Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng

Having loved both of Celeste Ng’s previous books, Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You, I quickly put a hold on her new book Our Missing Hearts as soon as it showed up in my library system. In fact, I would have skipped the library hold system and bought a copy on release day if not for one thing: I’d read in some of the book’s promotional material that it’s set in a near-future, semi-totalitarian USA, and as I think we all know by now (if not, I’m telling you here) I’ve been traumatized by realistic, near-future dystopias ever since David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks gave me nightmares. I still haven’t, for example, read Station Eleven even though everyone I know was recommending it, and many other similar books have crossed by radar and gone unread because I just don’t feel, with the world as it currently is, that I’m comfortable reading about things being believably worse in the near-future; it upsets me too much and I know I do miss out on some good books that way.

However, I really trust Ng as a writer and everything else I read about Our Missing Hearts sounded great, so I’m glad I finally got to it. The dystopian element didn’t bother me as much as expected, probably because, rather than being climate-change or plague-related, the problem in this fictional future was human intolerance, which, while awful and all-too-believable, feels like something possible to fight against, as many of the characters in OMH are trying to do.

This is the story of a young boy named Bird, being raised by his father after his mother has left the family a few years earlier. They are living in a near-future version of the US where societal unrest has led to the rise of a new form of patriotism: everything will be fine as long as we strictly control any dissent and any undesirable elements of the population. And while a lot of people are defined as undesirable, the group that comes in for the most repression and bigotry is the Asian-American population, made scapegoats in America’s ongoing conflict with China.

Bird’s father is white, but his mother is Chinese-American, and when her poetry becomes a focus of anti-government activism, she disappears. Bird’s father reacts by trying to keep himself and his son as low-profile and compliant as possible, hoping not to draw anymore negative attention that might threaten their already-precarious lives. But Bird is already curious and unsettled about how his world works, and when a mysterious message arrives that might be from his mother, he sets out on a quest to learn more about her and why she disappeared.

I found this book, like everything Ng writes, compulsively readable and engaging; I devoured it in less than two days. And while I do find myself shying away from anything dystopian, I do recognize that genre’s value in warning us about the dire future possibilities of present dangers. The “patriotic” totalitarianism of Our Missing Hearts is all too believable, and not just in the US — and it needs to be resisted with extreme vigilance.

This book is well worth reading!