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It wasn’t until he was nine, after his mother left, that he became Noah.
name reversion delineating
He is twelve now; he has been Noah for three years, but Noah still feels like one of those Halloween masks, something rubbery and awkward he doesn’t quite know how to wear.
Weight of identity theme ?
Something about it tugs at the back of his mind, but he can’t quite hook it.
Foreshadowing
Fifth grade, the last year with recess. Everything too small for them by then, meant for little children.
So much about age and identity already; it's innocence and experience
There were all kinds of stories about them: that even though Sadie’s mother was Black and her father was white they were Chinese sympathizers selling out America.
Everyone knew his mother was a Person of Asian Origin. Kung-PAOs, some kids called them.
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.
Today’s English assignment: In a paragraph, explain what PACT stands for and why it is crucial for our national security. Provide three specific examples. He knows just what he should say; they study it in school every year. The Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act. In kindergarten they called it a promise: We promise to protect American values. We promise to watch over each other. Each year they learn the same thing, just in bigger words. During these lessons, his teachers usually looked at Bird, rather pointedly, and then the rest of the class turned to look, too. He pushes the
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Everything all right, Noah? his father says, and Bird nods, makes a vague gesture at his notebook.
Contrast between address and narrative identity
Sisyphean,
His father shakes his head. Some disruption, he says. I think. And then, noticing Bird’s wide eyes: It’s okay, Noah. The authorities are here. They have everything under control.
Pretty pointed "under control"
Miu.
He has never known a world without PACT; it is as axiomatic as gravity, or Thou shalt not kill. He didn’t understand why anyone would oppose it, what any of this had to do with hearts, how a heart could be missing. How could you survive without your heart beating inside you?
Interesting to think about hegemony and indoctrination
What’s next, some people said, you think molesters and child-beaters deserve to keep their kids, too?
that slippery slope
Our Missing Hearts. Miu, who is the child of Chinese immigrants and has a young son—
He waits, hoping for his mother’s voice to come back to him, to fill in the rest of the story. A ball given a shove downhill. But there’s only the whispery sound of his father breathing. He can’t remember what his mother’s voice sounds like. The voice he hears in his head is his own.
We want to make sure you have the most current information. This way we can be sure nothing you use is outdated or inaccurate. You’ll find everything you need right here online.
The danger of the mercurial
Just part of giving back to society, Mr. Lieu had said at the unveiling ceremony. He was a businessman—some kind of real estate—and the principal had thanked him for this generous gift, said how grateful they were to private citizens for stepping in where the city budget still fell short. He’d praised the Lieus for being such loyal members of the community. It was the same year Arthur Tran’s parents had donated money to renovate the cafeteria and Janey Youn’s father had given the school a new flagpole and flag.
Racial pressures and attempts to ingratiate
Finally, when he is too tired to resist, he pecks out one more search, one he has never dared to try before. Margaret Miu.
Uh oh he gonna be flagged
Everyone gets the same chance to prove themselves, to show us who they are. We don’t hold the mistakes of parents against their children. She looks at him through bright, anxious eyes.
Mrs. Pollard nods, satisfied. If you decide on a cat, be sure to find a good breeder, she says as he heads into the hall. Adopting a stray—who knows what you’ll get.
This feels a little yikes
Yesterday morning, she says, on this quiet street, Family Services officers arrived at the home of Sonia Lee Chun and took custody of her four-year-old son, David. The reason? A recent post by Sonia on social media, arguing that PACT was being used to target members of the Asian American community.
Jump, Bird, she cried, but he didn’t, just let the swing slow until the toes of his sneakers dragged in the gravel, leaving grubby gray scratches on the canvas.
Intimate connection further exemplified by Sadie using his true name
I was afraid of that, she says. You don’t have a copy? Bird asks, and she shakes her head. Removed. Three years ago, it says. Someone complained, probably. That it encouraged pro-PAO sentiment, or something. Some of our donors have—opinions.
Good luck, she says. I hope you find it. And Bird? If there’s anything I can help with, just come back and I’ll try.
How does she know his true name?
I sent him to get an education, not to be brainwashed. Each time it makes the college paper, then the news; a congressman or sometimes a senator delivers an impassioned speech about universities as incubators of indoctrination; the provost issues another public statement in reply, defending the library’s collection. Bird has seen it in the newspaper as his father turns the pages. If we fear something, it is all the more imperative we study it thoroughly.
