Just Finished Reading Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

Our Missing Hearts, the 2022 novel by Celeste Ng, is the third book I've read of hers since Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You...click on the titles to read my previous reviews on this blog. In this latest work of hers, it is sometime in the near future in an America painfully recovering from an abrupt economic downtown as Chinese people are unfairly targeted as scapegoats for the crisis. And a new set of repressive laws, P.A.C.T., has been enacted that justify discrimination and censorship against Asian-Americans, even to the point of the government taking away their children as punishment for dissent.  It's a dreary, heartbreaking world as young Bird, a little boy whose mother Margaret, a Chinese-American dissident poet, has protected him from being taken away by leaving him and his father.  But Bird wants to find her, and she leaves a clue that he follows with the aid of his local librarian, a sympathizer to the resistance.  It became quickly clear to me not far into the book that this story is a combined reaction by Ng to (1) the way after 9/11 that Muslims and Middle Eastern people in America were often stigmatized following that traumatic event, and (2) the tendency for China...and by irrational inference, Chinese people in general...to be blamed for the Covid-19 pandemic that broke out in 2020.  The big difference as I see it between the two is that the American president at the time of 9/11, George W. Bush, took great pains to prevent any kind of bigoted reactions while during Covid, then-president Donald Trump made a repeated point of scapegoating China and the Chinese.  It's very clear that Celeste Ng, of Chinese ancestry but born and raised here in the United States, had a message to convey regarding what is ultimately not just an American problem with prejudice and scapegoating but a human problem of which history over the ages has provided extensive examples.  Yes, it's a depressing tale, this book, and I'm afraid that just about every society on Earth has elements within it that will gladly trample on someone else's rights because of their own fears and willful ignorance.  I didn't enjoy reading Our Missing Hearts, but I don't think that was the author's intention anyway...