Our Missing Hearts

Our Missing Hearts is a contemporary dystopian fiction novel by New York Times best-selling author Celeste Ng. Published in 2022, it is a reaction to the fears and racism in America following the COVID-19 pandemic. The novel follows two protagonists, Bird and his mother Margaret, as they navigate an oppressive society that victimizes them due to their Asian identity. Margaret, a poet, goes into hiding to help advocate against the government, while Bird, a child, follows messages encoded in stories to find his mother. The novel celebrates librarians, storytellers, and readers as champions of truth. Our Missing Hearts is Ng’s third best-selling novel. However, Ng is best known for her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere (2017), which was adapted into a popular television series on Amazon Prime in 2020.

This guide is based on the 2022 Kindle edition. The novel is divided into three parts, and this guide divides the parts into chapters that are marked through capitalization of their first sentence.

Content Warning: Our Missing Hearts addresses racism, and as such, includes hate crimes and racial slurs for Asians.

Plot Summary

Bird is an Asian American child who lives in Cambridge, amid a dystopian America. A law called PACT (“Preserving American Culture and Traditions” by punishing “un-American” values and behavior) has been adopted as the status quo against a war with China. Bird’s mother, a Chinese American poet, disappears to fight PACT. Bird’s white father, once a linguistics professor, now files books, a rare commodity, in the university library. Bird is plagued by thoughts of his missing mother. The novel begins with Bird receiving a message from his mother: a drawing of many cats with a tiny cupboard in the corner of the page. Bird recognizes this image as a Japanese children’s story his mother used to read to him. While Bird tries to track down this specific storybook, the university is targeted by anti-PACT protestors who secretly use his mother’s slogan (“Our Missing Hearts”). Bird is torn between tracking down his mother and avoiding the danger of looking for books he’s not supposed to read—especially as an Asian American. Former school friend Sadie disappeared after years of foster care when her parents were arrested for being anti-PACT protestors.

After a stranger hurls a racial slur at him in the street, Bird is reminded that he is unsafe simply because he is Asian. He comes to understand that racism against Asians is a byproduct of the Crisis and the adoption of PACT. He returns to his childhood home, long abandoned by his father. Bird finds a note hidden by his mother with an address in New York City. He asks the public librarian for help. The librarian is part of an underground organization that tries to reunite children with their parents after forcible separation. She gives Bird instructions to New York, and the latter leaves his father a note. In New York, Bird is initially impressed by Chinatown, where he doesn’t feel out of place for once. But by the time he reaches his mother’s address, his perception changes, as he witnesses a white man assault an Asian woman walking her dog. Bird tries to imagine himself in a fairy tale, with rules, missions, and hidden evil. At the address, a wealthy white woman meets him. She drives him to a dilapidated house, where he reunites with his mother, Margaret.

As Bird’s mother works on a mysterious project with bottle caps and wires, she tells him the story of the Crisis, her meeting his father, and her leaving the family. Margaret met Ethan during the Crisis, an economic catastrophe that led to mass unemployment and chaos. PACT rebuilt the country through strict security measures, including the removal of children from homes with “un-American” thoughts. Margaret married Ethan and wrote poetry about motherhood while pregnant with Bird. Her poetry, collected in a book called Our Missing Hearts, went viral when an anti-PACT protestor was killed with one of her quotes on a sign. Suddenly, Margaret became a source of suspicion, and media outlets accused her of being anti-American. She left before the government could take Bird away. She then spent years working with an underground organization of librarians, who use notes snuck in books to keep track of families and their stolen children. One of these children is Sadie, Bird’s former school friend, whom Margaret arranged to stay with her college friend, Domi.

Margaret takes Bird on a disguised walk around New York, where he helps her plant bottle caps in various locations. The bottle caps are part of Margaret’s mission to change everything. Domi takes Bird and Sadie to her cabin in Connecticut to keep them safe. Back in New York, Margaret turns on the bottle caps, which have tiny speakers attached to them. She recites the stories of separated families, humanizing them without identifying them. Millions of New Yorkers stop on the street, listening to her voice and crying over the stories. Though Margaret planned to leave her base before the police could find her, she stays too long and is caught.

Domi understands that Margaret’s plan went wrong, drives to Boston to find Ethan, and drives them to Connecticut to retrieve Bird and Sadie. Bird believes he will see his mother again and hopes to rebuild her book of poetry.