Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts and the Asian American Bestseller

Conceived and drafted during the COVID-19 pandemic, Celeste Ng's Our Missing Hearts (2022) imagines an authoritarian America in the wake of a fictional "Crisis," a period of severe economic depression and social instability. China is widely blamed for the Crisis, setting off a period of economic retrenchment, political repression, and anti-Chinese xenophobia codified in a law called PACT: Protecting American Cultures and Traditions. Under PACT, "Kung-PAOS" — a derogatory term for "Persons of Asian Origin" — are placed under constant surveillance. PACT is enforced by coercive family separation: children whose parents are accused of being too pro-China are taken by the state and sent to live with foster parents who will teach them "Real American Values." Marches in defense of Asian Americans are sparsely attended. When Bird, one of the novel's deuteragonists, witnesses a white man assaulting an Asian woman in the street, no one helps her: "An older couple about-faces . . . . A man hurries away, . . . cars flow by, unperturbed. They must see, Bird thinks, how can they not?"¹

In our world, Ng's work has landed to more sympathy. Our Missing Hearts is by far the most commercially successful novel to explicitly address the xenophobia of the COVID-19 years. It debuted at number five on the New York Times' bestseller list, selling at least 20,000 copies in its first week; it has since sold over a quarter of a million copies in print formats. These numbers are not surprising: Ng's two previous novels — Everything I Never Told You (2014) and Little Fires Everywhere (2017) — were both bestsellers. While Ng has sold millions of books over her career, she doubted that her debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, would find an audience: "Is anyone going to relate to this?," she recounted to TIME. "They're going to be like, 'Oh, those are Asian people. I'm not interested.'" Ng has since acquired a social platform in which mainstream media often consult her as an expert on matters affecting Asian Americans: "That's when I thought, 'OK, I didn't mean for everyone to look at me, but people are. So I guess I should say something worthwhile.'"²

In Our Missing Hearts, Ng's protagonist — Bird's mother Margaret Miu — also grapples with the sudden, unexpected burden of mainstream attention. Margaret, initially a little-known poet, discovers that two lines of poetry she has written — "All those bits of its missing heart / Scattered, to sprout elsewhere" — has been taken up by protestors against PACT family separations. Soon, the words "our missing hearts" are everywhere: spray-painted on pavements, scrawled across construction sites, distributed in pamphlets. "This woman's influence is skyrocketing," complains a detractor. "You know what her sales figures show? Four thousand copies of her book sold last week alone. Six thousand this week."³ It is significant that Ng offers the particular figure of "four thousand copies" on a weekly accounting basis. Publishing bestsellers lists are calculated weekly, and four thousand units is the median minimum number that a print hardcover novel must sell to "hit the list."⁴ Ng demonstrates that Margaret's poetry has reached the mainstream by using the success metric of Ng's own industry. The sales continue to skyrocket: "The anti-American ideology was clear, which made it all the more dangerous that people were reading these poems — nearly fifty thousand copies sold so far, an unheard-number for a book of poetry."⁵ Ng insists on the political potency and popularity of lyric poetry — historically the most avant-garde literary genre, stubbornly resistant to commercialization. In Our Missing Hearts, a bestselling poet can ignite a revolution.

This formulation is remarkable, given that Asian American literature has long been tormented by the threat of "selling out." As Mark Chiang puts it, our field's historically suspicious posture towards popularity assumes a logic of authenticity: "failure is the sign of authenticity because commercial success is cited as the mechanism of white domination by means of the theory of racist love, which posits that only those books that conform to white stereotypes of Asians will sell."⁶ The more visible Chinese American writers of the past century — for instance, Siu Sin Far/Edith Eaton, Jade Snow Wong, Jade Snow Wong, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan — have all been criticized for offering a reductive, self-Orientalizing, and/or white-washed representation of their own communities for white consumption.⁷ Hua Hsu reads in the writer H.T. Hsiang's letters an evident resentment of popular contemporary writers such as Pearl S. Buck and Lin Yutang: "How they get their names? Because they wrote books. Because they wrote best sellers. That's all."⁸ To refuse the market pressures to produce consumable Asian American images might therefore be perceived as a posture of political purity. To put it more pertinently in the language of the literary marketplace, this refusal might be understood as a defiant clinging to irrelevance. Yet this posture feels untenable given the urgency of combatting anti-Asian sentiment. The attachment to failure and the resentment of sellouts, both in the name of authentic representation, betray the anxiety that if one speaks truthfully, then no one will listen.

