Our Missing Hearts

by Celeste Ng

He answers to Bird, so I suggest you call him that, birth certificate be damned. She’d taken a Sharpie to every handout that came home, crossing off Noah, writing Bird on the dotted line instead. That was his mother: formidable and ferocious when her child was in need.

Your mom is a traitor. D. J. Pierce, spitting on the ground beside Bird’s sneakers. Everyone knew his mother was a Person of Asian Origin. Kung-PAOs, some kids called them. This was not news. You could see it in Bird’s face, if you looked: all the parts of him that weren’t quite his father, hints in the tilt of his cheekbones, the shape of his eyes. Being a PAO, the authorities reminded everyone, was not itself a crime. PACT is not about race, the president was always saying, it is about patriotism and mindset. But your mom started riots, D. J. said. My parents said so. She was a danger to society and they were coming for her and that’s why she ran away.

He’d said it. We have nothing to do with her, my dad and me. She’s not a part of my life anymore. Inside him his heart tightened and creaked. On the blacktop, the wad of D. J.’s spit glistened and frothed.

Bird calculates. If a Korean car costs $15,000 but lasts only 3 years, while an American car costs $20,000 but lasts 10 years, how much money would be saved over 50 years by purchasing only American cars?

He looks for signs of the disruption—craters, scorched buildings, broken glass. Nothing. Then, as they cross the street back toward the dorm, Bird sees it on the ground: spray-painted, blood-red against the asphalt, right in the center of the intersection. The size of a car, impossible to miss. A heart, he realizes, just like the banner in Brooklyn. And circling it this time, a ring of words. BRING BACK OUR MISSING HEARTS.

What the news calls people who protest PACT: Seditious subversives. Traitorous Chinese sympathizers. Tumors on American society. Words he’d had to look up in his father’s dictionary, back then, alongside excise and eradicate. Every time they spotted his mother’s words—in news reports, on someone’s phone—Sadie elbowed Bird as if they’d sighted a celebrity. Evidence of his mother, out there, elsewhere, so worried about somebody else’s children though she’d left her own behind. The irony of it leached into his veins.

He’d thought Sadie had been an exception. PACT-related re-placements remain extremely rare. Well, they aren’t, Sadie said. But how many, he’d asked once. Ten? Twenty? Hundreds? Sadie eyed him, hands on hips. Bird, she said, with infuriating pity, you don’t understand anything, do you?

Oh no, we don’t burn books here. This—this is America. Right? She raises an eyebrow at him. Serious, or ironic? He can’t quite tell. We don’t burn our books, she says. We pulp them. Much more civilized, right? Mash them up, recycle them into toilet paper. Those books wiped someone’s rear end a long time ago.

And suddenly, a door clicks open in Bird’s mind. Why his father is always so cautious, why he’s always nagging Bird to follow this particular route or that, to not go off on his own. How his father reached him so fast. It isn’t just dangerous to research China, or go looking for Japanese folktales. It’s dangerous to look like him, always has been. It’s dangerous to be his mother’s child, in more ways than one.

She was always doing that, telling him stories. Prying open cracks for magic to seep in, making the world a place of possibility. After she left, he had stopped believing all those fantasies. Wispy, false dreams that disintegrated in the morning’s light. Now it occurs to him that, perhaps, there might be truth in them after all.

It made perfect sense to him then; it still does. In all the stories his mother had told him, there was an ordeal the hero had to endure: Climb down this well and fetch the tinderbox. Lie beneath this waterfall and let it drum you to pieces. He was sure if he could stay awake his mother would be there. The fact that the test was so arbitrary did not bother him; the tests they had in school were arbitrary, too: circle the nouns and underline the verbs; combine these two random numbers into a third. Tests were always arbitrary; it was part of their nature and, in fact, what made them a test.

All the way through Chinatown, not a single store is without one. Some sport other signs, too, garish in red, white, and blue: AMERICAN OWNED AND RUN. 100% AMERICAN. Only when he’s left Chinatown, and the faces around him become Black and white instead of Asian, do the flags become more sporadic, the people here apparently more confident that their loyalty will be assumed.

Seventy-Fifth Street. Seventy-Sixth. Older buildings that wore their age gracefully, looking staid, not shabby. Here foreign words are proudly displayed: Salumeria. Vineria. Macarons. A safe and desirable foreignness.

He’d forgotten: in fairylands there is evil, too. Monsters and curses. Dangers lurking in disguise. Demons, dragons, rats as big as oxen. Things that could destroy you with a glance.