San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Dystopian novel illuminates policies of fear
Across the U.S., books are destroyed, mail is censored, teachers are surveilled and families are broken. Celeste Ng’s suspenseful third novel, a near-future dystopia, follows young Bird and his parents, Margaret Miu and Ethan Gardner, as they are torn apart by PACT, the Preserve American Culture and Tradition Act. A paranoid, despotic government rails against the military and economic bogeyman threat of China. Asian Americans, especially, are scapegoated and frequently assaulted.
Until three years ago, 12year-old Bird has lived a quiet life with his linguist father and poet mother near Harvard. Then, an anti-PACT activist waves a protest sign using the title of Margaret’s book, “All Our Missing Hearts.” After the protester is murdered by police, Margaret’s title goes viral. Book sales soar. She’s labeled a “kungPAO” radical, the book is pulped, their home is attacked, and she knows she must vanish or Bird will be taken from his father and sent to a patriotic family.
Here, as in her previous novels, Ng unflinchingly depicts acts of racism, family fragmentation and the violence seamed into American identity. Ng’s book is also an homage to librarians who are the vanguard of resistance to PACT.
The disgraced Ethan and Bird are evicted, and their books confiscated. Bird’s father snags a small 11th-floor suite in a student dorm with a broken elevator. Ethan spends evenings reading the dictionary while Bird’s homework consists of regurgitating fervid propaganda and answering math questions like, “If a Korean car costs $15,000 but lasts only 3 years, while an American car costs $20,000 but lasts 10 years, how much money
would be saved over 50 years by purchasing only American cars?”
Three years after Margaret disappears, Bird gets a letter from New York addressed in her handwriting: one page filled with cat drawings. He recalls a feline folktale she loved, which leads him on a labyrinthine search for his mother. A librarian explains how to take a bus and he travels solo to Manhattan, then on to the abandoned hovel of a Brooklyn brownstone where Margaret is hiding. She’s overjoyed to see Bird, even as she labors to create an elaborate public protest against PACT.
Margaret unfurls family history for Bird while intently weaving wires and soldering transistors into bottle caps. He regards the unheated, ramshackle house with peeling wallpaper and watches her busy hands. Is she making listening devices? Bombs? As she recalls being pregnant with him (note: Ng doesn’t use quotation marks for dialogue), “… she coils the wires neatly round her fingertip and tucks the bundle into the bottle cap. A twiddle of the screwdriver and the little capsule is sealed, a fat plastic pill.
“Bird can’t stop himself. What is it, he asks.
“Resistance, his mother says, and sets the bottle cap on the tabletop with all the others.”
Ng excels at narrative tension and at mustering readers’ fear and outrage. Bird emerges as an authentic boy; other characters are sketchier. The plot relies on coincidence. And on improbabilities: How did Bird’s very young parents afford a three-bedroom house in Cambridge, even in a depressed market?
Nevertheless, “Our Missing Hearts” is both a powerful reflection and grim augury. PACT evokes documented abuses of the Homeland Security Act and the Patriot Act. Ng is warning of further censorship, family separation and targeted murders. Like George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro and Octavia E. Butler, Ng pays close enough attention to write tomorrow’s headlines.