Just replay the January 6 hearings, and you’ll know what I mean, and what Ng meticulously, eloquently, and devastatingly gets at in Our Missing Hearts. By sowing discrimination, public humiliation, and personal destruction, the government implicitly condones violence against anyone of Asian descent and embarks on an insidious program of separating the children of alleged dissidents from their “undesirable” families, who often proceed to disappear under enigmatic and frightening circumstances. In this dystopian narrative, that standoff has steered the United States into devoting much of its national and cultural defense mechanisms at home to anti-Asian propaganda. In her new novel, Our Missing Hearts, it’s millions of lives progressively compromised, crushed, and stealthily snuffed out in a not-so-distant future as China perpetually hovers on the verge of a planet-annihilating war with the rest of the globe. The thing is, you never know your world is going to end until it happens - that disaster will strike or be inflicted that the unimaginable will creep up so slowly it goes unnoticed that dysfunction will blossom into deadliness or that peace, quiet, and country club calmness will shatter into a million little pieces - as happened in Celeste Ng’s literary blockbuster Little Fires Everywhere.
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