Where those two books tackled race, class, and the tensions between parents and children in more subtle ways, Our Missing Hearts represents a departure into the explicit-and a somewhat conflicted one. 4, is a “hard” read-Ng’s word, and not one that readers of her past two novels, Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere, would necessarily use to describe her work. The result, the moving Our Missing Hearts, to be published Oct.
“When everything in the world started to go to sh-t, the book took a darker turn as well.” “A lot of 2016 and the beginning of 2017 is kind of an angry blur for me,” she says.
That book was one of many novels Ng revisited while transitioning her domestic story into a dystopia. She made their lives devastatingly small, capturing a claustrophobia not unlike Offred’s in The Handmaid’s Tale, which is also set here. The library nearby is where she imagined Ethan at work shelving books the dorm apartment he and Bird call home is one where Ng lived as an undergrad. Resting in the shade near Harvard Yard, the author, 42, describes how she mapped Bird and his father Ethan’s world onto the Cambridge, Mass., neighborhood where she attended college and has lived for the past 15 years. And the coming-of-age struggles of her 12-year-old son Bird took on an edge of constant danger. The mother became Chinese American poet Margaret Miu, a famous dissident. The setting, grounded on Harvard University’s campus, became an alternate version of the U.S., one defined by anti-Asian racism, censorship, and the constant threat of children’s “re-placement” as a consequence of speaking out. As Donald Trump claimed victory in the presidential election and images circulated of families torn apart at the border, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe and anti-Asian racism raged across America and beyond, Ng’s story changed. But in the case of her latest novel, which she began to write in the fall of 2016, they slowly gave way to broader, darker themes.
Could she ever make him understand her work? Could he ever forgive her for loving something as much as or even more than she loved him? These are the types of intimate questions that have long driven Celeste Ng’s fiction. At first, it was the story of a boy, his mother, and her art.
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