This essay investigates the possibilities opened up by Ng's refusal of the tension between radical politics and popular commercialization, and complicates the view that "selling out" always involves some ethical compromise. I follow Tomo Hattori's advice not to shun the unrepentantly ambitious minority writer, but to read "for the money" and "for the bottom line" in examining how Asian American literature "enjoys its own trauma, produces it as excess and surplus, and coins it as ethnic cultural capital."⁹ In Our Missing Hearts, Ng moves into the mainstream through a peculiar universalization of her subject, a move which sets her apart from the other "sellouts" of Chinese American literature. Ng does not offer a version of a Chinese American subject packaged to titillate a white reader but rather weaves Chinese Americans into a tapestry of voices that speaks to a wider mass of readers.

For a novel inspired by the Covid-19 pandemic, Our Missing Hearts curiously downplays the particular Chineseness of its dystopia. Unlike previous Chinese American bestsellers — Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950), Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1989), and Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior (1976) — Our Missing Hearts offers very little cultural exposition. Chineseness is most often narrated as a loss: books purged from libraries, banned language education, forgotten phrases. Bird's white father Ethan warns him: "Anything that has to do with China, Korea, Japan, anything like that — you stay away from it. You hear someone talking in those languages or talking about those things, you walk away."¹⁰ When Bird runs away to Manhattan's Chinatown in search of Margaret, he finds only signs of a vanished ethnic ghetto: "On all the signs here in Chinatown, something has been painted out or taped over, or in some cases, pried away. He can still see the perforations where something was once nailed on, still make out shapes embossed beneath silvery-gray duct tape."¹¹ At face value, we can read this as a deliberate narrative erasure: Ng straightforwardly demonstrates how a xenophobic government eradicates culture. But it also highlights the universality of Chinese discrimination under PACT. Ng frames the anti-Chinese xenophobia of the Crisis as an arbitrary choice: "They would never fully agree, the economists, on what had caused it . . . . In time many would dredge up old lists of rivalries, searching for someone to blame; they would settle in a few years, on China, that perilous, perpetual yellow menace."¹² The Chinese today; someone else tomorrow.

Margaret Miu's emergence as the face of the anti-PACT movement is also accidental. Initially, Margaret has no activist ambitions. During the Crisis, she looks out only for herself: "Fuck this, fuck everything, she and Domi agreed, by which they meant: don't get attached to anything, or anyone."¹³ Margaret has never been to a protest, and she "had never, in all honesty, thought much about PACT at all."¹⁴ The poem that brings her national infamy is not inspired by the Crisis, but by a pomegranate she'd eaten while pregnant. She compares the pomegranate and its seeds to a mother's relationship with her child: "All those bits of its missing heart / Scattered, to sprout elsewhere."¹⁵ It turns out that the poem is nearly an afterthought, included only on the last page of the collection. The collection comes out to a modest reception, "praised by a few poetry critics and read by almost no one."¹⁶ Margaret is happy to work on her poetry in relative invisibility, until a young Black student named Marie Johnson is killed at an anti-PACT riot clutching a poster that reads: ALL OUR MISSING HEARTS. Margaret is astonished: "Not even her best line, she'd always thought, not even one of her best poems, and yet here it was. Clutched in this dying child's hands."¹⁷

When Margaret discovers her poem has subsequently been taken up as a rallying cry by anti-PACT activists, her first reaction is to laugh: she can't believe one of her poems has gone viral. Margaret only realizes that she is in danger after a right-wing talk-radio host investigates the origins of the line. Her publisher, overwhelmed by backlash, cancels future printings of her books. Death threats and hate mail find Margaret at her home. Margaret and Ethan know that a state investigation is coming, and so they decide Margaret must go into hiding so that Ethan can at least retain custody of Bird. Yet Margaret's political awakening comes with the realization not that she has been singled out for persecution by the state, but rather that her story is unexceptional. As she encounters more families on the run, she discovers the scope of PACT separations: "it was more people than she'd realized, more people than she'd ever thought of."¹⁸ After a Choctaw woman chides Margaret for thinking her situation is anything new, Margaret

began to learn: there was no new thing under the sun. About the schools where Indigenous children were shorn and stripped, renamed, reeducated, and returned home broken and scarred - or never at all. About children borne across borders in their parents' arms only to be caged in warehouses, alone and afraid. About foster children pinballed from home to home, their families sometimes unable to track their path . . . . There was a long history of children taken, the pretexts different but the reasons the same.¹⁹

