Celeste Ng (pronounced ‘Ing’), grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, and she identifies as Asian American. Informed by this background, her writing is set within a United States of America (USA) framework.
She wrote Everything I Never Told You (2014), and then her bestselling novel, Little Fires Everywhere (2017). This won several awards, including the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the ALA’s Alex Award. Little Fires Everywhere has been published in more than thirty languages, and been adapted as a limited series on Hulu, starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. When Our Missing Hearts was first published, it, too, became an instant bestseller.
What I admire about all three of Celeste’s novels is her ability to portray authentic well-rounded characters, how she tells convincing human stories, and leaves me thinking about everything long after I’ve finished reading. What a superb gift. Unlike her previous contemporary stories, however, Celeste has taken a different direction with Our Missing Hearts – that of a plausible dystopian near future.
A constant thread in Our Missing Hearts is the demonisation of China. Following ‘the Crisis’ – a fictitious catastrophic societal breakdown – the US government has passed the PACT bill: ‘Preserving American Culture and Traditions’. Anything remotely Asian is now perceived by all ‘patriotic’ Americans as a threat. That’s authoritarian rule for you and, so far, so believable.
‘A cable-news host who’d defended PACT from the beginning – Chinese American? he’d said, there’s no such thing – scanned the photo from the back of Margaret’s book and flashed it onscreen. Letting her foreign face say it all.’
Similar to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, much of what Celeste writes about in Our Missing Hearts is either happening now, or has already happened. I’m referring specifically to the current active banning of books in the US, the censorship of public libraries, and state-sanctioned restrictions of reading material in schools, colleges and universities. In a recent online article, I was alarmed to read that,
‘Between August and November [2022], Missouri banned nearly three hundred books in at least eleven school districts, according to PEN America.’
From: ‘A streak of extremism’: US book bans may increase in 2023’, by Adam Gabbatt, The Guardian; published 24/12/2022.
PEN America is a non-profit organisation that works to defend and celebrate free expression, in the USA and worldwide, through the advancement of literature and human rights. Given that context, Gabbatt’s article makes for a sobering read altogether. Of course, this is not something that happened ‘back in the day’; neither is it specific to the US, but it’s no surprise to me that books are being banned. Again.
‘Oh, no, we don’t burn books here. This is America. Right?… We pulp them. Much more civilized, right? Mash them up, recycle them into toilet paper. Those books wiped someone’s rear end a long time ago.’
In Our Missing Hearts, however, it’s not just books and literature that are banned. Non-PACT compliance of any kind is actively sought out and quashed. No, that wording is too sanitised; the authorities literally remove children from families who are deemed ‘non-patriotic’, and place them in foster homes. Often, children disappear altogether. And there it is, the backbone of the story – the ‘missing hearts.’
Divided into three sections, Our Missing Hearts tells the story of Ethan Gardner, a linguist turned librarian; his wife, Margaret Miu, a Chinese American poet; and their only child, Noah, aka Bird. The first section shows us Ethan and Bird’s suffocating existence since Margaret left them. In the second section, we learn why Margaret left, and how she’s fared since. The final section ties all the threads together and gives a conclusion. Not a ‘happily ever after,’ but at least the ending leaves us with hope:
‘… that thing with feathers that perches in the soul / and sings the tune without words / and never stops at all.’ Emily Dickinson.
Hope is depicted throughout Our Missing Hearts as non-violent action through art. It takes the form of ‘yarn bombs’, where protestors cover tree trunks and branches with knitted coloured yarn, dangling crocheted baubles in the shapes of children, and hearts. Red hearts are stencil-sprayed onto public spaces. Poetry is memorised and shared, albeit in whispers.
While reading, I thought of residential schools for First Nations children, recent newsreel images of caged children at the southern US border, the shocking legacies of Irish Mother and Baby Homes, those abhorrent conversion programmes for LGBTQ+ people. Not for the first time, it struck me how effective the removal of children becomes as a means of political control.
There’s a symbolism I appreciate in Our Missing Hearts, whereby Celeste casts sympathetic librarians as conduits for information; how, in the story, she appoints them to shelter and protect child protagonists.
‘Bird doesn’t fully understand … I’m sorry, he says meekly. The librarian sighs. How can you know, she says, if no one teaches you, and no one ever talks about it, and all the books are gone?’
I found reading Our Missing Hearts profoundly unsettling. Jeepers tonight … if it wasn’t for the fact that ‘hope never stops at all’, this book would’ve utterly broken me.
Here’s the blurb:
‘Our Missing Hearts is an old story made new, of the ways supposedly civilized communities can turn a blind eye to the most searing injustices. It’s a story about the power – and limitations – of art to create change in the world, the lessons and legacies we pass onto our children, and how any of us can survive a broken world with our hearts intact.’
(c) Jo Nestor
Jo Nestor, retired Adult Educator, lives in Leitrim and writes fulltime. Twice long-listed for FISH memoir competitions, she won the Leitrim Guardian Literary Award, 2020. Recent writing features in 2022 and 2021 editions of the broadsheet, Autumn Leaves, and her book reviews at www.writing.ie She chooses to live in hope.
Order your copy online here.
