Our Missing Hearts

by Celeste Ng

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.

This is exactly how it would be twisted. Take the bad and disguise it as something positive – peak American marketing.

angry parents complain if their children choose to study Mandarin, or Chinese history. 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;

This is also pretty relevant with a) right-wing populists blaming universities for one-sided education (aka teaching proven ideas and empirical facts) and b) so many universities these days being (partly) funded by corporations, with entire study programs focusing not on academic values, but on corporate ideology... So there actually is a problem with indoctrination at universities, but it's the other way round and nobody seems to really care about that, because the claims like you can read them in this passage from the book, are usually so much louder.

Banners advertising the fanciness of what they had, not its cheapness.

Great line! Rich people brag when they pay way MORE than an article is actually worth; poor(er) people brag when they make a steal.

The economic crisis, the newspapers began to call it, and then, as it became more than economic, as people began to lose their confidence, their sense of purpose, the willingness to wake up in the morning, their ability to keep trying, their optimism that something could be different, their memory that anything had ever been different, their hope that anything would ever improve—other phrases took hold.

it was easy to imagine the rest of the world was like this, too. It was easy to forget the Crisis still raging outside, because with money and luck and connections they had simply stepped out of it, the way you’d step out of a blizzard, into warm dry shelter.

"Poor people only exist when I see them" – sort of a mindset you really gotta be wary of yourself when you aren't confronted with "reality" on a regular enough basis.

From the hospital, the child was whisked away. The best possible outcome, headlines agreed. Protecting a child from learning such harmful views. Margaret, reading the news on her phone, a milk-stoned Bird dozing at her breast, thought: awful. And: How could those people endanger their child. She tried to imagine carrying Bird into the crush of a mob,

Extreme oversimplification of a situation in order to agitate – classic, but really well done here, because the protagonist (in the last sentence I marked here) is also appalled by what she hears, as an initial gut reaction. That's why these shocker stories work.

No, he didn’t know where she’d gone. No, he didn’t share her views, not at all. Quite the opposite, to tell the truth. No, he couldn’t honestly say he was sorry. He’d tried to make things work for the sake of their son, but a man could only stand so much, right? Well—let’s just say he was relieved that she’d no longer be an influence. Yes, exactly. Much better off without. Her books? Absolutely not. Seditious trash. He’d burned them all.

How painful it must be to say something like that about the one you love – and convincingly at that – because you have literally no other choice.

The calculation everyone made before parting their lips, before setting fingers to keys: how important was it to say? You glanced at the crib in the corner, at your child sprawled on the rug with their toys.

Very few sentences to describe the downward spiral of why people slowly stop fighting when being faced with the onset of totalitarian structures. Probably better to remain silent, because your child's life is worth more than raising your voice in this one instance that might not even make a difference.

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.

Akhmatova was forbidden to write, Margaret read, but she did so anyway. She wrote about her friends, arrested and dying in prison camps. She wrote about her former husband, shot for treason. Most of all she wrote about her son, locked in a prison that she visited daily but was never allowed to enter. Finally, agonizingly, she wrote about Stalin—effusive, flowery, goose-stepping praise—hoping that her compliments would persuade him to pardon her son, but they did not. Years later, when her son was released at last, he believed that his mother had not tried to free him, that she cared more for her poetry than for him, and their relationship was never the same. Margaret told this story to herself over and over, so that she would not forget it.

Mohamad, his name was. Earlier that evening, she’d sat beside him and his wife and eaten maqluba and listened to them tell the story of their son. I was a child when the Twin Towers fell, he had said toward the end. Someone spray-painted filthy things on our garage door. Someone broke our front window with a brick. My father hung a huge American flag on our house, for a while. He’d paused, and his wife took his hand. None of our neighbors did or said anything to help us, he said.

Since the novel focuses so much on Asian Americans, it's good that it makes a point every now and then that Asian Americans, of course, aren't the only minority that are systemically suppressed in the US.

They can pretend this never happened; they can still say, no, we don’t know her, we haven’t heard from her in years.

They can keep collecting stories, finding ways to share them. Finding ways to pass them on and remember them.

With stories being one of the most important tools that shaped society throughout the entire history of humanity, one should not understimate the lasting effect of Margaret Miu's deeds in the end of the novel – even if they may not seem like much immediately after.

Days later, weeks even, Margaret’s voice still lodged in the crevices of their brain, the stories they’ve heard a pin completing a circuit, lighting up feelings that have long lain dark.