PACT was passed in response to Sino-American rivalry, but PACT does not disproportionately target Asian families: "They are not just Asian American families, she finds: there are white journalists who'd researched the re-placements, Latina activists who'd organized protests."²⁰ Ng emphasizes its universal, arbitrary enforcement: "Maybe you were a journalist and you wrote an article that talked about re-placed children, or mentioned the attacks on Asian faces, or dared to question their demonization. Maybe you posted something on social media that criticized PACT, or the authorities, or America. Maybe you got promoted and your coworker got jealous. Maybe you did nothing at all."²¹ Family separation is not just an Asian American problem. It could happen to anyone, for any reason, at any time. Margaret's response therefore is not to center herself or her family's story, but to dedicate her life in hiding to chronicling the testimonies of other families: "She would go out and gather them, like grains of rice gleaned from threshed-out fields. She would find as many as she could."²²

Yet Ng's move to universalize obscures the historical divisions that have plagued Asian American studies, and Asian American activism, since the 1960s. The organizing framework of family separation masks vastly different logics at play. Margaret believes: "there was a long history of children taken, the pretexts different but the reasons the same."²³ But in the historic cases of Indigenous and African American family separations, nearly opposite logics were responsible. In one case, the assimilative logic of the blood quantum law underwrote the justification of boarding schools; in the other, the one-drop rule and partis sequitur ventrum doctrine dictated that even children born to white fathers were still legally classified as property.²⁴ These cases of child removal functioned under the distinct political projects of settler colonialist ethnic cleansing and the perpetuation of the slave economy. Meanwhile, Chinese Americans have proportionally been less impacted by current family separation regimes. It is Marie Johnson's parents, not Margaret, who lose their child to the state. A harsher reading might frame Margaret's coalition building as an act of self-aggrandizement, not solidarity. The world-building element of PACT merely speculates a racial analogy which gives Margaret, and to some extent Ng, access to what Musa al-Gharbi calls the "totemic capital" of racial victimhood: the "epistemic and moral authority afforded to an individual on the basis of . . . claimed or perceived membership in a historically marginalized or disadvantaged group."²⁵

Here I take a quick detour into pandemic-era developments in the American publishing industry to give context into how the totemic capital of racial victimhood can be obtained through an abstract universalization of racial categories. Our Missing Hearts landed during a boom period for what was often referred to as diverse fiction,²⁶ which began in the summer of 2020, shortly after the second wave of national Black Lives Matter protests catalyzed by the murder of George Floyd. In response to protests about racial inequality in publishing, each of the "Big Five" fiction publishers (Macmillan, Penguin Random House, Simon & Shuster, HarperCollins, and Hachette) issued statements affirming their commitments to racial justice. Popular discourse quickly shifted from the demands of Black protestors to support for the "nonwhite," "BIPOC," or the "diverse" as a more generic category of the oppressed. Publishers pledged reforms such as implementing anti-racism training, hiring nonwhite editors, establishing imprints centered on diverse titles, and acquiring nonwhite authors in highly valued details. A retrospective PEN America report from 2022 listed the following initiatives in 2020: the uptake of the #WeNeedDiverseBooks hashtag on social media, appointment of DEI officers and broad support for DEI initiatives, and announcements of major Black and Latinx hires.²⁷ As al-Gharbi argues, individuals in symbolic economies can take advantage of such temporarily inflated markets in minoritized capital "by exploiting the vagueness inherent in many social distinctions."²⁸ Here, that vagueness manifested as a general BIPOC bump resulting from a particular spate of anti-Blackness. For instance, Ruby Rose Lee - then an editor at Henry Holt & Company - told PEN America that she had only been able to pay as much as she had for a memoir by a Korean-American professor because of the protests of 2020.²⁹

