As befitting his name, the boy embodies Emily Dickinson's vision of hope as "the thing with feathers - / That perches in the soul - / And sings the tune without the words." Bird carries, literally and figuratively, the novel's "seedling" - its narrative arc and moral weight.Īs in a fairy tale, Bird must first embark on a harrowing quest to find out the truth about his mother, Margaret Miu, an Asian American poet who has apparently abandoned her family.īird's best friend Sadie thinks Margaret is the leader of an underground resistance movement, which manifests itself in frequent, startling acts: intersections painted blood-red giant red hearts, made by yarns and entwined with ghostly dolls, which sway from trees in parks.īird's father, Ethan, forbids his son to mention Margaret's name to anyone. The book begins in media res, from 12-year-old Bird Gardner's point-of-view. In this sense, Ng's narrative does borrow one important element from dystopian fiction - the idea of memory erasure, imposed by a repressive regime and borne by individuals cut off from their cultural legacy. But it is also propelled by hope, less a grim prognosis of the future than an impassioned call for a full reckoning with the past. Other problems mentioned in the novel are ongoing: police brutality, racial violence and economic inequality. history, such as slavery, discrimination against Asians, and forced assimilation of Indigenous children. Existential threats to certain individuals or groups - a common trope in dystopian novels - are already a part of U.S. "The Crisis," for example, is a worldwide economic breakdown allegedly caused by China's market manipulation, and is clearly a fictional stand-in for the pandemic. Celeste Ng's Our Missing Hearts is not exactly dystopian or alternate history, as many events described in her latest novel have in fact happened, or are thinly disguised versions of real-life tragedies.
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