Writer:

Celeste Ng is the author of three novels, Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and Our Missing Hearts.

Her first novel, Everything I Never Told You (2014), was a New York Times bestseller, a

New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications. Everything I Never Told You was also the winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the ALA’s Alex Award. It has been translated into over thirty languages and is being adapted for the screen.

Her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere (2017) was a #1 New York Times bestseller, a #1 Indie Next bestseller, and Amazons Best Fiction Book of 2017. It was named a best book of the year by over 25 publications, the winner of the Ohioana Award and the Goodreads Readers Choice Award 2017 in Fiction, and spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list.

Little Fires Everywhere has been published abroad in more than 30 languages and has been adapted as a limited series on Hulu, starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington.

Her third novel, Our Missing Hearts, will be published on October 4, 2022.

Celeste grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio. She graduated from Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan). Her fiction and essays have appeared in the

New York Times, The Guardian, and many other publications, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors.

Synopsis:

※Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve “American culture” in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic—including the work of Bird’s mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet who left the family when he was nine years old.

Bird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn’t know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn’t wonder. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of librarians, into the lives of the children who have been taken, and finally to New York City, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change.

※The definition of “dystopia” in the Oxford English Dictionary is bald and to the point: “An imaginary place in which everything is as bad as possible.”

Literature is full of examples. In “The Time Machine,” the Morlocks feed and clothe the Eloi, then eat them. “The Handmaid’s Tale” deals with state-sanctioned rape. The firefighters in “Fahrenheit 451” incinerate books instead of saving them. In “1984”’s infamous Room 101, Winston Smith is finally broken when a cage filled with rats is dumped over his head. In “Our Missing Hearts,” Celeste Ng’s dystopian America is milder, which makes it more believable — and hence, more upsetting.

Noah Gardner, known as Bird, is a 12-year-old Chinese American living with his father in Cambridge, Mass. His mother is a fugitive, on the run because she wrote a supposedly subversive poem titled “All Our Missing Hearts.” America is living under PACT — the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act — which became law during a confused and economically disastrous period known as the Crisis. (We’re given more details about this Crisis than we actually need.)

Before the Crisis, Bird’s father was a linguist. Now he works in a library, shelving books. In Ng’s version of the American Nightmare, there’s no need to burn books. “We pulp them,” a helpful librarian tells Bird. (Bird doesn’t tell her he’s picturing book bonfires, but she intuits it.) “Much more civilized, right? Mash them up, recycle them into toilet paper. Those books wiped someone’s rear end a long time ago.”

Less gaudy than firefighters burning books, but more believable. The empty shelves Bird sees in his father’s library speak volumes.

Under PACT, the children of parents considered culturally or politically subversive are “re-placed” in foster families. When Bird is given a clue to his mother’s whereabouts he goes in search of her, and much of Ng’s firmly written and well-executed novel deals with his adventures along the way. In that sense, the book is a classic tale of the hero’s journey, said hero young enough to make the trip from innocence to experience with surprisingly little bitterness directed toward the parent who has abandoned him. That his mother, Margaret Miu, had no choice would make no difference to most children, it seems to me; abandoned is abandoned.

We have heard this tale of government scapegoating before, which adds to its power rather than detracting from it. Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany’s economic malaise. Trump told us to fear migrant caravans full of “bad hombres.” Here it’s Asian people in general and Chinese Americans in particular who are held responsible for everything that’s gone wrong — blame those who don’t look like White America. In New York’s Chinatown, street names have been censored: “Someone — everyone — has tried to make the Chinese disappear.” Flag pins decorate every lapel.

Because Ng’s storytelling is so calm — serene, almost — the occasional explosions of violence are authentically horrifying, as when Bird observes a man punch a Chinese woman, knock her to the ground, then kick her repeatedly. There is no reason except for her otherness … and perhaps the fact that she looks well off. He then kills her little dog, breaking its back “the way he might crush a soda can, or a cockroach.”

On another level, “Our Missing Hearts” is a meditation on the sometimes accidental power of words. Why are Mr. Gardner’s library shelves so empty? Because students must not have access to books that “might expose them to dangerous ideas.” This isn’t dystopian fiction but actual fact, as rancorous school curriculum meetings and protests across the United States have proved. The Florida Parental Rights Bill, signed by Governor DeSantis in March of this year, is basically a free pass to text censorship.

