Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng

Celeste Ng’s magnificent, devasting novel, Our Missing Hearts, is the perfect book for our times, in the best possible way. It’s like Ng took all of my worries about the world and validated them without offering false hope (change is going to take work). This book is one I’m going to be pushing into readers’ hands for months (if not years) to come.

Bird Gardner lives in New England, sometime in the not-too-distant future. He once had a mother but now only lives with his dad, who constantly repeats rules meant to keep the shrunken family together: don’t talk about his poet mother to anyone, avoid trouble at all costs, and don’t question the PACT (Protect American Culture and Traditions Act). These rules are troubling, of course, but what’s even more troubling are PACT’s ripple effects throughout American society. Bird isn’t the only one trying to avoid trouble because the powers that be have figured out how to control all dissent. To keep people quiet, take away their children.

In her afterword, Ng points to historical precedents for governments taking children away from parents who are, somehow, a challenge to the majority’s status quo. Governments in the United States, Canada, Australia, and other places took indigenous children from their parents to “civilize” them. The Trump administration separated children from immigrant parents. It is a terrifyingly effective tactic. In Our Missing Hearts, Bird slowly learns why his friend, Sadie (who was taken from her activist parents), burns with fury at the adults around her who keep her from going home, why everyone seems so afraid to voice their thoughts, why so many books have been removed from the libraries and schools, and, above all, why his mother had to leave.

Our Missing Hearts is narrated by Bird except for a middle section in which Bird’s mother, Margaret, gets to tell her story. She takes us back to an economic collapse so awful that it eclipsed the Great Depression. The collapse—called the Crisis—was blamed on China, where Margaret’s parents emigrated from. People of Asian descent (Chinese or otherwise) were attacked or shunned by white Americans. (Ng references the racially motivated murder of Vincent Chin in the afterword.) Margaret tells us how she survived the Crisis and found Bird’s father. Their love story is beautifully told and had my heart aching long before Margaret gets to the part where she explains how one of her poems became a flashpoint in the anti-Asian/anti-PACT movement.

One thing that really jumped out at me about Our Missing Hearts was the use of art to protest PACT and the complacency of white Americans. Because the fear of losing one’s children is so strong, activists have gone underground instead of staging mass protests or more forceful responses to oppression, people will create guerilla works of art that can’t be traced to anyone but that remind anyone who sees them that children are being stolen. Margaret’s eponymous poem is often quoted. Librarians also get a shoutout as part of the resistance, which pleased me greatly.

This book was an incredible read. Ng plays the emotions like a virtuoso and I was close to tears more than once because of the beauty Ng invoked for the power of art, Margaret’s love for her family, and Bird’s awakening to the world around him. It also had my clenching my hands in fists at the way that PACT stole so many freedoms in the name of a little security against future economic and social turmoil. Ng does all of this without making anything too easy and without preaching. It works as fiction unlike a lot of books I’ve read that have sᴏᴍᴇᴛʜɪɴɢ ɪᴍᴘᴏʀᴛᴀɴᴛ ᴛᴏ sᴀʏ. This book is phenomenal.