American writer Celeste Ng’s first two novels were realist domestic fiction, but her third was a more political creation.
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”.Our Missing Hearts
, were realistic domestic fiction – so creating the dystopian world ofTo learn more about how to build a convincing parallel world that reflects contemporary concerns, Ng read novels such as Margaret Atwood’sand Leni Zumas’ Red Clocks, which takes place in a society that has banned abortion. “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.”
“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.
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