When a Black girl is shot dead at an anti-PACT rally, the phrase “Our Missing Hearts” — emblazoned on the sign she was carrying; she’d read Margaret’s poem — becomes a rallying cry. Bird’s mother had no intention of achieving fame or infamy because of that line; it was from a poem about — of all things — pomegranates. Rodney King (“Can’t we all just get along?”) and George Floyd (“I can’t breathe”) weren’t intentionally phrasemaking either. King’s line was an off-the-cuff plea for peace and Floyd only wanted to get the cop off his neck before he died. Yet these lines resonate. Governments are right to fear words. They can change hearts and topple tyrannies. By the same token, they can increase the chokeholds of some tyrants: witch hunt, fake news, I rest my case.

I won’t give away the splendid conclusion of Ng’s book; suffice it to say, the climax deals with the power of words, the power of stories and the persistence of memory. It’s impossible not to be moved by Margaret Miu’s courage, or to applaud her craftiness. Is her final word to the world a kind of propaganda? Yes, but sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.

There are peculiar lapses that must be noted. Covid-19 doesn’t exist in “Our Missing Hearts,” although there can be no doubt that the pandemic has given rise to dark conspiracies having to do with China, where Covid first appeared. Donald Trump and others were happy to call it the China Flu. Ng likewise ignores social media — there’s a single glancing mention near the end of the book — although few innovations in human history have done more to focus and amplify racist tropes. In fact, social media encourages large numbers of people to deliberately turn away from the truth.

Ng succeeds in spite of these occasional blind spots, partly because her outrage is contained and focused, and mostly because she is often captivated by the very words she is using. Bird’s father’s oldest habit, we’re told, is “taking words apart like old clocks to show the gears still ticking inside.” The gears in this story for the most part mesh very well. And Bird is a brave and believable character, who gives us a relatable portal into a world that seems more like our own every day.

※Our Missing Hearts, the new novel from Little Fires Everywhere author Celeste Ng, takes place in a retro sort of dystopia, a Cold War kid’s nightmare. It’s the kind of world where people spend a lot of time worrying over un-American values and threats to the American way of life, where kids are taught to inform on their neighbors, and everyone still rides their bike to school.

But the America of Our Missing Hearts isn’t fretting over secret Russian communists. In the process of recovering from a vaguely detailed economic meltdown that’s become known simply as “the Crisis,” America has turned on China, and on every “Person of Asian Origin” who might either come from China or be mistaken as having done so.

The resulting society, as all successful dystopias do, bears an unsettling resemblance to our own, retro vocabulary be damned. In Ng’s world, Asian Americans are harassed and attacked in the streets. Books are banned from schools and libraries, then pulped and turned into toilet paper. Most urgently, children are taken away from any parent who’s been reported as holding un-American ideas, placed with foster families in faraway cities, and given new names so they never find their way back to their old homes.

Bird, the 12-year-old boy at the center of Our Missing Hearts, has not been taken away from his family. Instead, his mother, Margaret, has vanished. An Asian American poet whose famous line our missing hearts has become a slogan of the protest movement, Margaret disappeared three years before the beginning of the novel. Bird has been left with his terrified single father and a thousand questions. As the novel begins, Bird is in the process of making up his mind to look for Margaret.

Bird’s quest powers Our Missing Hearts forward through the first and strongest of its three sections, as he makes his way through secret library networks, hunting down missing books laced with clues. There is something both sweetly old-fashioned and subtly horrific about Bird’s fairy tale-inflected search for his missing mother, his slowly dawning realization that the world in which he lives is deeply flawed. It reads like a classic kid’s book you half-recall picking up in the fifth grade. It’s giving The Giver.

Once we leave Bird’s narration and move into Margaret’s more adult voice, however, Our Missing Hearts begins to falter. Margaret is amorphous, less a real character than a political cipher who exists to draw emphatic underlines below all Ng’s real-world parallels.

When Margaret first becomes outraged over her country’s child removals, Ng has her begin to learn “things she’d been able to not know, until now,” about the brutal historical removals of Indigenous children and migrant children and foster children — as though Ng doesn’t trust her readers to recognize those parallels on our own. When Margaret encounters the Black parents of a woman killed at a political protest holding a sign with Margaret’s poem on it, she spends pages thinking about the troubled political relationship between Black and Asian American communities. The eventual understanding she reaches with the parents in question becomes “a small tug at a complicated knot that would take generations to unpick.” Whenever Margaret is talking, this book has a tendency to swing from interestingly polemic to disastrously didactic.

In contrast, Ng’s writing about parenthood is tender, lucid, and unsentimental. One parent telling a story about their lost child can’t remember if the story took place when she was 5 or when she was 15, because of “how slippery and elastic time was in the fact of your child, how it seemed to move not in a line but in endless loops, circling back again and again, overwriting itself.” Margaret teaches Bird “to pluck honeysuckle blossoms from the vine and touch the end to his tongue: such sticky sweetness.” In her love for Bird, Margaret resolves at last into a real person: in the specificity of it, the sensuality.

