“Growing up as a Chinese American in non-Asian parts of the country, there’s never been a time when I wasn’t aware that hostility might be coming my way. “It was interesting to me that it took a lot of people by surprise, the rise in anti-Asian violence at the beginning of the pandemic,” Ng says. A devastating, unprovoked attack on an Asian American woman in Manhattan is one of many incidents in “Our Missing Hearts” that gives the book a ripped-from-the-headlines quality. The COVID-19 pandemic, which began as Ng was working on the book, made anti-Asian hatred impossible to ignore. “I’m still learning a lot about it myself.” has become a xenophobic police state.Įven many Asian Americans, Ng says, are unaware of the long history of oppression and brutality directed at Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans and other groups in incidents often treated as footnotes in American history. There’s a sense that well, they’re diverse, but they’re the safe kind of diversity, right?”īooks Review: ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ author Celeste Ng ventures boldly into the dark futureĬeleste Ng’s new novel, ‘Our Missing Hearts,’ follows a boy named Bird in search of his mother after the U.S. “Asians have been seen as being sort of white-adjacent or closer to white. “There’s been a long history of leaving Asians out of the discussion of race,” Ng says. It’s an important issue for the 42-year-old Chinese American author, whose parents emigrated from Hong Kong and raised her in Pittsburgh and Shaker Heights, Ohio. Race plays a major role in “Our Missing Hearts,” as it did in her first two novels. I was thinking, well, how do I do this? How do I create a world?” “I’d never written anything that wasn’t strictly realist. “Like a good writing nerd, I did my homework,” Ng says. She also read more contemporary works, including Colson Whitehead’s zombie novel “Zone One” and Leni Zumas’ “Red Clocks,” a 2018 novel that imagines an America where abortion is banned and embryos have constitutional rights. Ng says she explored a lot of speculative fiction as she worked on the novel, including genre classics such as “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood and “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury. And so, I felt like, let me lean into this and see what happens.”

“But when the outside world started to feel like it was a dystopia, it felt really strange to me to be imagining this nice little world in the book in which none of that was happening.

“We’d been seeing the rise of the far right for some time - that was already present, certainly before the election,” Ng says.

Our missing hearts book