The harshest lens to interpret the commercial success of Our Missing Hearts is, therefore, as a racially generic text capitalizing on an industry-wide interest in the symbolic capital of victimized Blackness transformed into the symbolic capital of an abstracted racial oppression. But Ng takes pains to address the awkwardness of the coalition. Margaret too is accused of self-aggrandizement: of egging on protests for attention and making everything about her. Moreover, Margaret finds that not all the parents of removed children wish to speak to her: "Some don't trust her, with her Chinese face. You all caused the Crisis, and you want us to feel sorry for you?"³⁰ Margaret's political awakening occurs during a fraught scene when Margaret, early into her life in hiding, visits Marie Johnson's parents at their home to seek absolution. This is a selfish act, she realizes, even as she attempts it: "What she desperately wanted — reassurance, comfort, absolution — she had no right to ask of them, and they had no reason to give it to her."³¹ Marie's father rebuffs her, while Marie's mother remains in the doorway, studying her. The women regard one another, and a list of fraught Asian-Black interactions flash through Margaret's mind: the LA race riots, Peter Liang's shooting of Akai Gurley, incidents of racial profiling on both sides. The silence stretches, agonizingly, until Marie's mother asks whether Margaret has children. "Then, to Margaret's surprise, Marie's mother reached out, touched Margaret's wrist."³² Their differences are not resolved, but they are temporarily set to the side in large part because of Mrs. Johnson's sympathy with Margaret's own suffering. She tells Margaret: "Welcome to the worst club in the world."³³

A more charitable reading, then, interprets Ng's strategic equivalencing as a call for a coalitional politics founded upon a common grievance: the worst club in the world. In her invocation of the LA race riots, Ng calls up a schism that fractured the anti-imperial, third Worldist solidarities borne of the Civil Rights era by pitting Asian Americans against Blacks. However, Ng's narrative resolution also echoes the activists who sought a capacious solidarity against state violence.³⁴ It is Marie Johnson, rather than Margaret, who emerges as the true coalition-builder. Before she left for the protest where she was killed, her father tried to stop her: "Marie, that ain't about you. You think those PAOs would stick out their necks for you? ... Just let it be."³⁵ Marie sympathizes with "those PAOs," even if her father believes they would never sympathize with her. She draws a connection between PACT child separations and the historical separation of enslaved children from their parents at the auction block, determines the link between Margaret's poetry and new accounts of taken children — "with each news report of a child taken, the last lines of the last poem had come back to her, insistent as an infant's cry" — and puts her life on the line showing up at a protest that "ain't about" her.³⁶ Margaret takes up the mantle of a coalition that formed long before her radicalization. For Ng, the urgency of the crisis demands a kind of strategic essentialism of the oppressed — a temporary suspension of inter-group differences for the realization of a political goal — founded not upon ethnic categories, but shared grievance.³⁷ Only a collective voice can acquire real political power.

Can this work? Ng offers her own doubts, even at the novel's climax. Margaret has spent years collecting testimonies from families affected by PACT, which she then broadcasts through speakers embedded around Manhattan. Margaret knows that the live broadcast will signal her position to the police, but she continues speaking until her arrest. Here Margaret performs a strategy of sympathetic identification, inundating her listeners with a preponderance of collected testimony, pleading for them to identify with even one:

The voice comes from all around them, as if from the air itself, and though later a few of them would say it sounded godlike, from the sky, most of those who heard it would insist on the exact opposite: it felt like a voice inside them, speaking somehow both to them and from them, and though it was speaking the stories of strangers, people they had never met, children who were not their own, pain they had not experienced, it was somehow speaking not just to them but with them, that the stories it told, one after the other in a seemingly endless stream, were not someone else's but one larger story of which they, too, were a part.³⁸

Ng strips down sympathetic identification through narrative to its simplest logic: that a story might convince its audience of its subject's humanity and forge a link between the self and the other. Still Margaret is pessimistic that anyone is listening; and if they are listening, that they care. "It is hard for anything to be heard and even if anyone hears it, how much of a difference could it really make, what change could it possibly bring, just these words, just this thing that happened once to one person that the listener does not and will never know."³⁹