Ng had her breakout hit with 2017’s Little Fires Everywhere, a beautifully observed novel of suburban motherhood that was adapted into a Hulu series starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. Our Missing Hearts is a weaker outing than its predecessor, clumsier and less grounded in character, too ham-fisted in the political points it’s determined to make. Still, it shines in Ng’s language, and in the dark fairy tale she conjures forth.

Quotes:

1.     But PACT is more than a law. It’s a promise we make to each other: a promise to protect our American ideals and values; a promise that for people who weaken our country with un-American ideas, there will be consequences.

2.     it is PACT, of course, that changed everything. That deemed some books dangerous, to be kept only if they were kept out of reach.

3.     the officer began, your son did deface a sign advocating for PACT.

4.     We’re very grateful to folks like you who are protecting our security, he said. After all, if it weren’t for you, who knows where we’d be. How much, he could see his father calculating, would it take to make them go away? Already he knew it was more than they had. It’s the influence of that girl, his father said. The re-placed one. Sadie Greenstein. I understand she’s a tough case. Shock sizzled through Bird.5. Noah, he says. Don’t do anything to call attention to yourself. That’s where it’s coming from. You know how boys start to get around this age. Girls can get them to do anything.

5.     That’s why I keep telling you, keep a low profile.

6.     this whole thing means cat. The beast that makes the sound miu to protect his crop.

7.     like they were puppets and the strings holding them up had gone slack.

8.     Soon there were protests in the streets. Strikes. Marches that were peaceful. Marches with guns. Windows smashed, things seized or set aflame: anger and need made manifest and tangible.

9.     loved the way his attention focused, intense as summer heat

10.  It came pouring out of her then, in a confused torrent: apologies and confession, explanation and regret and self-recrimination. Her poems, her intent, her horror and sadness at Marie’s death. I didn’t mean, she kept saying.

11.  he Asian and Black worlds, orbiting each other warily

12.  Los Angeles on fire, Korean stores aflame. Her parents had fumed, reading the news, indignant at the damage, the delinquency. And then, years later, a young Black man dead in a stairwell, a Chinese American cop’s finger on the trigger. There’d been outcry on all sides—an accident, police brutality, scapegoating—until the circles separated again into an uneasy truce.

13.  My friend went on vacation, to India, and brought me back this. Marie was maybe seven, or eight? She loved it. She’d play with it, put it in her pocket, carry it around. One day I came home from work and she’d broken off the trunk. Did I give her hell. I told her she had no respect for other people’s things, didn’t I tell her to be careful, why didn’t she listen to me. No, Mama, she said to me, I wanted to see what was inside. She did it on purpose. I told her she was on punishment for a month. The next day I found it like this.

She tipped her palm where the little elephant stood, letting the light catch its curves.

14.  Welcome to the worst club in the world

15.  a large and lumbering animal, every movement threatening to knock some part of the past to the floor. She held her breath, as if that might make her smaller and stiller, as if that might help anything.

16.  As if memory were a bead that might spring from her fingers, clatter to the floor, roll into a crack and disappear.

17.  She’d been doing research, he went on. Trying to trace our family tree. In high school, she got curious. She was at the library all the time, looking at databases and census records, trying to find her roots. Our roots. What she found was a big blank spot. No records, before Emancipation—except for one. A bill of sale, for my maybe-ancestor. Age eleven. To a Mr. Johnson in Albemarle County, Virginia.

18.   Another pause. He looked down at Margaret, and she looked up at him. Listening.

19.   She’d been doing research, he went on. Trying to trace our family tree. In high school, she got curious. She was at the library all the time, looking at databases and census records, trying to find her roots. Our roots. What she found was a big blank spot. No records, before Emancipation—except for one. A bill of sale, for my maybe-ancestor. Age eleven. To a Mr. Johnson in Albemarle County, Virginia.

20.  I didn’t want her to go. But she was set on it. She just said: It’s wrong to take children from their families, Daddy. You know

21.  no poem could encapsulate Bird

22.  her face, like clouds in a strong breeze shifting across the sky.

23.  How could we keep such a book, they wanted to know. If you were really a subversive, how could we risk letting young minds see it?

24.  It devastated Marie, Mrs. Adelman said. Those children taken to silence their parents, and the news not even mentioning it. Everyone staying quiet, pretending it didn’t happen, saying they deserved it. All those families, split apart.

25.  For there were always more children, more stories. It was like picking up seashells on the beach: one more, one more, one more. Each wave depositing another on the wet and gleaming sand. Each shell a relic of a creature once there, now gone.

