Review by Robert McCool

Words can be weapons; whether written or spoken, or the more dangerous implied threat by authority.

Poetry has to be words too; a light illuminating the darkness in some human souls.

Such is the premise in the new masterwork by Celeste Ng, titled Our Missing Hearts ($34.00, Random House ISBN978-0-593-63267-3).

The story begins after the collapse of the United States economic system (which is blamed on the Chinese, of course). This is the time of PACT (Preserving American Culture and Traditions), a totalitarian authority that controls the whole country. PACT has the power to suppress any activity that is considered UN-American or seditious. PACT has the power to read all mail, wiretap any phone, or impose an ongoing curfew, which the breaking of brings down the law. Big time.

They also have the right to remove any child from its family if the parents do not follow PACT constraints faithfully to protect American values. These PACT laws were passed unilaterally by the House and Senate in an effort to bring America out of the Crises.

CONTINUES

PACT especially hates Chinese-Americans, and it does its best to take their children and put them in what is a brainwashing camp. Many Chinese-Americans adults up end up in prison, never to be heard from again.

The main characters are a mixed American family: Bird, the young boy who now lives with his American father; a word scholar and professor, who now shelves books at the college library where he used to teach, after his Chinese-American mother, the world famous poet Margaret Gardner, is declared UN-American and her work banned from sale and libraries, like most other books in this new age of oppression. She deserts Bird and her husband to escape what would surely land her in a bad place where she would never get out.

Bird misses his mother and wonders why she disappeared from them in order to escape PACT’s harsh laws that would have put her in prison and her family in jeopardy. Since then, the father refuses to acknowledge her existence or to talk with Bird about her or her poetry.

But Bird stills wonders where she went, and one day he hears from her in a rough drawing showing her location in New York. That is the way only she can possibly see him, in stealth and in secret from his father.

So Bird gathers what money he can and takes the bus into New York City and follows his mother’s drawing, which is in fact a coded map, and finally finds his lost mother.

Margaret has not stopped writing poetry even as she places herself in extreme danger, while her words are passed mouth to mouth by people who crave her thoughts and words that illuminate ease from the eternal fear that they live in. Her words are filled with hope and dreams for an oppressed society. Although she and her poetry must hide, still it gets out, mostly through brave librarians.

But Margaret also has other projects too. She goes from one family to another family who have had their children taken away from them and records their stories, so she can perhaps have a book publisher, one very small and unknown by PACT, put them into print secretly, so as the people who love her work might pass it on, mostly by librarians, and spread her message as far as possible.

Margaret also has another ambition, helped by her childhood friend, Domi Duchess, who has inherited her father’s company that makes computer chips, and using his continued business genius that she follows, is now rich and can help Margaret fulfill her dream of spreading the words that people who have had their family torn apart have told her.

But Margaret has another important and ambitious project too that she calls her job,. She, and with her friend’s expertise, she is making trash bottle caps into tiny speakers with which she hopes to broadcast the collected stories she has obtained from her interviews with the childless parents. She spreads these tiny speakers into trash cans, waste bins and even dog shit, where nobody would think to look. And her project is successful. People listen to her all over the city causing them to doubt PACT’s authoritarian laws. There will be anger in the streets, and fearful minds changed, as Margaret has hoped.

She and her husband are reunited with Bird, by the efforts of Domi, in a hidden cabin in the far woods.

The book is written wonderfully, and Celeste Ng is in true brilliant form as she writes about the culture of Chinese-Americans, and the use of instant Chinese noodle cups.

I very strongly suggest that you read this masterful book.