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Part 1, Chapter 6
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Our Missing Hearts, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Free Speech, Patriotism, and the Corruption of Truth
Surveillance, Fear, and Discrimination
The Power of Art and Imagination
Parental Responsibility, Rights, and Experience
Privilege, Silence, and Complicity
Summary
Analysis
The next day, Bird returns to the library to see if Carina can help him. As he watches, an older Black man chooses a book and slips a piece of paper in between its pages. Bird remembers the slip of paper the librarian found in a book the other day. The man gives the book with the note to the librarian, saying he thinks it has been shelved in the wrong place and that he’s sure someone is looking for it. Bird senses the man and the librarian are speaking in some kind of code. Before the man leaves, he mentions that he grew up in foster care. The librarian thanks him.
Bird instinctively seeks help at the library, positioning the institution as a central hub of community access and aid. The return of the notes slipped inside books, accompanied by coded language, points again to anti-PACT involvement. There is the growing sense that librarians are implicitly trustworthy in this authoritarian context (perhaps because of their commitment to the freedom of information), as both Bird and the older Black man come to her for unconventional assistance.
Themes
Bird approaches Carina as she is looking at the slip of paper the man left behind. On the slip of paper, he sees what looks like a name and an address. The librarian hides the paper quickly. Bird asks her if she can help him get to New York City, having concluded Margaret wants him to go to the address he found in his bedroom cubby. The librarian says she cannot help him, and Bird decides to bluff. He tells her he knows what she is up to: that he saw the note the man slipped to her. Tense, Carina pulls him into the library’s backroom, scolding him for spying. She demands that he tell no one what he has seen.
Carina’s secretive activities with the slips of paper seem to reassure Bird of her trustworthiness. He takes a risk in asking her to help him run away—as it is always a risk to trust someone in a surveillance state—but his instincts pay off. That he thinks to implicitly threaten Carina with revealing whatever she is up to demonstrates that Bird’s primary mode of understanding power comes from the world as he knows it, where information can always be leveraged to get what one wants.
Themes
Carina tells Bird that people will get hurt if he tells anyone what he saw and that the man with the note is just trying to help. Bird maintains that he only wants her help, not to cause trouble. Remembering how the librarian knew his name before, he tells her he is trying to find his mother, Margaret Miu: “one of the leaders” trying to find lost children. The librarian reveals that she knows who Bird and his mother are, and that his mother used to come into the library often. Bird tries to picture this.
Carina’s admonishment brings Bird back from his fairytale quest into the real world where there are real consequences. Name-dropping Margaret feels like an attempt to make up for the way he flippantly threatened Carina, but only further reveals his naivety and ignorance (that is, Bird doesn’t know exactly what his mother’s role in the resistance movement is).
Themes
Carina quotes Margaret Miu’s poem—“all our missing hearts / scattered, to sprout elsewhere.” She seems bitter and says that it is easier to write brave words than “do the work.” She tells Bird that she and other librarians have been helping parents track down their missing children, collecting information about the children’s whereabouts and passing it along. At this point, they cannot do more to reunite the broken families. Bird asks why she does it, and the librarian cites a historical event Bird does not know because, evidently, it would have been un-American for his teachers to include it in the curriculum.
Carina’s subtly implies that Margaret has not contributed much to the anti-PACT movement apart from her words. This moment also illustrates how Bird is largely ignorant of who his mother is; all his information comes from foggy memories or hearsay. This pushes back against the idea of his journey as a heroic fantasy quest in a way that will return in future chapters. The line from Margaret’s poem is still too vague to understand its significance to the anti-PACT movement. The described sharing of information positions libraries as central in the fight against both censorship and child removal. In highlighting Bird’s ignorance of historical events, Carina demonstrates how censorship actively hurts the quality of education and general public knowledge.
Themes
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Carina tells Bird not to judge Margaret for leaving: she might have had good reasons for her choices. The librarian herself had two children, but both died during the Crisis. She assures Bird that his mother would be happy just to know he is well. Bird realizes Carina also knew Sadie, but she tells Bird she doesn’t know where Sadie has gone. Though she can’t help him get to New York, the librarian provides Bird with train schedules and routes, telling him that what he does with that information is his business.
Despite her earlier judgment of Margaret, Carina urges Bird not to be too harsh toward his mother, suggesting a shared understanding that parents often have to make hard decisions. The loss of her own children, unrelated to PACT, hints at the deep and varied losses the Crisis left behind. In providing Bird with transportation schedules and letting him use that information however he wants to, Carina embodies a core principle of librarianship: to help people find information without trying to influence what they do with it, or how they interpret it. This principle directly contradicts PACT, whose promotion of patriotism above all else restricts information access and actively seeks to shape the truth.
Themes