26.  One day, overcome, she sent a postcard: no message, just a small line drawing. A cat beside a little door. A clue, if they would accept it; an invitation to find the note she’d left for them. To find her. As she dropped it into the mailbox, she imagined it winging the house, but no reply.

27.  So when Sadie had ended up in New York, no trace of her parents anymore, she knew where to go. When she spotted the library, it had felt like something out of a fairy tale: a palace guarded by two mighty lions, pale gray, impassive. She climbed the steps and stretched to set her hand on one massive paw, fingers curving between the broad claws, and it came back to her like a scent on the breeze: a story her mother had read her once. A little girl lost and alone, aided by a lion, the king of that land. She looked around. There was the street lamp. And here in front of her was the magical doorway that might take her home. The library was almost empty; it was nearly closing time, and Sadie wandered until she found a quiet corner, an old armchair in the children’s section, where posters that said read still hung over half-emptied bookshelves. She curled up and fell asleep and awoke to a young woman patting her shoulder.

28.  She’s been shuttled from library to library for weeks and they won’t be able to hide her forever. It’s a miracle they’ve been able to this long.

29.  I only need my diaper changed twice a day, Sadie called from across the room.

30.  He looks at his mother, her hands calloused and rough. But still they are strong and warm and gentle on his.

31.  The same hands he remembers lifting a seedling from the soil, plucking an inchworm from his T-shirt and setting it in the grass.

32.  No one paid any attention to the old women who wandered the streets, gathering bottles and cans to sell; if anything, people edged back or turned away, embarrassed or disgusted or both. She’d seen them for years: of all things the Crisis had not changed, of all things that had survived, somehow these women were one of them. Dogged, unproud, patiently sifting the trash for what could be salvaged—and many of them, even before the Crisis, Asian. Their faces reminded her of her grandmother’s, her mother’s, her own, and she thought of them each time she pulled her straw hat lower over her eyes and shuffled down the sidewalk, bending over garbage bins or at the roots of trees. Dressed like one of them, she could go anywhere, if she was careful.

33.   you’ll come back, he says. It is not a question, but a statement. A reassurance.

She nods.

34, I wanted to make sure you were all right. I wanted to make sure you would be all right. I wanted to see who you were. I wanted to see who you had become. I wanted to see if you were still you. I wanted to see you.

35. The understanding seeps into him like a sedative. Limpening his muscles, scooping smooth the hard edges of his thoughts. He leans against her, trusting her to bear his weight. Letting her arms twine around him like a vine round a tree. Through the tiny hole he’s poked in the window covering, a thin strand of light pierces the black plastic, casting a single starry splotch on the wall.

36. It is a reverse treasure hunt, a game he and his mother are playing.

About story figures:

Margaret Miu(mother),Ethan Gardner(father),Noah Gardner(Bird),Sadie(one of missing children),

Domi(best friend of Margeret), Marie(victim of protest ,daughter of Johnson family).

Summary :

Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner(Noah) lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father(Ethan), a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. Noah only answer when you call him "Bird",but since his mother left him , none calls him Bird anymore, until one day he received the letter ,written the "Bird", he knows this letter from his mother .His mother ,Margaret Miu, a Chinese American poet, left the family when Bird was nine years old without a trace. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far, as his father requires him all the time, until Bird got this letter from his mother. Finally Bird will know

why his mother left him (in his thought), but this letter without words but drawing , cats. It must means something, as Bird remember his mother.

Bird starts to look for his mother news from this letter, then from a story which about cats that his mother told him .For a decade, his family’s life has been governed by laws written to preserve “American culture”(PACT) in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin(PAOs), and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as

unpatriotic. The book (The boy who drew cats)that he is looking for is one of those , include his mothers poems ,even her name .

Bird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn’t know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn’t wonder. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her.

His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of librarians, into the lives of the children who have been taken, and finally to New York City, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change. Once there, Bird does meet with his mother Margaret again. The novel then takes a shift in tone where

Margaret tells Bird about how she got in this position. Why she left him and his father . What she has been through , what will be her plan . There’s quite a bit of shocking revelations and unexpected turns in Margaret’s journey.

It was quite interesting that Margaret was an ‘accidental’ activist—she wrote those poems when she was reflecting on motherhood(stay unnoticed was how you survived) ,and the period of Crisis in US. From her perspective, it was not political at all in nature. They were quiet poems published by a small indie press.

