Celeste Ng's Novel, "Our Missing Hearts"
Reviewed By Robert Bruce Scott
Our Missing Hearts (Random House, 2022) is the first novel I have read by Celeste Ng, whose direct, matter-of-fact style reminds me of two of my favorite English-language novelists, Ernest Hemingway and Leslie Marmon Silko. The starkness of Ng’s prose, particularly in the early pages of this novel, where the sociocultural setting was being developed around the daily lives of two key characters – Bird “Noah” Gardner and his father, Ethan – gave me a feeling at first that I must be reading about a dystopian society on some other continent or planet, but not present-day America.As a reader, however, I could not ignore the continual references to locations and institutions firmly placing the three main characters – including Margaret Miu, Bird’s mother and Ethan’s wife (whose influence is pervasive in their home and community despite her absence) – in the United States of America and a gnawing realization that our society may be already transitioning into the kind of a setting that novelist Celeste Ng depicts in this story. Through Ng’s artful writing, a reader begins to recognize familar aspects of American life which perhaps would remain unacknowledged within our routine frames of reference, beyond conscious awareness, if not for this kind of literature.
Our Missing Hearts could be termed a novel of “praxis,” as this concept was described by Paolo Freire (1970):
In Ng’s alternate American reality, competition between the U.S. and China has escalated to the point where China (and any person who appears to be Asian) is now a scapegoat so that federal and local governments, instead of working to resolve social and economic problems, simply lay blame and restrict free speech while promoting patriotic slogans and clamping down on any counter-cultural messaging with swift, targeted, and inexorable force, buttressed by vigilante violence and a heightened neighborhood-watch mentality.[The oppressed] must acquire a critical awareness of oppression through the praxis of this struggle. One of the gravest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge [a person’s] consciousness. Functionally, oppression is domesticating. To no longer be prey to its force, one must emerge from it and turn upon it. This can be done only by means of the praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it. (Freire, 1970, p. 36)
Ethan and Margaret meet and fall in love in New York City at a time when the socio-economic system is faltering, and certain trends like book-burning and removal of children from home environments deemed subversive have only just begun. The birth of their son, Bird, inspires them to move out of what is becoming a violent and unpredictable city, and, because of Ethan’s family connections, they are able to relocate to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he joins the linguistics faculty at Harvard. Margaret, a first-generation Chinese-American immigrant and counter-cultural free spirit, fills their son Bird’s early years of life with lots of creative play, nature walks, and storytelling, and, continually, starting with the early months of her pregnancy, she feels inspired to write poems, which are collected together into a book called “Our Missing Hearts,” also the title of the final poem in that book, published when Bird is three years old.
At that age, Bird and Margaret and Ethan are living an idyllic life, with all the chaos of the rest of society seemingly very distant. Here is a description from novelist Celeste Ng of the special world Bird’s mother was creating for him:
In school, Bird learns, beginning in kindergarten, the ideas considered essential by the nation’s authorities, all revolving around the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act (PACT), which he is first taught as “We promise to protect American values. We promise to watch over each other.” At age nine, with no explanation to him from his parents, Bird’s mother, Margaret Miu, leaves the home, never to return. When the novel begins, he is now 12 years old, so that traumatic event is three years past. Much later in the novel, the sub-plot of why his mother had to leave is explained. Celeste Ng’s skill at integrating so deftly between an omniscient narrator and a character in the novel becoming very much like a first-person narrator reminds me of another of my all-time favorite authors, Joseph Conrad.She taught Bird to catch fireflies: hands cupped, lemon-lime light flashing in the cracks of his fingers. And then to let them go, spiraling into the night like a dying spark. She taught him to lie still in the grass and watch the neighborhood rabbits nose in the clover, so close his breath stirred the fine white fluff of their tails. She taught him the names of flowers and bugs and birds, to identify the low “coo-coo-coo” of the mourning dove and the brash scream of the blue jay and the singsong “phoebe” of the chickadee, clear and fresh as cold water on a summer day. She taught him to pluck honeysuckle blossoms from the vine and touch the end to his tongue: such sticky sweetness. She pulled the shell of a cicada from a pine tree’s trunk, turned it over to show the neat slit down the belly where, having grown, it had wriggled out of its old self into something new.
(Ng, 2022, pp. 237-238)
The true starting action, then, of this story is about midway through the novel, a recounting of when Ethan and Margaret saw a photo in the newspaper with the caption: “Protester Marie Johnson, 19, a first-year student at NYU from Philadelphia, was killed by a stray bullet in police response to anti-PACT riots Monday.” That photo and the news report are Ethan and Margaret’s first indications that the phrase from her book of poetry has become a rallying cry for a civil rights movement protesting the growing number of child-removals from families and homes for alleged infractions of PACT laws, and that the media frenzy and political fallout from the popularity of her poem is going to put Margaret – and anyone associated with her – in danger.
There is something hopeful in this novel and it has to do with never giving up on fighting for anything that is essential in your life: for Bird, this is his quest to find his mother; for Margaret, it is her desire to broadcast the personal stories and family memories of parents who have lost their sons and daughters because of the PACT system. It would be trite for me to say this is a story about human freedom or democratic values. But at the same time, the novelist Celeste Ng has managed to bring her readers vicariously into the mindsets of people for whom life has become a constant struggle to maintain and/or regain their human dignity. In a cogently worded postscript, she lists significant analogous events and oppressive conditions, in America as well as global settings, some historical and others ongoing today.The night before the march, Marie bought sheets of posterboard at the drugstore. With fat-tipped scented markers, she jigsawed words onto the sign, sketched the solemn face of a child below. After the march, they’d found the markers and the rest of the posterboard on the floor of her dorm room, blank and unused, beside a spread-eagled copy of Margaret’s book…. People googled those words, and up popped the name Margaret Miu, the title of her book [“Our Missing Hearts”]. The poems she’d written while pregnant, in a sleep-deprived haze nursing Bird late at night, watching the sky turn from black to navy to bruised grayish-blue….Not even her best line, she’d always thought, not even one of her best poems, and yet here it was. Clutched in this dying child’s hands.
(Ng, 2022, p. 248)