Those books that suit the American (patriotic) view of the world are neatly organized and cared for by Bird’s father. It is safer to accept her absence and not to question why his father, once a linguist, now works in Harvard University’s library.
Part of the PACT policy is to demolish written works that threaten the narrow definition of colonial, patriarchal, and largely white “American culture.” Rather than burning books, as happened during the unforgiving censorship movement of 1933 in Berlin where more than 25,000 “un-German” books were set alight, books are pulped in Bird’s world.īird has been raised to disavow his mother, and he has been encouraged not to ask questions about her or her work. She has illustrated a United States, which could be any Western nation, that only barely stretches our imaginations beyond the reality we live in now. Ng is not oblique in her references to the global experience of Covid, or to the inherent racism and misogyny that resulted in the broad and diverse Asian diaspora being treated with disdain and - in some cases - being attacked physically and verbally. Asian Americans are deemed dissidents, and Bird’s mother, Margaret, has been a fugitive since her son was 9 years old. The act, introduced during a crisis, does not recognize or reward artists who question - let alone criticize - the myopic representation of America. His mother’s poem, All Our Missing Hearts, has attracted the wrath of authorities, falling foul of the American federal PACT (Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act).
In her third novel, Ng introduces Bird Gardner, a 12-year-old Chinese American boy who is living with his father in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In American novelist Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts, writers are punished for their (apparently) subversive work, and their children are left parentless and tainted with the stigma of rebelliousness.
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