While she was certainly aware of the political turmoil in the country, she thought it was other people’s problems. Even after the brutal murder of her father and her mother’s death from a subsequent heart attack, Margaret’s reaction was to run away from any problems. After all, Margaret was taught to keep her head down and live a quiet existence. I think it’s easy to initially paint Margaret as harsh as this sounds, somewhat of a coward (obviously until her last defiant act). But I actually feel that Margaret’s behavior is very common—not paying attention to severe laws until it impacts them personally.(until she became a activist, Bird is in risk to

being taken away by force ) However, when Marie(victim of student protester), reads Margaret’s work—Marie viewed it as giving a voice to both the parents and to their taken children. Marie used the slogan (our missing

hearts, which from Margarets poem . ) After this, "Our missing hearts" becomes the major slogan in

My interpretation

When I started the story, I felt depressed but when I finished it, I felt a little

relieved. Even I dont know what will happen after those voice in the air (the world will be different ?), but at least Margaret didnt hide any more in front of the fear.

I do feel it did serve as a spark to help finally dismantle PACT. However, it might take close to 20 years or so for it finally to turn around through her act.

Probably Bird and Ethan went back to their quiet life in Cambridge. Probably Bird will make it his mission to find his mother’s words again. That would be nice "our missing hearts"sequel two. Sadie maybe will find her parents or stay with Domi until she will be adult ,and does the "messenger" mission to connect those taken children to find their parents. For sure that Margaret’s act made a different and woke people up to the horrific reality. It will be interested in following Bird as an adult and his initiative to find his mother’s work. And see

how the country is like at that time—if anything did indeed change.

Questions:

1.     Could something like the PACT act be passed here in Taiwan?

“PACT is a very important law that ended the Crisis and keeps our country safe”

During the Crisis, disruptions happened all the time; Everyone out of work, factories gone idle, shortages of everything; mobs had looted stores and rioted in the streets, lighting whole neighborhoods ablaze. The nation paralyzed in the turmoil. Three Pillars of PACT. Outlaws promotion of un-American values and behavior. Requires all citizens to report potential threats to our society. Her parents had protested PACT. PACT protects innocent children from being indoctrinated with false, subversive, un-American ideas by unfit and unpatriotic parents. A headline: local poet tied to insurrections . His mother’s photo, a dimple hovering at the edge of her smile. His mom is the ringleader or peacekeeper?

In 1950, due to the outbreak of the Korean War, Taiwan was included in the Pacific island chain of the Cold War. The entire island was shrouded in white terror. The authoritarian Chiang Kai-shek government feared the displeasure of the US government and McCarthyism. Massacres and shootings like the 228th and 27th troops did, but they cant be ignored; therefore, a model prison was set up, under the pretense of resettlement, but the so-called "thought prisoners" were treated in real terms, and the site was chosen to be located across the sea from Taiwans main island. Green Island. Many blood-stained stories happened repeatedly on the burning island.

2.     Why did Bird embark on this journey to find his mother? What answers did he hope to find?

Sadie had ended up in New York, no trace of her parents anymore. Sadie’s courage makes Bird brave.’ If we fear something, it is all the more imperative we study it thoroughly.”

3.     Throughout the story, Bird remembers folktales that his mother used to tell him as a child. What was the significance of these folktales to this story as a whole?

this whole thing means cat. The beast that makes the sound miu to protect his crop.

4. After Bird’s mother leaves, his father ensures that he goes by Noah. But once he is reunited with his mother and she calls him Bird again, he starts to finally relax in his own skin. Let’s talk about how a name ties to our whole identity.

any protest, and the authorities seek her , and try to take away Bird from his parents. Thats why Margaret left and started to collect the stories of those missing children.

It was like picking up seashells on the beach: one more, one more, one more. Each wave depositing another on the wet and gleaming sand. Each shell a relic of a creature once there, now gone.

She got a plan to publish those stories. This changes everything for Margaret .

Questions:

5.Once they’re reunited, Margaret recounts her journey to Bird. She paints a very different picture

from what the media has portrayed her—she was not an activist by choice. What were your thoughts as you read Margaret’s backstory? Do we have similar experience in our lives?

The movie"Untold Herstory"portrays three women of different ages and identities, including female students, talented dancers and young mothers. Some read a few books, sing a few songs, and some are just passionate about justice... and they are "disappeared" together Brought to Island of Fire to serve his sentence, his name was erased and his name was changed to a serial number. There was no relevant information on the transcript of household registration, and only the six characters "Liu Magou No. 15" were used instead.

6.Why did Margaret’s poems struck a chord with the protest movement?

It came pouring out of her then, in a confused torrent: apologies and confession, explanation and regret and self-recrimination. Her poems, her intent, her horror and sadness at Marie’s death. I didn’t mean, she kept saying.

he Asian and Black worlds, orbiting each other warily

Los Angeles on fire, Korean stores aflame. Her parents had fumed, reading the news, indignant at the damage, the delinquency. And then, years later, a young Black man dead in a stairwell, a Chinese American cop’s finger on the trigger. There’d been outcry on all sides—an accident, police brutality, scapegoating—until the circles separated again into an uneasy truce.

