“Bird and Margaret’s world isn’t exactly our world, but it isnt’ not ours, either,” Ng writes in the author’s note at the end of the book. And by not directly invoking the pandemic, Ng has created one of the best works of art about this time period. But the reader can feel them lurking in the background of every page of this examination of the ways we use words to hurt and heal each other. The words “coronavirus,” “COVID-19,” or “pandemic” never appear in Our Missing Hearts. To say anymore would spoil the emotional and physical journey Bird takes throughout Ng’s poetic and brutal novel, which evokes Fahrenheit 451, 1984, The Leftovers, Station Eleven and folk tales in equal measure. He sets out to find her, and then he learns his mother’s side of the events that led to her leaving the family. But when he receives a coded letter in the mail one day, he knows it’s from his mom. Bird has heard she was a traitor and a PAO sympathizer.

Margaret was a poet whose words became a rallying cry after a woman died at an anti-PACT protest holding a copy of her book. They moved there shortly after Bird’s mother, Margaret, up and left without saying why. 12-year-old Bird, half Asian, half white, lives with his librarian father in a Harvard dorm tucked away from the world. Soon, in an echo of generations past, the government started forcibly removing the children of people it deemed traitorous.Īnd that is where Ng begins her story-not with the blueprint for an alternate reality for America, but with a child trying to make sense of why his mother left. Any Asian authors deemed unpatriotic were canceled, their works banned. Eventually, if people weren’t considered patriotic enough or anti-Asian enough, they were investigated.

There was no one specific cause, but once people noticed that countries like China, Korea and Japan saw a rise in GDP while America’s economy continued to decline, this kicked off a new wave of anti-Asian hatred and a rise in patriotism from “true Americans.” The Crisis finally ended when the president signed the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act (PACT), which focused on finding seditious Persons of Asian Origin (PAOs). In Our Missing Hearts’ dystopian version of America, the country is still reeling from a recent, unspecified economic catastrophe known as The Crisis. Book bans, discrimination against Asians, a national Crisis that nearly broke the country - the dystopian America in Our Missing Hearts, the latest novel from Little Fires Everywhere author Celeste Ng, is all too similar to the America we’re living in now.

All our missing hearts