Our Missing Hearts: Part 2, Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

Margaret begins to tell Bird her story while making something with pipes and wires—it is not clear what she is creating. Flashing back to the time before her birth, she recalls the story of the bomb in her mother and father’s mailbox. They were Chinese immigrants who quickly sensed their neighbors’ prejudice and made every effort to assimilate themselves and Margaret into the mainstream American culture. Margaret was always bookish and traveled to New York after graduation, lured by the promise that she might find a new identity there.

Still in a flashback, Margaret arrives in New York. Before long, she is recreating herself, no longer concerned with blending in because no one notices her in the city. The Crisis is only on the horizon, and Margaret is still able to find work waitressing at a restaurant. She skips classes in order to write and publish her poems. She also learns Cantonese, which she has never heard her mother and father speak. She drinks with friends and makes love to strangers, feeling as though everyone can sense the storm that is coming. She figures they may as well “burn bright.”

The Crisis begins with the mass closure of small businesses and a dramatic upswing in unemployment. Margaret’s restaurant shuts down, and no one else is hiring, unable to pay the employees they have. Economists speculate on the cause of the country’s financial crisis, but it will be a few years before they blame China. While the wealthy hunker down to wait it out, the middle and lower classes suffer disproportionately, losing their homes. Eventually, protests begin to break out across the country. Margaret watches as the city empties. Though her classes are cancelled, she insists on staying.

Margaret meets a fellow student named Domi and moves into an apartment with her and four other people. One of them works for the mayor, trying to connect people to what little resources still exist. Another is a security guard in an empty office building. The rest take odd jobs where they can, scavenging from rich neighborhoods when opportunities dry up. None of them feels guilty about looting: now, survival is all that matters. Eventually, Margaret procures a bike and becomes a messenger, and Domi joins her shortly after.

Crime and danger increase at night during the Crisis. Domi and Margaret comfort and look out for each other when they can. Margaret has forgotten all about poetry, but she gradually adapts to the new rules of the world. The governor imposes a curfew and limits on social gatherings. Illness spreads quickly and often goes untreated due to drug shortages and high hospital bills. Margaret gets used to living hand to mouth and caring only about her own survival, but she cannot get used to the city’s pervasive quiet.

In the present, Margaret pauses, considering how best to explain to Bird what the Crisis felt like. As time wore on, more and more people became fed up and took to protests, which often turned violent, and still no help came. Bird interrupts to say he is hungry, and Margaret is embarrassed that she has forgotten how to take care of him. She gives him a granola bar and continues to work on her project, incorporating plastic bottle caps into her mysterious creations. She avoids Bird’s questions about the work and returns to her story.

In Margaret’s story, the Crisis has been going on for two years. Margaret’s Asian features are starting to make her the target of harassment. She and the other roommates throw Domi a birthday party in the apartment despite the new law prohibiting large gatherings, and this is where Margaret meets Ethan, a Columbia graduate. They talk all night on the fire escape, and the next night Margaret walks uptown to Ethan’s apartment. Domi doesn’t approve of their relationship, saying that Margaret is abandoning her friends for comfort, even though Domi herself comes from a wealthy family. Ethan’s parents’ connections allow him to retain his studio apartment for a reasonable rent, and Margaret takes refuge there more and more frequently.

Ethan specialized in etymology and is fluent in numerous languages. Margaret suggests they learn Cantonese together. Both Margaret and Ethan love language, and they spend their days in his apartment reading dictionaries, tracing the roots of words. Margaret loves Ethan’s attempts to know the world through words, and he loves her preoccupation with the ineffable. Outside their contented bubble, national unrest continues in rallies and votes and violence, though nothing improves. Having found a safe place, Margaret decides to stay with Ethan rather than return home. She sends Domi a letter but receives no reply.

