Our Missing Hearts: Celeste Ng's Inspiration to Write It

Our Missing Hearts, Celeste Ng's newest book, paints a terrible picture of the United States in an undefined future filled with anti-Asian American prejudice, but is it a hellscape? Even Ng herself had some doubts as she was writing it.

Bird Gardner, a 12-year-old whose mother Margaret, a Chinese American poet, has vanished, is the main character of the novel. Bird sets off on a search for her and an investigation into his family's history after receiving a cryptic letter.

Late in 2016, shortly after finishing her second book, Little Fires Everywhere, Ng began writing this book. However, several things in the outside world altered at that moment. The story began to incorporate the issues she was asking herself, such as, "Where are we heading as a society?" How can she as a parent raise her child in a setting that seems so unfriendly to him? How can she attempt to instill optimism in her child when she is experiencing so much sorrow herself?

In one of her interviews, Celeste Ng stated that she had to ultimately come to terms with the fact that it wasn't that far off. Because in the universe of Our Missing Hearts, America is recuperating from an economic meltdown and political upheaval that have all been attributed on China, it is possible that it is two or three degrees off from reality. The government removes "un-American principles" from parents in order to keep the peace and transfers their children to different homes.

Due of her feelings of inadequacy when writing on current events, Ng nearly decided to abandon the writing of the book. Suddenly, she felt as though she couldn't ignore this subject after the pandemic and a wave of blatant incidents of violence against Asian Americans. In order to concentrate on this one, she set aside the draft of another novel she had already finished.

Resource: MSN