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It seems to work until Bird (like so many inquisitive young teen protagonists before him) decides to embark on a journey to find his mother and solve the mystery of her disappearance, a journey that leads him to discover the underground resistance movement whose mission is to find the missing children and reunite them with their parents. Bird and his father, in turn, have spent their lives distancing themselves from Margaret’s poetry and trying to fit into their quiet Cambridge existence. Not only that, but Margaret is being investigated by the government for threatening the peace. His mother, Margaret Miu, is a Chinese American poet who left the family when Bird was nine. Set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “Our Missing Hearts” follows the journey of Bird Gardner, a 12-year old who has grown up with his librarian father, Ethan. Though Ng sometimes struggles to balance the demands of world-building required by this plot, long-time readers will still recognize and appreciate the masterful way in which she explores the tensions within the Gardner-Miu family, resulting in a majestic novel that is very much relevant to our times. The result is a novel set in a dystopian future where an economic depression in the United States is blamed on China, and authorities are allowed to relocate children of dissidents, primarily targeting families of Asian origin.

Perhaps we can see a little bit of Ng reflected in Margaret: Though her previous novels “Little Fires Everywhere” and “Everything I Never Told You” are primarily quiet family dramas that see an implosion from within, Ng seems particularly inspired by the current affairs happening around her, from the increase in violence against Asian Americans, to Covid-19, to the separation of migrant children and their families at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The heartbeat of Celeste Ng’s novel “Our Missing Hearts” is Margaret Miu, a Chinese American poet who sees her work adopted as the slogan of a protest movement.