My friend went on vacation, to India, and brought me back this. Marie was maybe seven, or eight? She loved it. She’d play with it, put it in her pocket, carry it around. One day I came home from work and she’d broken off the trunk. Did I give her hell. I told her she had no respect for other people’s things, didn’t I tell her to be careful, why didn’t she listen to me. No, Mama, she said to me, I wanted to see what was inside. She did it on purpose. I told her she was on punishment for a month. The next day I found it like this.

She tipped her palm where the little elephant stood, letting the light catch its curves.

Welcome to the worst club in the world

a large and lumbering animal, every movement threatening to knock some part of the past to the floor. She held her breath, as if that might make her smaller and stiller, as if that might help anything.

As if memory were a bead that might spring from her fingers, clatter to the floor, roll into a crack and disappear.

She’d been doing research, he went on. Trying to trace our family tree. In high school, she got curious. She was at the library all the time, looking at databases and census records, trying to find her roots. Our roots. What she found was a big blank spot. No records, before Emancipation—except for one. A bill of sale, for my maybe-ancestor. Age eleven. To a Mr. Johnson in Albemarle County, Virginia.

7.The government considers Margaret a threat and she has to leave the family immediately without a truly proper goodbye to Bird. Do you feel Margaret was left with no choice?

like they were puppets and the strings holding them up had gone slack.

1.     How did meeting with Marie’s parents change Margaret’s perspective on activism and her role in it?

no poem could encapsulate Bird also Marie, Marie just followed her soul , the poem is just a guide pour her inside world out.

2.     Why did so many people turn a blind eye to the violence against the Asian community? Why was the Asian community targeted?

PACT is more than a law. It’s a promise we make to each other: a promise to protect our American ideals and values; a promise that for people who weaken our country with un-American ideas, there will be consequences.

3.     While Margaret could have gone away with Bird and Ethan in hiding—she felt it was her duty to tell the stories of the taken children. What would have done if you were Margaret? Why was it important for her to tell the stories?

It is not a question, but a statement. A reassurance.

The best way to cure the pain is to find out the reason.

4.     Do you feel Margaret’s initiative had an impact on the people who heard it? Did it change anything or do you think things remained the same?

It is a reverse treasure hunt, a game he and his mother are playing.

 Life is a game, we can’t choose our role, just enjoy playing with fun with wisdeom.

5.     Did the ending feel hopeful or somber? What was your impression of the ending overall?

Life is tough, but the love soothe our wound.

Freedom is not easy for us to chase after. But once you lost

You know it’s so amazing and worth to treasure with whole life long.

I wanted to make sure you were all right. I wanted to make sure you would be all right. I wanted to see who you were. I wanted to see who you had become. I wanted to see if you were still you. I wanted to see you.

6.     What do you feel are some of the key takeaway and lessons from this story?

The gift of the elephant shows the freedom of the animal. Once be taken away his wrapping, he looks so charming and adorable.

Taiwan, from being abandoned to being depended on, just cos the spirit of clustering and closinity, everyone shared par of the job and connected with each other. "customer request,Mission must be achieved" the mission of impossible comes from freedom. Business protects Taiwans security.Talent and manpower storm is the worse problem in our near future. 50 years ago, 17 rookie engineers led Taiwan from labor to semiconductors. Now we still keep rolling for our mission. Surving comes never from begging but strengthen our own ability.

Questions for Our Missing Hearts. Answered by Shannon.

1. Could something like the PACT act be passed here in Taiwan?—> The possibility is minimal since 1) Taiwan has a different history and identity from the US, and has been more successful in resisting China’s influence and maintaining its sovereignty and democracy.

2)Taiwan has a more diverse and tolerant society than the US in the novel, and has a strong tradition of civil society and social movements that could challenge any authoritarian laws or policies.

3)What’s more, Taiwan has a more robust and independent media and literary scene than the US in the novel, and has more access to information and alternative perspectives that could expose and counteract propaganda and censorship.

However, Taiwan is also facing increasing pressure and threats from China, which could undermine its security and stability. Taiwan also has its own issues with ethnic and political divisions, discrimination, and corruption that could create social unrest and discontent.

Therefore, while it may seem unlikely that something like the PACT act could be passed in Taiwan, it is not impossible. It would depend on how the people of Taiwan respond to the challenges they face, and how they defend their values and rights.

2.Why did Bird embark on this journey to find his mother? What answers did he hope to find?

—> Bird embarked on this journey to find his mother because 1) he loved her and missed her deeply. He felt lonely and isolated without her, and he wanted to reconnect with her and understand why she left him.

