Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng starts slow; initially it’s too easy to put down, until, well, it isn’t.
Much has to do with the mystery surrounding the absence of 12-year-old Bird’s mother who his father refuses to acknowledge while insisting his son to do the same. They live in a not-too-distant dystopian world where fear and suspicion rule based on safeguarding America’s culture known as PACT.
It’s a time when children are removed from parents suspected of seditious thoughts and behaviors. Those of Chinese, and by default all Asians, are considered threats. Bird’s mother Margaret is Chinese American and a poet. Her work goes largely unnoticed until one day PACT protesters use a line from one of her poems for their cause: Our Missing Hearts. To protect her son, she leaves the family.
Despite his father’s pleas, Bird’s curiosity about his mother becomes a driving force. These efforts to find her are where the narrative revs up.
Margaret’s story catches the past up with the present. This includes her childhood in the neighborhood’s only Asian family, later surviving on the streets when the economy collapses (blamed on the Chinese), and meeting Bird’s father and becoming a mother.
It’s been years since Margaret has written poetry, but she embraces a new passion based on the protester’s slogan: she tries to meet and interview as many parents as possible whose children have been taken from them.
Ng’s writing is vivid and frightening in its depiction of how self-preservation is manipulated by fear.
Out Missing Hearts
Four Bookmarks
Penguin Press, 2022
335 pages (includes author’s notes and acknowledgements)
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