In the end, Our Missing Hearts makes an ambivalent, self-deprecating case for selling out. Ng cracks the problem of moving from the margins to the mainstream not by insisting that others learn more about the Chinese American, but by moving the Chinese American closer to the other. The Chinese American voice goes mainstream only by merging into a common cause. For years on the run, Margaret has "muffled her footsteps, muzzling herself";⁴⁰ when she finally speaks, she does so as a conduit for others. Margaret sacrifices her own family for the cause — she knows she will be detained during her broadcast, and she knows she will likely never see Bird or Ethan again. Her courage nearly falters the night before her broadcast, but Bird chastises her: "So it doesn't matter, he says, as long as it's happening to someone else . . . You're a hypocrite, he says."⁴¹ It's enough to strengthen Margaret's resolve. Ultimately, Margaret performs a different kind of assimilation — not becoming an "honorary white," as model minority critique warns against, but into a generic category of the racially abject. The path to attention, to bestseller-dom, is to become embedded in a tapestry of larger stories: "Only one voice, but speaking the words of many."⁴² For Ng, the sacrifice is worth the hope. A story is only ever a wish in the dark; a stab at sympathy with no promise of reciprocation: "Would one person be compelled? One out of eight million, a fraction of a fraction. But not nothing."⁴³

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Rebecca Kuang (@kuangrf) is a PhD student in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University, as well as the incoming Millard Distinguished Writer in Residence at the College of the Holy Cross. She is the author of seven novels including Taipei Story and Yellowface.

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References

1. Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts (Penguin, 2022), 130. ↩︎
2. Lucy Feldman, "Celeste Ng Did Not Set Out to Write This Book," TIME, September 15, 2022. https://time.com/6213487/celeste-ng-our-missing-hearts-interview/. ↩︎
3. Ng, Our Missing Hearts, 206. ↩︎
4. Burcu Yucesoy et al., "Success in Books: A Big Data Approach to Bestsellers." EPJ Data Science 7, no. 1 (2018): 7. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-018-0135-y. ↩︎
5. Ng, Our Missing Hearts, 297. ↩︎
6. Mark Chiang, The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University (New York University Press, 2009), 147. ↩︎
7. See for instance: Sau-Ling C. Wong, "'Sugar Sisterhood': Situating the Amy Tan Phenomenon" in Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions, ed. David Palumbo (University of Minnesota Press, 1995) or Frank Chin et al., preface to Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian American Writers, Third Edition, ed. Frank Chin, Jeffrey Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Hsu Wong (University of Washington Press, 1974). ↩︎
8. Hua Hsu, A Floating Chinaman (Harvard University Press, 2016), 165. ↩︎
9. Tomo Hattori, "Model Minority Discourse and Asian American Jouis-Sense," Differences 11, no. 2 (1999): 232. ↩︎
10. Ng, Our Missing Hearts, 66. ↩︎
11. Ng, 125. ↩︎
12. Ng, 161. ↩︎
13. Ng, 171. ↩︎
14. Ng, 205. ↩︎
15. Ng, 191. ↩︎
16. Ng, 195. ↩︎
17. Ng, 205. ↩︎
18. Ng, 228. ↩︎
19. Ng, 238. ↩︎
20. Ng, 237. ↩︎
21. Ng, 226-27. ↩︎
22. Ng, 235. ↩︎
23. Ng, 238. ↩︎
24. Patrick Wolfe, "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native," Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 388. ↩︎
25. Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton University Press, 2024), 237-8. ↩︎
26. Dan Sinykin and Richard Jean So, "Has the DEI Backlash Come for Publishing?" The Atlantic, June 19, 2024. https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/06/diversity-publishing-backlash-study/678734/. ↩︎
27. al-Ghabri, We Have Never Been Woke, 230. ↩︎
28. "Reading Between the Lines: Race, Equity, and Book Publishing," PEN America, October 21, 2022. https://pen.org/report/reading-between-the-lines/. ↩︎
29. "Reading Between the Lines." ↩︎
30. Ng, Our Missing Hearts, 237. ↩︎
31. Ng, 214. ↩︎
32. Ng, 217. ↩︎
33. Ng, 217. ↩︎
34. For context on the history of Asian American struggles against anti-Blackness, see Claire Jean Kim's Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World (2023). ↩︎
35. Ng, Our Missing Hearts, 220. ↩︎
36. Ng, 204. ↩︎
37. "Strategic essentialism" is also a historical strategy of defining the boundaries of Asian American studies while acknowledging its tensions and contradictions; for more, see Susan Koshy, "The Fiction of Asian American Literature." ↩︎
38. Ng, Our Missing Hearts, 296. ↩︎
39. Ng, 299. ↩︎
40. Ng, 289. ↩︎
41. Ng, 267. ↩︎
42. Ng, 293. ↩︎
43. Ng, 322. ↩︎