Our Missing Hearts is a novel by Celeste Ng.
Finished on: 29.9.2023

Content Note: animal death, (critical treatment of) racism, fascism

Plot:
In a USA governed by strict laws to preserve American culture, twelve-year-old Bird lives with his father, a former linguist turned librarian. It has only been the two of them since Bird’s Chinese-American mother Margaret left the family three years prior. Bird has learned to disavow his mother and her poetry that has become a symbol for the resistance against the state of politics. But then he receives a cryptic letter that must be from her and goes on a mission to figure out what is actually going on.

Our Missing Hearts imagines a future USA that could very well be its present, exploring the cruelties in and of a totalitarian system in a poetic manner.

Our Missing Hearts is both a departure from Ng’s writing so far, and a continuation of the themes she has always explored. As in her other works, she explores along social fault lines, particularly racialized ones and she does so with a lot of insight. Only this time, she doesn’t do it in society as it is today, but in what society could very well become after only a couple of wrong turns.

It is not just the speculative setting that sets this novel apart from her other works, though, it is also the more poetic, almost allegoric tone she takes to tell the story. Bird is the point of view character and him being 12 years old, maybe a little strange and faced with extraordinary things makes the story feel a little disconnected from reality. When his mother takes over the point of view, her being an artist has a similar effect. I can imagine that this could be jarring for some readers, but for me, it heightened the emotionality of the story.

And it is a pretty harrowing story, one that Ng dares not to resolve, but leaves open, making it a call to action, a call to resist fascist tendencies even today. She emphasizes the importance of art, story-telling and remaining empathetic as acts of resistance, while making her own novel an example of just that.

I shed more than one tear while reading, hoping that Bird would succeed and that things would turn light again. They did not, exactly, but there is hope that they will.

Summarizing: beautiful.