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.
