By Justine Trinh
In Our Missing Hearts, Celeste Ng constructs a world that, as she writes in her author’s note, “isn’t exactly our world, but isn’t not ours either.” That is, the events and occurrences that happen in the book do not have any direct correlation to real life events, but rather drew inspiration from them. As a result, she ultimately describes a haunting possibility of what our world could easily become if it is not already. This what-if world shook me to my core and is one of my worst fears especially being Asian American in America living during COVID-19 and the rise of anti-Asian hate.
Our Missing Hearts is about twelve-year-old Bird Gardner who lives with his father in an alternative America governed by laws established to protect traditional American values. The main law, in particular, the Preserving American Culture and Traditions (PACT), was passed in an effort to reestablish the American way of life that was lost after an economic crisis often referred to as the Crisis. This imagined fantasy of “American culture” villainizes Asian / Asian American bodies and deems them as unpatriotic. Therefore, the United States must protect itself from “those with foreign faces, foreign names,” and justifies brutal acts of violence against anyone who is considered a Person of Asian Origin (PAO). Throughout the novel, Bird witnesses these acts of discrimination including an Asian American man being denied service at a pizza restaurant simply due to his race or an Asian American woman publicly being beaten in broad daylight in front of bystanders. It is safer for Bird to denounce his mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet, who left him when he was nine than be branded as unpatriotic. Yet, he cannot help but wonder about her and her poems, specifically, “All Our Missing Hearts,” which have been appropriated by the counter narrative / Anti-PACT group who are deemed as radicals.
When I read this book, I was struck by how eerily similar Bird’s world was to ours. While Bird’s world might be fictitious, the violence and discrimination are not and are nothing new. There has been anti-Asian sentiment since the late 1800’s with the Los Angeles Chinese Massacre of 1871; the Page Law of 1875 which prohibited Chinese women from entering the United States; and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that barred all Chinese people from entering the United States. People of Asian descent have never been welcomed in the United States and are continued to be seen as perpetually foreign regardless of their citizen status. This justified Japanese American incarceration during World War II because after all, “those with foreign faces, foreign names” are considered to be unpatriotic, even while many Japanese American families had been in the United States for generations. During this time, many other ethnic Asian groups were targeted and mistaken as Japanese despite Life Magazine publishing a very racist infographic to distinguish the difference in 1941 between Japanese and Chinese people. This idea of “all Asians look alike” continued into the 1980s with the brutal murder of Vincent Chin, who was mistaken as Japanese by two disgruntled auto workers who had been recently laid off and beat him to death out of anger at Japanese car companies for dampening the American auto industry. These men were never fully held accountable despite the attack being racially motivated. Ng calls this injustice out in her novel when a judge rules that “the average American cannot reasonably be expected to visually distinguish between varieties of persons of Asian origins.”
And as much as I want to believe all of this hatred is a thing of the past and that our world is changing for the better, I know that it is not. The pandemic made that blatantly clear. In the past three years, we have witnessed a grandmother attacked on the streets of San Francisco; a family celebrating a birthday accosted by a rich, white CEO in Carmel; six women shot in Atlanta; and many other instances of anti-Asian violence. NPR reported in 2021 that 9,081 anti-Asian incidents have been reported from the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020 to June 2021 with physical assaults increasing to 16.6% from 10.8%. During the pandemic, I remember not being able to leave the house out of fears of becoming one of those statistics.
Yet Ng encourages us to continue to stand up against this violence and erasure through the use of her characters. While the people in her world are monitored and surveilled, there are those who stand up against this injustice in many ways both big and small. While the protagonist’s mother Margaret’s book, All Our Missing Hearts, is taken out of the library for its anti-PACT message – along with many other books by people of color, her work is still used as a form of defiance against these laws that break families apart. Librarians are part of an underground network trying to locate children of those deemed as dissidents. Even Bird’s friend’s use of sharpie vandalism is enough to bring attention to the inequalities of this world. Even though Ng brings awareness to this dark potential future, her book ultimately is one of hope that everyone should read, especially during a time of increased anti-Asian violence.
Our Missing Hearts is available from Barnes & Noble, Blue Cypress Books, Bookshop, Kinokuniya, Moon Palace Books, and Skylight Books.
Justine Trinh is an English literature Ph.D. student at Washington State University. She graduated from the University of California, Irvine with B.A.s in Asian American studies and classical civilizations and a B.S. in mathematics. She then went on to earn her M.A. in Asian American studies, making her the first student to graduate from UCI Asian American Studies’ 4+1 B.A./M.A. program. Her research interests include Asian American literature, critical refugee studies, family and trauma, and forced departure and disownment.