity. Our next legislative session begins in early 2023. I fully expect horrible laws targeting LGBTQ individuals to come out of this session, including many directed at children and families.

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That is disturbing. As an evangelical Christian, minus the “far right,” what most concerns me is the making of cultural identity into a kind of god, or ultimate allegiance, which the Bible would call apostasy and idolatry. I am deeply concerned about the “othering” implicit in all this and the use of state power to inflict harm, simply for not being “like us.”

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Our Missing Hearts: Reese's Book Club (A Novel) Hardcover – October 4, 2022

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• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Penguin Press
• Publication date October 4, 2022
• Dimensions 6.25 x 1 x 9.25 inches
• ISBN-10 0593492544
• ISBN-13 978-0593492543
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Press; First Edition (October 4, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593492544
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593492543
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1 x 9.25 inches
• #87 in Asian American Literature & Fiction
• #716 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
• #2,047 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Celeste Ng is the number one New York Times bestselling author of the novels Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and Our Missing Hearts. Ng is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and her work has been published in over thirty languages.

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Missing Silver Valley Pastor found dead

A Silver Valley pastor who was reported missing Tuesday and found dead later that day died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to the Pinehurst Police Department.

Real Life Ministries Silver Valley members contacted police at about 8:05 a.m. Tuesday saying they couldn’t find Gene Jacobs after he failed to show up to a 6 a.m. church meeting, police said in a news release. Church elders’ calls and texts to the pastor went unanswered.

Jacobs left his residence on foot at about 5:30 a.m., according to video footage from a nearby residence.

The Shoshone County Sheriff’s Office was called to assist in finding Jacobs, police said. Pinehurst police learned of potential threats made to Jacobs, so the search team investigated the possibility of an abduction. That was soon discounted when Jacobs’ water bottle was found on a trail he is known to often hike, according to police.

Pinehurst residents, church elders, a few law enforcement agencies that included a K-9 and a drone team searched the steep trails and hillsides but no track was established.

Shoshone County and Kootenai County search teams, as well as an airplane and helicopter, joined the search. The helicopter located Jacobs at about 6 p.m. off the trail. A recovery team responded to the location and found Jacobs dead, police said.

His body was removed from the location and turned over to the Shoshone County Coroner and a funeral home. Police said initial indication is that Jacobs died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. An autopsy is scheduled.

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