2)he was intrigued by his mother’s poems and stories, which he received through secret messages. He wanted to learn more about his mother’s life, her culture, her beliefs, and her role in the resistance movement.

3)he was dissatisfied with his father’s lack of communication and explanation. He felt that his father was hiding something from him, and he wanted to know the truth about his family’s past and present.

—>He was struggling with his identity as an Asian American in a hostile society. He faced racism and discrimination every day, and he wanted to find a sense of belonging and acceptance. He hoped that by finding his mother, he would also find himself.

3. Throughout the story, Bird remembers folktales that his mother used to tell him as a child. What was the significance of these folktales to this story as a whole?

—>The folktales that Bird remembered were mostly from Asian cultures, such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc. They reflected his mother’s heritage and identity, as well as her love for storytelling and poetry. They also served as clues for Bird’s quest to find his mother. They contained hidden meanings or symbols that guided him along the way. For example, the story of “The Boy Who Drew Cats” inspired him to draw cats on walls as a way of communicating with his mother. They could be lessons for Bird’s growth and survival.

4. After Bird’s mother leaves, his father ensures that he goes by Noah. But once he is reunited with his mother and she calls him Bird again, he starts to finally relax in his own skin. Let’s talk about how a name ties to our whole identity.

—> A name can tie to our whole identity because it can reflect our culture, heritage, personality, and sense of belonging. In the novel, Bird’s name is a symbol of his hope and freedom, as well as his connection to his mother who gave him that name. When his father changes his name to Noah, he is trying to protect him from the discrimination and oppression that Asian Americans face under PACT. However, he is also erasing Bird’s identity and individuality. When Bird reunites with his mother and she calls him Bird again, he feels more comfortable and confident in who he is and where he comes from.

5.Once they’re reunited, Margaret recounts her journey to Bird. She paints a very different picture from what the media has portrayed her—she was not an activist by choice. What were your thoughts as you read Margaret’s backstory? Do we have similar experience in our lives?

—> Margaret’s backstory reveals that she was not an activist by choice, but rather a victim of circumstances. She was forced to flee China after her husband was killed by the government for writing a dissident poem. She came to America as a refugee, hoping to find a better life for herself and her son. However, she faced racism and prejudice in her new country, especially after the Crisis and the rise of PACT. Her poem “All Our Missing Hearts” was meant to be a personal expression of her grief and longing, but it was appropriated by the anti-PACT movement as a rallying cry. She had to go into hiding to avoid being arrested or worse. Her story shows how art can be both powerful and dangerous, and how people can be misunderstood and misrepresented by the media and the authorities. We may have similar experiences in our lives when we face injustice or oppression, or when we try to express ourselves through art or words.

6.Why did Margaret’s poems struck a chord with the protest movement?

—> Margaret’s poems struck a chord with the protest movement because they resonated with their feelings of anger, sadness, and hope. Her poems spoke of the loss of freedom, culture, and identity that many people felt under PACT. They also spoke of the love and courage that motivated them to resist and fight for change. Her poems were simple but profound, using metaphors and imagery that appealed to the emotions and imagination of the readers. Her poems were also universal, as they addressed themes that anyone could relate to, such as love, grief, and hope. Her poems inspired people to stand up for their rights and values, and to reclaim their missing hearts.

7.The government considers Margaret a threat and she has to leave the family immediately without a truly proper goodbye to Bird. Do you feel Margaret was left with no choice?

—> She had no choice because she was considered a threat to PACT by the government, who actually left the deemed-to-be-dangerous parents no time to react while forcefully taking their children away. Besides, Margaret chose to leave Bird and Ethan simply because she wanted protect them from potential harm that may ensue due to her activism.

8.How did meeting with Marie’s parents change Margaret’s perspective on activism and her role in it?

—> At first Margaret only wrote poems as ways to express her personal life and perspective on love, hope, and grief since she understood the importance of living a low-profile life, trying to avoid attention from the authority. It wasn’t until she met Marie’s parents was she struck by the power of her literature in making change.

9.Why did so many people turn a blind eye to the violence against the Asian community? Why was the Asian community targeted?

—> People are programmed in nature to choose their own safety over looking out for others while in danger, which was undoubtedly true in Our Missing Hearts.

—> Asian communities were targeted because China was the source for economic and political instability across the globe that even jeopardized the U.S. values in the novel.

10.While Margaret could have gone away with Bird and Ethan in hiding—she felt it was her duty to tell the stories of the taken children. What would have done if you were Margaret? Why was it important for her to tell the stories?

—> I would probably do as Margaret did if I were as gifted as Margaret in impacting people via art. Telling people about the stories of those taken children was important as it resonated the deepest affection of humans for their children, which was a way to arouse people to take action to make things right.

