Book Review: "Our Missing Hearts" by Celeste Ng

The novel thinks that art moves people to action. But in this society, art does not move people to action.

On October 15th, two activists of the JustStopOil collective threw tomato soup at Sunflowers, Vincent van Gogh’s famous painting that hangs on London’s National Gallery. The idea was to start a conversation on climate change and, indeed, conversations abound: whether or not it was a good idea (why a painting? why not sensibly protest?), openly questioning its purpose in regards to the larger topic of the climate crisis for days at end, and doing anything but talking about the climate crisis at hand. Now imagine this concept mapped out to Asian-American racism. That’s the premise that Celeste Ng’s latest novel, Our Missing Hearts, is based on, and the world that she thrusts protagonist Bird Gardner onto.

Bird Gardner has a white father, Ethan, and an Asian mother, Margaret, and looks more like his mother than his father. This is a problem in a post-PACT world United States, where Bird is regularly harassed and ostracized by the people in his school for looking Asian. To make matters worse, Margaret has been gone from Bird’s life for the past three years — because she’s “a traitor”, the reader is told at first (though gradually finds out why exactly she is gone). One day, Bird receives a letter that he supposes can only come from his mother; she is the only one that calls him Bird and not his birth name Noah. So, twelve-year-old Bird sets out alone to New York to find his mother.

The novel is separated in three acts, with all three written in the same omnipresent narrator style that Ng has written her last two novels, Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere, in. While the first act centers Bird, the second about Margaret, and the third alternating between the two, for the most part the perspective shifts freely from one character to the next. After Margaret reunites with her son — this happens about one third into the novel in — the novel leads to a protest piece planned and acted out by Margaret that leads to the FBI finding her at her hideout. Throughout, flashbacks are employed whenever Ng feels the need to explain — the second is practically all retrospective —, and usually it is more than what is necessary: lines and lines of explanation following a simple question, or answer, or sentence. Moments where the reader finds themselves in a character’s head that adds nothing to the understanding to the world or character, and in fact may even water it down. For instance, the sentence “That’s everything, Margaret says shortly, and lets out a sigh — of satisfaction? Of sadness? It isn’t clear.” is so overwritten it leaves one wondering whether or not Ng can conceive giving the reader the chance to figure it out by themselves and the strength of the context — if not by metaphors like debut Everything I Never Told You, then by straightforward explanation. Characters in the debut (literally) died by the weight of their metaphors and meanings. In Our Missing Hearts they are vacuumed. Here, the world is a message, one so large that everybody of a remarkably small cast has to represent one facet of it.

Like literary books and indie movies are often wont to do, realism takes precedence over drama in Our Missing Hearts, and so Bird’s decision to find his mother, his mother’s tumultuous past, and her ambitious art piece never really hit the way they should — in no small part because Ng is more interested in narrating. Ostensibly, this has to do with one of the novel’s many ambitiously tackled but never fully realized themes: the act of storytelling, specifically oral traditions. In one of the clunkiest scenes of the novel, Margaret meets the parents of a Black protester shot by police, who tell Margaret her daughter’s entire life story. This scene begins with Margaret meeting the Black mother, which represents the Black and Asian-American community as a whole:

Studying Margaret, Margaret wondered what [the Black mother] saw. She wondered, belatedly, of the Asian and Black worlds, orbiting each other warily, frozen at a distance in a precarious push-and-pull. In her childhood: a young Black girl shot, Los Angeles on fire, Korean stores aflame. […] And then, years later, a young Black man dead in a stairwell, a Chinese American cop’s finger on the trigger.

Elsewhere Bird finds his mother through a Japanese folktale banned by the government that she had told him when he was younger, and he later hears PACT from her with the thought that it was mythical before Margaret filled it with her story. Our Missing Hearts is recited as a poem that the reader never hears in full. As the novel ties the act of storytelling not just in its prose (that avoids quotation marks), but also its characters, it misses the aspect of escalation in the process. I do not necessarily think there have to be racists in a book that covers racism, but saying slurs doesn’t have the same impact as state-enacted and state-enabled violence, such as it seems to be happening here (a conclusion one does not arrive at through the strength of the text, but rather by mapping the situation of the novel onto the physics of the real world). Considering the importance and its validity of the message, it makes for a poor decision overall. It never feels like a story, only a vehicle to discuss bigger themes, larger ideas, whole histories and — with the grace of a sledgehammer — race relations.

