Our Missing Hearts

by Celeste Ng

If we fear something, it is all the more imperative we study it thoroughly.

hole than denim. She pierced things. No one ever gave her a second glance. Not like home, where people always gave her a second glance, and sometimes a third.

Maybe sometimes, she thought, the bird with its head held high took flight. Maybe sometimes, the nail that stuck up pierced the foot that stomped down.

She began to learn: there was no new thing under the sun.

A slim young birch, too tall for its slender whip of a frame, bowed nearly into an arch, but growing, still growing nevertheless, sending its jagged green leaves toward the sky.

I hope you’ll look at The Making of Asian America, by Erika Lee; Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear, edited by John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats; Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II, by Richard Reeves; and From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry: The Killing of Vincent Chin and the Trial that Galvanized the Asian American Movement, by Paula Yoo, as a few starting points.

Blueprint for Revolution, by Srdja Popović,

Anna Deavere Smith,

Anna Akhmatova

More generally, Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny was a powerful reminder about how quickly authoritarianism can rise (as well as what can be done about it), and Václav Havel’s classic 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless” changed my thinking about the impact a single individual could have in dismantling a long-established system. I hope he’s right.