11.Do you feel Margaret’s initiative had an impact on the people who heard it? Did it change anything or do you think things remained the same?

—> Yes, it did make an impact and change. Margaret had been impacting people via literature. Despite poetry being viewed as soft power, it moved and reached people’s hearts gradually day by day. That’s why the resistance force was growing, and more and more people were drawn to the gatherings irrespective of the risk of being raided and caught by the police.

12.Did the ending feel hopeful or somber? What was your impression of the ending overall?

—> The open-ending leaves space allowing readers’ own interpretations. For those looking at the bright side, it would mark an everlasting journey to freedom whereas it could be deemed horrific because there’s no ending,no hope, or certainty certainty for those in need of assurance from others. I belong to the former.

13.What do you feel are some of the key takeaway and lessons from this story?

—> 1)free will of humans can go beyond laws and adversities.

 2)family love and bond are powerful tools that help people stand strong among adversities.

 3)politics is full of lies and distortions, but completely staying away from such a power game can be not wise because we have to strive for proper and rightful representations of our own kind and right lest our basic rights be taken away. So, when it’s time to vote, go voting. When it’s time to opine on public issues, make voice.

Summery by Consultant Clive

Today was another great celebration of storytelling led by Happy who was a wonderful leader, despite the distance and geographical distance.  She provided us with a detailed summary and questions that struck at the core of all our members.  The story follows Bird Gardiner, who after living the last few years with his father – a former linguist who now shelves library books – has learned to disavow his artist and dissident mother. In this America, books critical of the nation are not allowed, children of unpatriotic parents are removed from their homes and hatred toward people of Asian origin seems accepted.

Bird is a likable, believable character who seems both naïve at times and brave at others. The book moves from a meditation on our current political and social state to a tight suspenseful thriller as we follow Bird on an odyssey to find his mother. It is both a reminder of the value of art, a tribute to family bonds that are unbreakable and a salve for our shared humanity.

Celeste Ng’s paragraphs are built with sentences so lovely and lyrical and they certainly touched the hearts of Faye and Florence.  The way Ng writes about motherhood – about what you know and don’t know about your children, and their expressions “part them and part the person they loved most” make it hard not to  go on a journey with this novel.

"Our Missing Hearts" was a perfect book club selection (although apparently too long….I will send a message to Celeste!) and the book lends itself to questions from how to teach our children to create a better world when we have failed to do so and how we can confront injustice in our own communities. It was a very powerful book and was the catalyst for Gloria and Mingli to share experiences as well as Shannon sharing some of her family’s experiences in the USA. 

It would be easy to dismiss the book as too close to the America we all know, Happy reminded us that this is not just about America.  As Lydia and Emma pointed out, this was a beautiful storytelling of families that took us to another dimension from the world in which we now live. It was really a wonderful and powerful book and the meeting was memorable.  If there is one thing we can learn from this book, it is the power of storytelling and how they bring us together and help us to find connections with other people.  Once again, thank you Happy and thank you to the members who joined in and shared today.  

Related reading:

1.      https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60149573-our-missing-hearts

2.      https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/164692.Celeste_Ng

3.      https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/books/review/celeste-ng-our-missing-hearts.html

4.      https://www.vox.com/23387768/our-missing-hearts-celeste-ng-review

5.      https://bookclubchat.com/books/book-club-questions-for-our-missing-hearts-by-celeste-ng/

6.      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism

7.      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtH1oepOfe4&ab_channel=%E4%B8%89%E7%AB%8BiNEWS

8.      A Family’s Murder-Suicide and a Foster Care System in Crisis https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/books/review/we-were-once-a-family-roxanna-asgarian.html?unlocked_article_code=Gsnrmeq7AiYOdmCh1jPF_TkQDM6C0qsgQGFXGQq51IcjtGzaOND4kEdBTY_7a7ubT28K8Kq7XJ-drwtbbm2wjprbX0G0W0dD0RZN6cnitDO04NfR0EU7CQbq6ighbIydhaQlg9ldhpMbc4rQHERZPw2xuNx4kjrm8T5pffDInY1bb4voA7zy4jZAN_LihX1W21IEDMmO2wRi2_LF0b8zIJnbOBa7XOii_Lt3J8xJcI9SsM9uoo98BKILi3YFdy2Rg6fcXx0ED8KjNHQqqYshA2TXyr4GQCgi7hCKCQXnfAvZP3fdnUzmbGLvAvmze2XIDMVIXLDgYIWgdRnmmKSywk1h9TxtBXdb-Zw0S6478Mj6ugGiuQ

9.      https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-niemoeller-first-they-came-for-the-socialists