Our Missing Hearts Study Guide

Celeste Ng is the daughter of Chinese immigrants who migrated to the United States in the late 1960s. Her father worked as a physicist for NASA, while her mother taught chemistry at Cleveland State University. Ng graduated from Shaker Heights High School in Ohio, and went on to study English at Harvard before earning her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Michigan. In 2012, Ng won the Pushcart Prize for her short story “Girls, At Play.” In 2014, she published her debut novel entitled Everything I Never Told You, a literary thriller about family, racism, and secrets. It has since been translated into over 30 languages, and it won the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the ALA’s Alex Award. Her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere (2017)—which follows two families in 1990s Shaker Heights as they challenge their neighborhood’s culture—was adapted for a television miniseries. Ng has taught writing at the University of Michigan and served as an editor for the Fiction Writers Review. In recent years, she has been a vocal advocate for the children of undocumented immigrants who have been separated from their families. Among other honors, Ng is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim fellowship. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her family.

In her author’s note and in interviews, Ng discusses how events following the 2016 election in the United States inspired many aspects of Our Missing Hearts. The Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the U.S. border is one of many instances in which governments have removed children from their families to exert political control. Other examples that inspired the fictional PACT re-placements include the fracturing of enslaved families, government-run boarding schools for Indigenous children instituted in the 1700s and beyond, and the dysfunction of the present-day foster system. The years of the COVID-19 pandemic witnessed an uptick in anti-Asian rhetoric and racism similar to the discrimination that takes place after Ng’s imagined government blames China for the Crisis; in much the same way, the Trump administration blamed China for the spread of the coronavirus disease in 2020. Finally, since 2020, the American Library Association has reported a significant increase in attempted book bans of titles accessible in public and school libraries. In 2022, there were 1,269 attempts to ban books offered in public libraries, the highest number since the ALA began compiling censorship data over 20 years ago. Many of these proposed bans cite the importance of protecting children from indoctrination and “dangerous” ideologies as a reason to restrict access to certain books.

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is a foundational dystopian novel about an American society where books have been outlawed, and so-called “firemen” burn any they find. Though PACT’s censorship is less extreme, the empty library bookshelves Bird encounters similarly point to the suppression of free thought. Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police (1994), translated into English in 2019, presents a fable-like dystopia in which random objects are forgotten from the communal memory—except for a select few people who remember them. The danger these citizens face for their memories recollects PACT’s effective erasure of historical events based on their potential to inspire unpatriotic feelings. For another take on a surveillance state, Jessamine Chan’s novel The School for Good Mothers (2022) tells the story of a mother’s attempts to prove her devotion to her child under the watchful eye of a judgmental government institution, recalling Margaret’s struggles to mother Bird the way she wants to. For a greater exploration of the nuances of national identity, Lisa Ko’s The Leavers (2017) examines ideas of borders and belonging through the lens of a Chinese American boy whose undocumented immigrant mother suddenly goes missing, leaving him in the care of white college professors. Finally, for readers looking for more lyrical writing about coming of age in a post-disaster America, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014) tells the sweeping tale of a young actress whose life is just beginning as the world ends.