Fiction is a sort of warning call, and we’re ignoring history

Fiction is a sort of warning call, and we’re ignoring history




Fiction is a sort of warning call, and we’re ignoring history


ByGiselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
May 14, 2024 — 4.00pm

There’s a scene in Celeste Ng’s most recent novel that comes directly from news headlines. A man knocks a Chinese woman to the ground and kicks her repeatedly. No one does anything to help. It’s a real incident that happened in broad daylight in Manhattan in 2021, and it chilled the 43-year-old American author for “the idea that everybody might be able to turn away”.


Celeste Ng says curiosity is a natural element of the human condition.CREDIT:

Published in 2022, Our Missing Hearts is one of those novels in which fiction and reality blur in disturbing ways. In its version of America, the land is governed by PACT – the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act – and PAOs (people of Asian origin) are treated with particular disdain. Books are censored and knowledge is gatekept. The children of dissidents are removed and rehomed, and 12-year-old Noah “Bird” Gardner is in the middle of it all, desperately searching for his renegade poet mother.

Ng first began writing the novel before Asian hate crimes exploded in the Trump and pandemic years, initially as a reflection of her upbringing as the child of Chinese immigrants in American suburbia. Tackling these topics and memories was proving emotionally tough, so she put the manuscript aside – until the world began to mirror her fiction in terrible ways, and it felt like a sign. “It wasn’t until the pandemic when a lot of anti-Asian violence started happening that I finally felt, ‘OK, I think I need to write about this,’” she says.



The author’s previous novels, 2014’s Everything I Never Told You and 2017’s Little Fires Everywhere (which was made into a miniseries starring, and produced by, Reese Witherspoon), were realistic domestic fiction – so creating the dystopian world of Our Missing Hearts was a new challenge that required a different skill set.
To learn more about how to build a convincing parallel world that reflects contemporary concerns, Ng read novels such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Leni Zumas’ Red Clocks, which takes place in a society that has banned abortion.

“I realised that the world I was writing was actually not that different from ours … It really was just everything that was happening, but just a little bit more, and all the things that we worry might happen were starting to happen,” she says. “Unfortunately, it feels like it’s still scarily relevant.”

Ng points out that Red Clocks, published in 2018, was almost eerily prescient, as the overturning of Roe v Wade in America has since outlawed abortion in many parts of US.



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“I think that fiction often acts as sort of a warning call in some ways – you’re imagining what could be, and it’s almost like if people think about those things, learn from history and change course, all those warnings seem like they were hysterical,” she says. “We’re very much trying to ignore history, and I don’t think it’s going that well.”

Politics might be a newer thread in Ng’s novels, but family dynamics are a long-held interest. All three of the author’s books explore the thorny relationships between parents and children in particular, and the ways in which families can fracture – and find ways to heal.

It’s a topic dear to the author’s heart as both a mother and a daughter herself; her experience of becoming a parent has made her look back at her childhood, and understand more about the challenges her own mother may have gone through.

“A lot of what I’m writing is really trying to figure out how much parents can really give children what they need, and how much children can ever really understand their parents,” she says. “I’m fascinated by it because I’m in the middle of that sandwich … Every book that I write is going to be negotiating that split between parents and children in both directions.”

Ng believes that curiosity is a natural element of the human condition – wanting to know more about the people around you, and uncovering the buried secrets that guide a person’s choices. If you’re in a coffee shop and you hear someone lower their voice mid-conversation, you’re going to want to lean in and listen – and Ng’s stories come from the same impulse.

“For fiction writers, I think that’s so rich,” she says. “It’s such a good space to explore those nosy feelings and secrets – what can we learn from them?”



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Race is, of course, also a part of the family puzzle across generations. When Ng started writing Our Missing Hearts, her son, now a teenager, was five years old. He is mixed-race – Ng’s husband, Matthew Fox, is white – and reflecting on what that experience might be like for the boy growing up informed how Ng developed and wrote the character of Bird, who is also biracial.

“I was thinking about how his experience is going to be different from mine, and different from his father’s,” she remembers. “His father has to guess what it’s going to be like for him because he’s not fully white, and I have to guess what it’s going to be like for him because he’s not fully Asian. He’s in between cultures, and he’s got these two parts of himself … People are going to view him in different ways, depending on the context.”

To understand Bird’s character, Ng wrote stories and passages that never ended up in the novel about what the child had seen and remembered in his world. She acknowledges the challenges of writing a child’s perspective as an adult, but his naivety, and coming of age, was a crucial part of this story: “He’s starting to realise that the story he had about his family is maybe not the whole story, and that what he thought the world was like is actually not exactly what the world is: it’s much bigger, maybe more menacing, but it also has people out there that he connects with.”

Both of Ng’s parents are Chinese, but she felt this tension within herself growing up, too, first living in the very white area of rural Pittsburgh as a child, then Shaker Heights, Ohio – the setting of Little Fires Everywhere – where she moved at the age of 10. That suburb was more diverse, but only in terms of white and Black – being Asian was still seen as an anomaly, and she realised that she occupied a kind of racial no-man’s land.

“I realised that the way we think about race in the US is really about Black versus white, and I’m not either of those things,” Ng says. “I’m always negotiating my own relationship to my own heritage … I recognise all the ways in which I am not American, and I recognise all of the ways in which I’m very American … A lot of what I write is really trying to investigate that grey area.”

For Ng, fiction is an ongoing way to discover, and come to understand, new parts of herself – even though none of her stories are autobiographical, they all contain these pearls of truth and vulnerability, and feel personal to her. She is at work on her next novel, which will continue to explore the same concerns: “I’m thinking a lot about family relationships, especially mother/daughter relationships, and about what art or creating things can reveal to us.”

Our Missing Hearts is published by Little, Brown at $22.99. Celeste Ng is a guest at Sydney Writers’ Festival (swf.org.au).

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