Despite his father’s insistence that Bird forget about his mother, Bird goes in search of her instead. Bird has never read her poems because they too have disappeared - they were deemed too dangerous to be read in the authoritarian society America has become. He is the son of Margaret Miu, a Chinese American poet who has disappeared. In Our Missing Hearts, 12-year-old Bird Gardner is constantly reminded of his differences. That’s the moment when you realize the world sees you differently than you see yourself. “But then there’s a moment where you might be on the bus, or you might be in the train station and someone calls you out on it, and they let you know that you’re not like us or you’re not welcome,” she says. In her mind, she isn’t moving through the world as an Asian person. “The older I get, the more I realize that my life is political, whether I want it to be or not because I walk around in this body,” Ng says. They, too, delved into issues of discrimination and other injustices. While it’s possible some readers will find Our Missing Hearts too political, Ng says her other two novels also questioned the way society functioned. “How you raise a child, for me, in particular.

“That started to raise a lot of questions for me about how you raise a child in a world that feels like it’s got so much hate in it,” Ng says. Although she began writing it as an exploration of a parent-child relationship, her newest novel took a darker turn after the 2016 election. In some ways, the novel itself is a form of bystander intervention. In Our Missing Hearts, Ng explores how bystanders can make a difference, how in our increasingly polarized society, she believes they must. And it strikes me now looking back how brave that woman was, and how grateful I am to her.” But that was I think maybe one of the only times that a bystander has ever intervened in a case like that. And she said, ‘Why don’t you leave them alone? Why don’t you just, you know, take a step back’ and then he began yelling at her, which was, I think, her goal, and then the bus came, and we got on it. “There was a woman at the bus stop,” Ng says. And he spat at the ground.”Įxperiencing a sudden display of hate was unnerving it came out of nowhere. “And he was really screaming in our faces and saying things like, just go back to, you know, Vietnam or wherever you came from. “This man came up and was screaming at us,” Ng recalls. She and her sister were waiting for a bus near Tower City, along with their aunt and uncle who were visiting from Hong Kong. Her new book is not set in Cleveland, but one of its themes builds upon something that happened to her here. Business Hall of Fame and Community Leader of the Year Awards.

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