Our Missing Hearts

by Celeste Ng

His father’s oldest habit: taking words apart like old clocks to show the gears still ticking inside.

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.

PACT.

Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act

It’s become the rallying cry at anti-PACT riots across the nation, but its roots are here—terrifyingly close to home. The phrase increasingly being used to attack the widely supported national security law is the brainchild of local woman Margaret Miu, pulled from her book of poems Our Missing Hearts. Miu, who is the child of Chinese immigrants and has a young son—

What the news calls people who protest PACT: Seditious subversives. Traitorous Chinese sympathizers. Tumors on American society.

PACT is a crucial part of keeping America safe from being undermined by foreign influences.

Everyone has storage limitations, she said. So we’ve culled the books that we felt were unnecessary or unsuitable or out of date.

Well, it’s like that, the teacher said. We all want our children to be safe. We don’t want them exposed to bad ideas—ideas that might hurt them, or encourage them to do bad things. To themselves, or to their families, or to our country. So we remove those books and block sites that might be harmful.

She used to come here? he repeats. Still processing the idea that once his mother stood in this very spot, touched the same books that stand all around them. Every day. Borrowing books, back when she was still writing her poems. Before she became the voice of the revolution.

All our missing hearts scattered, to sprout elsewhere.

There is no snow, yet, to hold footprints, and in a moment, as his father disappears from sight, it is as if he never passed that way at all. Today it strikes Bird as unbearably sad, to pass by and leave no trace of your existence. To have no one remember you’d been there.

The Crisis was China’s doing, some started to insist: all their manipulations, their tariffs and devaluations. Maybe they’d even had help, dismantling us from within. They want to take us down. They want to own our country.

She wanted to be a bird keeping her head low.

To most people, PACT seemed temperate, sensible even: patriotism, public vigilance. Why wouldn’t you support it?

PACT will protect us from the very real threat of those who undermine us from within, the president said. All loyal Americans—including loyal persons of Asian origin—need fear nothing from this law.

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.