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.