That’s a shame, though, because the world Ng is valiantly trying to capture is one every immigrant secretly fears. As Margaret tells it to Bird: following a devastating recession that nobody in America can quite pinpoints its reasons of (capitalism is not even mentioned once in this novel, so the inevitable endgame thereof is automatically disqualified), an East Asian man shoots a Texan senator who ramped up sinophobic sentiments. Following a nationwide outrage, PACT is enacted, helping the country normalize itself. Asian Americans become PAO — Person of Asian Origin, deliberately erasing the revolutionary aims of the Asian American label itself. And to them, the lines of American cultures and traditions shift with every passing minute: what initially starts with “having any doubts about anything American”, “appearing insufficiently anti-China” ends up someplace at “having any ties to China at all — no matter how many generations past”. PACT, and subliminally the assassination of the senator, gives people a free pass to hate crime Asian Americans (curiously, in this novel, South Asian Americans such as Indians, Pakistanis, and Filipinos are not mentioned, while Vietnamese and Thai people are). PACT also means that a poetry collection by an Asian American immediately means it’s critical of PACT, American values, and the just-recovered United States — a fate that befalls Margaret, who suffers an extensive campaign of targeted harassment by right-wing groups. PACT and the atmosphere it creates has every Asian American fearing for themselves, giving them the anxiety that nobody is in their corner. The mass-displacements of children, usually children of color (Bird’s best friend, Sadie, is also displaced and half-Black and white) and parents alike, specifically Asian Americans only add to the same conclusion: keep your head down, do not stand out. It’s a potent concept, ripe with conflict and violence (inside the community, inside oneself, and outside the community) and instantly relatable to marginalized communities. In her lengthy Author’s Notes, doubling as a justification to a book that is already chock full of narrative justifications, Ng explains that the book was written in the early pandemic, back when Trump took to call coronavirus the “Chinese virus”, and China was to blame for the devastating illness that spread out to the world. It shines through in the work itself, a guiding light of the work throughout. I do not want to dismiss the very valid fears that gripped Asian Americans two years ago. It is, to be frank, the fuel to the best part of the novel, when Ng stops explaining and shows a Chinatown where nothing Chinese is left on the stores, and everywhere the signs declare it is 100% American. Wary Asian Americans eye Bird wishing that he leaves them alone, but nevertheless it creates a vivid mirror for Bird, who finally sees people like him and his mother.

Unlike in the novel, the last two years hasn’t just hit Asian American people, but all marginalized communities, a result of worsening economies enabling the rise of fascism. Suppose that the focus on Asian Americans alone is because Ng writes what she knows, which isn’t Black or Latino culture but Asian American culture. Suppose this is because Ng wants to highlight something she considers underwritten. Again, this is valid. But the idea that a Texan senator would lead to an outrage that not even card-carrying, Democrat-voting liberals would contest, feels paranoid on the author’s part. The idea that no other marginalized community would help, quite literally naming a standstill between Black people and Asian-Americans, leaves no room to community (tellingly, the act of storytelling between the Black character and Margaret is one-sided) and real revolutionary ideas. If the novel had anger like reviews claim it does, it is misdirected because the plot is too busy spoon-feeding readers every character’s thought, its blow softened with the ending, in which Bird decides he will learn about his mother through her poems. Meanwhile, she’s gone again. Why? Will PACT be abolished just because Bird does that? Is state truly this rattled by a couple of stories? Or is this throwing tomato soup at a painting in hopes of kickstarting the conversation in a world obsessed with spectacle?

The aforementioned paranoia is also what stops the cast — and, by extension, the story — from truly reaching out to a wider cast of characters and from any of the characters being active; Bird fancies himself as a fairy tale protagonist caught up in a web of mythical events, but really all he is is the player of a visual novel who has to press A to pass the text quickly, a passive presence if I’ve ever read one (and for my part, I wish there were options to play the whole story in double speed). When he ends up in New York’s Chinatown he sees women like his mother everywhere, thinks they look like him, and… that’s it. Nothing comes out of it. Finding his mother in community is lovely, but it is yet another moment of passive action, which I am unsure if the story world needs more of. Even Margaret’s decision to leave her son — something devastating and difficult — is addled with ennui, never allowed to fully build to a punch. The art piece in question that Margaret works on? Loudspeakers installed everywhere — provided generously by Margaret’s rich friend of nepotic means, Domi Duchess — in which Margaret reads the stories of the missing children aloud. Everybody stops and stares and cries. Whether they do anything after that or not, Ng frustratingly (but not surprisingly) leaves open to interpretation. The other means of resisting, a system of passing notes of missing children through librarians, is equally symptomatic of this problem. While there are various unnamed people that protest PACT through art, always going viral, the reader never gets to meet the people making it nor the people spreading it, thus are barred from finding out the kind of community that is built through the difficult act of resistance. Violence is off-screen and apparently never a viable option to our rebels, an odd detour that turns the narrative to juvenile whimsy. This isn’t a riot, hardly a focused outrage, barely a conversation. It is, at most, sharing a hashtag: everybody is encouraged by other people tweeting, but ultimately a solitary act, one done in utter silence in a vast, and quite empty, world.

Our Missing Hearts will be lauded as a big and important novel. To some degree, it deserves that: this is literature that will have people reflect on their own community and emphasize with others, as I can between my status as diaspora Turk and Celeste Ng’s as diaspora Chinese; to people not acquainted with racial marginalization, it will offer them a new window. To them, the view will be one of heartbreak and hurt, sad and moving and angry and timely, but after the book is done they will willingly choose to surround themselves with (or at the very least tolerate) people that wholeheartedly think marginalized people do not deserve to live in any way. With characters that come with a manual but little human feel, a world that is a thinly veiled metaphor, and a plot that cannot imagine disrupting the status quo, Our Missing Hearts remains trapped as a story to pass the time. The novel thinks that art moves people to action. But in this society, art does not move people to action. Rising prices do. Dead people, killed by those in power, do. I’m aware this is morbid. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? We’re all going to die, probably sooner than we’d all like. There’s very little conversation to have about it, but a whole lot of action to stop it.

Our Missing Hearts is out via Penguin Press.