Our Missing Hearts is a Masterpiece

 

OUR MISSING HEARTS (2022)

By Celeste Ng

Penguin Press, 335 pages.

★★★★★

 

 

 

 

Our Missing Hearts was influenced by Margaret Atwood, the foster care system, slavery, the removal of Native American children from their homes, the early days of COVID, Japanese internment in the 1940s, folk tales, anti-Trump protests, McCarthyism, anti-immigrant border debates, and yarn bombing. In most cases, if you pick up a novel whose list of influences is that long and varied, alarm bells go off in your head. What we can say about the latest work from Celeste Ng is that it's not a good novel; it's a great one. If it gets half the publicity it deserves, Our Missing Hearts will become The Handmaid’s Tale of this generation. Like Atwood's masterpiece, Ng's novel packs the additional wallop of feeling way-too-plausible.

 

Ng takes us to a not-so-distant American dystopia. A series of events known as the Crisis has decimated the economy. Those with resources have isolated themselves to ride out the Crisis, but so many people have lost their jobs that few have even part time work. For them, life in America has come to resemble that of places such as Chad or Haiti. The streets are a war of all against all and even basic needs such as food and shelter are day-to-day conundrums. Think squatting, contingency labor, dumpster diving, stealing copper wire, and forging survival pods with others.

 

When the Crisis finally begins to subside, leaders convince the citizenry that an external enemy, China, and its agents caused the collapse. This precipitates attacks on Chinese Americans and Asians in general, as few non-yellow Americans can (or bother to) tell the difference between them. Congress passes the Preserving American Culture and Traditions (PACT) act that most of the populace embrace as salvation. Asian Americans learn to keep a low profile and endure taunts, spitting, and random violence against those unlucky enough to stumble into the wrong place.

 

The Gardner family is at the center of Ng's drama. Nathan is a linguist, librarian, and adjunct Harvard professor from a well-to-do family. During the Crisis he marries Margaret Miu, a spirited and creative Chinese American woman. They produce a son, Bird, whom Margaret loves so dearly that she devotes a volume of poetry to him. Like those who escaped the streets during the Crisis, Margaret is too grateful to see the full implications of PACT when it ends. It is unique to say the least; a major provision guaranteed to make America “safe,” allows the government to remove children from disloyal homes to “protect” America's future. With no prompting or knowledge on her part, Margaret's poetry volume about Bird, which includes the line that titles Ng's novel, becomes an underground classic with “missing heart” iconography showing up on the streets. Margaret's parents die, her father pushed down a flight of steps by an attacker and her mother from a fall that might or might not be suicide. Margaret knows that the only way Bird–rechristened as Noah–can avoid being taken is for her to disappear. Even then, Nathan loses most of his work and his home; he and Noah are reduced to living in two rooms on the 10^th floor of a dormitory.

 

The novel’s subtext is what Bird remembers–he was young when his mother left– or can piece together. He is a curious child and a lonely one because he cannot hide his mixed-race attributes, but he does have one friend, Sadie, a foster child obsessed with re-finding her biological parents. Information is nearly impossible to find. Libraries have been carefully curated, as Noah/Bird discovers when he tries to find his mother’s poetry; the very attempt potentially places he and Nathan in jeopardy. But Bird is a sensitive adolescent and he thinks he knows where his mother has gone.

 

It would be easy to overdo a novel like this, but Ng recounts horror, hope, crushed dreams, and quiet rebellion in poetic but never pretentious language that illumines detail, deepens pathos, provokes us to anger, and awakens our fear that, yes, this could happen here. It is healing in its insistence that stories are powerful and that knowledge liberates. Ng also understands that resistance and change are processes, not hokey one-offs. There's even a nod to tribalism, if you choose a clan on the side of true goodness rather than pandering sloganeering. What a beautiful and timely book! Ng writes like an angel. Maybe that's because the heavenly hosts are on her side.

 

Rob Weir