Novel Readings

Somewhere, maybe, someone is telling someone else: Listen, this crazy thing happened the other night and I can’t stop thinking about it. Days later, weeks even, Margaret’s voice still lodged in the crevices of their brain, the stories they’ve heard a pin completing a circuit, lighting up feelings that have long lain dark. Illuminating corners of themselves they hadn’t known. Listen, I’ve been thinking. Eight million people, all those stories passing from ear to ear. Would one person be compelled? One out of eight million, a fraction of a fraction. But not nothing. Absorbing that story, passing it on. Listen Somewhere, out there, saying to others at last: Listen, this isn’t right.

Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts held me from its first page to its last—and yet by the time I finished it I was also wondering if the very directness with which it played, not just to my emotions, but to my values, was a weakness of the novel rather than a strength.

Our Missing Hearts is a dystopian novel that (like The Handmaid’s Tale) is frightening because its vision of the world is so familiar, so plausible, an extension of what it is already like—of what our society is already manifestly capable of—rather than a fantastical horror story. The novel is set in the near future after a massive economic crisis that was blamed on China, leading to the implementation of surveillance and control measures putatively designed to “protect American culture and traditions” (the PACT act). It tells the story of Noah, or Bird, as he was once called, who lives with his father in a university dorm where they moved in search of obscurity and thus, they hope, safety. Noah’s mother Margaret is of Chinese descent; her parents were among the earliest targets of the anti-Asian violence instigated by PACT, but she and her husband Ethan had believed if they just lived quietly, they would be left alone. Then a poem Margaret wrote becomes an anthem for a protest movement, and to save Ethan and especially Bird (who looks like her), she leaves them to go into hiding. Bird eventually sets out to find his mother, and in the process sees both the full horror of the world his parents have desperately tried to shelter him from and the courage of those who resist the evils it inflicts.

As Ng says in her author’s note, “The pandemic that began in 2020 brought a sharp increase in anti-Asian discrimination, but this isn’t a new phenomenon”; “real life examples,” she goes on, “were never far from my mind.” Her focus is on the United States but Canada has a similar shameful history and a similar painful present: tonight’s news stories on CBC, in fact, include one that is grimly illustrative. Ng does a good job dramatizing the insidious ways official prejudice legitimizes individual aggression, while also influencing bystanders to look away, whether out of indifference or fear. Bird has seen rudeness and contempt before his quest but never brute violence of the kind he sees when he follows his mother’s trail to New York and sees a woman who reminds him of her:

The woman notices him across the street, watching her, and smiles. Perhaps he reminds her of someone, too; perhaps at first glance she mistook him for someone she loves and now that love spills over to him, a largesse. And because she is looking at him, because she is smiling at him and perhaps thinking fond thoughts about this little boy who reminds her of someone she loves, she does not see it coming: a fist, smashing into her face.

The violence the novel is most concerned with is not quite so direct, or at least not so directly physical: the “missing hearts” of the title are children taken from their parents when suspicious or malevolent observers accuse the parents of un-American behavior or beliefs. Resistance to these legal but immoral kidnappings is the cause for which Margaret’s poem becomes the anthem, and to which Margaret ultimately dedicates herself. Again, Ng points to real-life counterparts, from “the separations of enslaved families” to the ongoing “separations of migrant families still occurring at the U.S.’s southern border and beyond.” Our Missing Hearts is thus clearly and intentionally timely, an attempt to enlist the power the novel itself celebrates—the power of stories, and of those who cherish, preserve, and perpetuate them (librarians, aptly, are central to the resistance)—to get people to listen and say “this isn’t right.”

This is obviously a good thing: any enthusiast of 19th-century “social problem” novels is bound to say so, and to refrain from quibbling about didacticism or heavy-handedness. And overall I wouldn’t really say Our Missing Hearts is heavy-handed or didactic—and who, after all, doesn’t love stories, books, and librarians? Well, actually, mistrust of books and libraries is another all-too common reality these days, so unfortunately I guess the case for their social and political value does need to be made . . . but not to me, really, just as—though I was chilled and saddened by the incidents the novel depicts—I also don’t need convincing that prejudice and discrimination and violence of that kind “isn’t right.” Perhaps paradoxically, this is why by the end of Our Missing Hearts I had become somewhat less invested in it as a reader: it started to seem like preaching to the choir. The power of Margaret’s final act of protest is its reach: her message doesn’t target only sympathizers. Would anyone who really needs the lessons Ng offers actually pick up her novel? They might, I suppose, and also there might well be readers who, whatever their other good intentions, have not thought very hard about anti-Asian discrimination in particular, or who need to reflect more generally on how easily tyranny slips in if we make enough “little” concessions along the way, or if we look the other way often enough (another of Ng’s sources is Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny). Maybe this is a foolish or arbitrary reservation in any case: dramatizing problems readers may not have seen or experienced for themselves has a power of its own, and as the narrator of Middlemarch says, “Who can say what may be the effect of writing?” Better to write what you believe in and hope it makes a difference than to keep quiet about the injustice and suffering you see in the world.