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68 pages 2 hours read

Celeste Ng

Our Missing Hearts

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022

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Part 1, Chapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary

Bird suddenly recalls a childhood memory of recreating the events from The Boy Who Drew Cats and hopes he’ll see his mother again. He often passes his old house, which hasn’t sold because his mother isn’t around to sign for it. Bird and his father left the house shortly after his mother’s disappearance because their neighbors were watching them so closely, it felt suffocating to live there. The boy enters the house, hoping to find his mother. The house is dank and empty, but in the cupboard he often used as a hiding place while playing with his mother, he finds a note. The note says “Duchess” and provides an address in New York City. The note is written in Margaret’s handwriting.

Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary

Bird returns to the public library, hoping the librarian can help him. He sees a man put a piece of paper in a book and give it to the librarian, shakily saying that he found the book and is certain someone is looking for it. Bird confronts the librarian: He wants help getting to New York and says he knows she’s sneaking something around. The librarian confesses that she helps children who have been separated from their parents reunite. It’s dangerous work, and many people are secretly involved. The librarian is especially interested in helping children because she once had two of her own, both of whom died during the Crisis due to medical conditions. She remembers Bird’s mother but can’t get him to New York. Instead, she swears him to secrecy and then shows him the schedule for trains from Cambridge to New York.

Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary

Bird imagines the journey to New York as one of the fairy tales his mother would tell him, in which heroes must go through arduous tests to reach their happy ending. He leaves without saying goodbye to his father, like his mother. However, he leaves a note letting him know that he’s going to New York as well as his mother’s cat drawing as a hint.

Bird takes a bus to New York City, where he is dropped off at Chinatown. Surrounded by so many Asian people, Bird doesn’t feel like he stands out, and this makes him feel powerful. However, Chinatown is covered with American flags, the Mandarin street signs are painted over, and people only speak Mandarin or Cantonese inside closed stores. As Bird leaves Chinatown, he notices more Black and white faces and less flags; infrastructure damage from the Crisis can be seen everywhere. As Bird walks uptown, the streets become prettier and more open. He mistakes an Asian woman walking her dog as his mother. As he watches the woman, a white man punches her in the face and kicks her while she’s down. The man then stomps on the woman’s dog, and Bird screams. The man sees Bird, and the boy runs away.

Bird finally makes it to his mother’s address—that of an ornate town house. He is ushered in, and a blonde woman, the Duchess, asks him questions. She drives him to a different location, a dilapidated-looking house that he sneaks into. Inside, Bird is reunited with his mother.

Part 1, Chapters 5-7 Analysis

Throughout the first chapters of the novel, Ng references an event known as the Crisis. Though she has yet to reveal what the Crisis is, it is the impetus for PACT. People speak of the Crisis in tones of horror and sadness. The public librarian lost her two children to the Crisis due to their medical conditions. This implies that the Crisis shut down life-saving infrastructure in America. In New York City, Bird sees the toll of the Crisis in the city’s poorer neighborhoods. America is still rebuilding after the Crisis, perhaps a reason for the strict nature of PACT. Ng withholds the details of the Crisis in order to increase tension and mystery. Like the people who lived through the Crisis, Ng’s readers must accept that something society-changing happened.

To cope with the significant risk of his journey to New York City, Bird chooses to view the world through the lens of a fairy tale. Fairy tales are structured stories in which a hero needs to fulfill a mission by enduring tests, witnessing hidden evils, adhering to rules, and ultimately persevering to a happy ending. Bird’s decision to embrace life as a story emphasizes Ng’s metafictional message about the importance of stories. Stories help people understand the world around them, giving them the courage to face uncertainty. Society is a dangerous place for Bird, but his flight implies that try as he might, Bird’s father can’t protect him by keeping him isolated from the world. Leaving the security of his father is a major sacrifice that is necessary to begin Bird’s fairy tale.

In New York City, Bird witnesses a white man beat an Asian woman. While Ng was writing this novel, racist assaults of Asian people, even in diverse places like New York City, rose dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ng includes this scene in her novel to emphasize that contemporary America is not so different from her dystopian world.

Bird endures several tests, appropriate for his fairy tale. Traveling to New York City is a test, as is walking alone through the unfamiliar city. Escaping evil (the white assailant) is a second test. Bird passes a third test when he enters the Duchess’s home, and she asks him arbitrary questions that he doesn’t know the answers to. The mystery of the Duchess comes from her extreme privilege, which enables her to keep her involvement in the underground anti-PACT organization a secret. She is an important supporting character whose anonymity and title evoke fairy tales in which royalty or witches help or hinder a hero’s journey.

Bird carefully follows the Duchess’s rules, and in being brave and patient, achieves his mission: Part 1 ends with the reunion between him and his mother, Margaret. After years apart, and little communication, Bird finds her through storytelling. Bird decodes his mother’s subtle messages by tapping into the memory of their shared stories. This heightens the importance of stories as means of communication that transcend lived experience, time, and space.

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