That’s where it’s coming from. You know how boys start to get around this age. Girls can get them to do anything.
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. His father has always known it, has always been braced for something like this, always on a hair trigger for what inevitably would happen to his son. What he’s afraid of: that one day someone will see Bird’s face and see an enemy.
the mish-mosh house, he’d called it; his mother had called it the House of the Thirty-Seven Gables.
Hawthorne?
They don’t teach you any of this. Too unpatriotic, right, to tell you the horrible things our country’s done before. The camps at Manzanar, or what happens at the border. They probably teach you that most plantation owners were kind to their slaves and that Columbus discovered America, don’t they? Because telling you what really happened would be espousing un-American views, and we certainly wouldn’t want that.
The librarian sighs. How can you know, she says, if no one teaches you, and no one ever talks about it, and all the books about it are gone?
Now, after all this time, he is on his way to find her. Like someone in those very stories she’d told him all those years ago. He will journey to where his mother is waiting patiently for him.
The power of narratives and how they shape our perspectives
She will see him and at once she will be his again and they will all live happily ever after.
We are really being set up for disappointment
The bus drops him in Chinatown in the midst of a fine drizzle. A different world: more people than he’s ever seen, more bustle, more noise. Despite the clamor and commotion, he feels oddly at home, and it takes him a moment to understand why: all around him, suddenly, are people with faces like hers.
For the first time in his life, he is unremarkable, and this feels like power.
In conjunction with previous highlight
barbershops where men’s laughter floats through the propped-open doors on a wave of aftershave.
Here foreign words are proudly displayed: Salumeria. Vineria. Macarons. A safe and desirable foreignness.
There is simply no sound, and through the tinted windows the city scrolls by in sepia, like a silent film. To him they seem to be not driving but floating.
gibbous
Suburban camouflage from the Sears catalog.
An elderly woman with a cane thumping her way down Broadway, singing at the top of her lungs in time with her steps: Our God is an awesome God / He reigns from heaven above.
He specialized in etymology: the meanings of things. As a boy he’d played Scrabble and done crosswords with his father; his mother had coached him for the spelling bee. For his birthdays and Christmas, he’d always asked for books. These days, with libraries and stores shuttering, he had nothing to read but the row of dictionaries lined up on the windowsill.
For Ethan, words carried secrets, the stories of how they came to be, all their past selves. He would find the mysterious ways they connected, tracing their family tree back to pinpoint the unlikeliest cousins.
On social media, dozens of photos—pulled from online records, dating profiles, work portraits, vacation snapshots—were posted side by side with the still frame from the security tape by those sure they’d cracked the case. All in all, amateur sleuths would positively identify the culprit as thirty-four different men, aged nineteen to fifty-six and none resembling another, and because of this the shooter would never be apprehended, no one would ever be charged, and every Asian face would always remain a suspect—of the shooting, or of secretly sympathizing with it.
PACT: Preserving American Culture and Traditions. A solemn promise to root out any anti-American elements undermining the nation.
And finally, most crucially: preventing the spread of un-American views by quietly removing children from un-American environments—the definition of which was ever expanding: Appearing sympathetic to China. Appearing insufficiently anti-China. Having any doubts about anything American; having any ties to China at all—no matter how many generations past. Questioning whether China was really the problem; questioning whether PACT was being applied fairly; eventually, questioning PACT itself.
The average American, one judge ruled, cannot reasonably be expected to visually distinguish between various varieties of persons of Asian origin. As if they were types of apples, or breeds of dogs; as if those persons of Asian origin did not count as average Americans themselves. As if any of this might be justified by careful distinguishing on the part of the one wielding the bat.
collating
Ive always liked this word
Margaret listened. She began to learn: there was no new thing under the sun. About the schools where Indigenous children were shorn and stripped, renamed, reeducated, and returned home broken and scarred—or never at all. About children borne across borders in their parents’ arms only to be caged in warehouses, alone and afraid. About foster children pinballed from home to home, their own families sometimes unable to track their path. Things she’d been able to not know, until now. There was a long history of children taken, the pretexts different but the reasons the same. A most precious
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Seems like, aside from issues of racial discrimination and hatred, the thesis of the novel. We are reading fiction and horrified , but this is reality, too.
fug,