In Ethan’s apartment, Margaret begins to write poetry again, detailing her experiences during the Crisis. The media begins to blame China for the economic disaster. People begin to see those with “foreign faces” as suspicious. Margaret’s mother calls to tell her a stranger pushed her father down some stairs at the park. He later dies from his injuries. The day after his death, Margaret’s mother has a heart attack, and a police officer notifies her. When Margaret’s father was pushed, several passersby saw and critically failed to help him. The man who pushed her father is never caught, and such racially motivated incidents become increasingly common.

Grieving her parents, Margaret asks Ethan to take her away from the city, wanting a fresh start. His parents’ connections land him a teaching job at Harvard, and Margaret and Ethan buy their house in Cambridge. Margaret gladly retreats from the Crisis into a privileged domestic bubble. In the larger world, an Asian man is caught on camera shooting a senator who has been spouting anti-Chinese rhetoric. Though the shooter is never caught, the incident leads to the creation of PACT.

After the assassination attempt, many view all Asian people as untrustworthy. PACT is signed into law in an effort to reunify Americans around the hatred of a common (but loosely defined) enemy: anti-American elements. The law funds neighborhood watch groups, creates jobs for people to produce pro-American merchandise, rewards those who report “potential troublemakers,” and allows for children to be removed from un-American environments. Eventually, questioning PACT constitutes a violation of PACT. Though the president insists that loyal persons of Asian origin have nothing to fear, violence against anyone perceived to be Chinese rises, and the perpetrators go unpunished.

During this time, Margaret remains in her comfortable, sheltered life, not thinking about the negative consequences of PACT, though she occasionally misses her life with Domi. She becomes pregnant and meets Ethan’s parents. When the library reopens, she reads books about how animals mother their young and how plants reproduce. Inspired, she writes enough poems to fill a book. One day, Ethan brings her a pomegranate, and she thinks of how many seeds can be planted from this single fruit. She writes her final poem about these seeds—the pomegranate’s missing hearts, “[s]cattered, to sprout elsewhere.”

Margaret is ashamed that she thought of PACT as progress and that none of the negative consequences would ever apply to her. (In the present, she completes one of the bottle cap creations and tells Bird, when he asks, that it is resistance.) Returning to Margaret’s flashback, rumors spread about the government removing children from their families. Some stories are reported, like the case of a three-year-old girl removed after her parents took her to a march protesting anti-Chinese bias. Hearing this story, Margaret thinks of how irresponsible those parents are, silently assuring baby Bird that none of this will ever apply to him.

Margaret carries on, preoccupied by poetry and her garden and Bird. Ethan’s parents continue to visit, remarking that Bird looks just like Margaret. Later, she and Ethan will wonder whether or not they meant this as a compliment. A press publishes Margaret’s poetry collection, Our Missing Hearts, which features a pomegranate on its cover. The book is not widely read. Margaret teaches Bird about nature and tells him the stories her mother once told her “before she stopped speaking of such things.” Bird wants to know whether the stories are true, and Margaret lets him believe that the things that happen in the fantastical stories might be possible.

In the present, Margaret pauses her story and her work. She counts up the bottle caps and notes that she has made fewer than usual. Instructing Bird to stay in the house and keep quiet, she loads creations into a bag and disguises herself as a trash-picker. Then she leaves to run more mysterious errands. While she is gone, Bird considers all that she has told him about the Crisis. In school, the history felt like a cautionary tale. But hearing about it from his mother makes it more real. He thinks of the bottle caps and wonders whether they are time bombs; he no longer knows what his mother is capable of.

Margaret returns with food. She and Bird eat, and she asks him about school and his father. Bird tells her how Ethan told him to go by Noah and takes good care of him. Bird expects his mom to be sad when he mentions that Ethan pretends she doesn’t exist, but Margaret only agrees that is for the best. Bird asks why, and she tells him he needs to hear the whole story. She promises to tell him more tomorrow. Before they go to bed, she asks if he would like her to call him Noah. He pauses, then he tells her she can still call him Bird if she wants to.