Our Missing Hearts (2022)

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When society becomes too consumed by a known fear – a specific race who appears to terrorize the American way of thinking – the populace can easily be consumed by it. And given today’s political climate, it’s not hard to see why. Known for her best-selling novel, Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng is back with another telling story about the castigation of people who have a certain tint to their skin in Our Missing Hearts, and the bottomless love a parent can have for their child.

Bird Gardner doesn’t quite remember the day his mom left. In all honesty, she’s been gone for three years and there’s almost zero trace of her in the apartment where he lives with his dad. For as long as he knows, his remaining parent never mentions his poet-writing Chinese mom and Bird has learned to always follow his rules: don’t ask too many questions, don’t stray from the path, and never stand out too much. The core reason is because Bird is half-Chinese, and anything deemed un-American was seen as a threat to its culture and should be removed.

For the past 10 years, the political landscape of America has had its economic ups and downs but when it bottomed out, the main reason behind it was squarely pointed at Asians and anything of Asian descent. Sadly, Bird’s mom became the poster child for protests and “re-placed” children because of her poetry, written at dawn in the early stages of Bird’s life.

Despite Bird’s apparent acceptance of his dad’s rules, he decides to break them when he receives a postcard in the mail of nothing but cats and a door drawn on it. With this clue, he’s able to open a world that had been closed off to him, and in the end, reconnect with a mom he believed never actually loved him.

Ng does an exceptional job bringing her characters to life. The slow pacing, movements that appear innocuous until you realize she’s building up to a larger picture – it all comes together in a beautiful poem, providing people with the beauty of a parent’s love for their child. The major gripe with the writing was the lack of dialogue marks (if this is a new trend, I’m not for it), but it’s a minor one. Our Missing Hearts takes us on a heart-wrenching journey into the mind of what a parent would do to be reunited with their child, even at the cost of their own life.