Bird Gardner is twelve years old and lives with his father, who used to be a linguist and college professor, but now works in a university library shelving books. They live in a small apartment in a dorm on campus. Bird’s mother Margaret, a Chinese-American poet, the daughter of immigrants from Hong Kong, disappeared when he was nine years old. He does not remember much about her and he resents her for abandoning them.
One day a mysterious letter arrives filled only with drawings and no words. Bird goes on a quest to find its meaning and eventually steals away to go on a trip to find his mother. When he finally finds her in New York City under mysterious circumstances, he learns of her love and her own private battle for justice and decency.
Our Missing Hearts plays in America of today, in an alternate society where there was a severe economic downturn, akin to the Great Depression, some fifteen years before the story starts. They called it The Crisis. Businesses failed, unemployment was rampant, many lost their homes, livelihoods, possessions and hope. The country needed a scapegoat, some explanation why things happened to them.
In Germany, in the 1930s, Hitler faced such a nation under such a crisis. He invented a scapegoat, somebody whose fault it was: The Jews. In the America of Our Missing Hearts, the leaders blamed the Chinese, and by association any Asian-Americans. Of course China was to blame for America’s demise. And as we reacted to Japanese-Americans in World War II, putting them into camps, so did America isolate Chinese-Americans in this story. Bird’s mother, being the daughter of Chinese immigrants, had the face that betrayed her origins. Her poetry, without being political, was misinterpreted as unpatriotic, and quickly banned.
The government started to separate children from their immigrant parents under the guise of protecting them from the unamerican influences of their parents. All this rings true. In 2018, the American government separated children and parents of immigrant families at the border. Their crimes: being children of parents desperate enough in their home countries to flee in search of better lives, safer lives and more prosperous lives. The American government told us that immigrants were taking away our jobs, they were animals, vermin, that had to be deported at a minimum. We were taking their children from them to protect the children. It’s now six years later, and there are still over 1,000 of those children who are not yet reunited with their families:
The Trump administration’s family separation policy remains a lasting and disgraceful legacy of that administration and of the United States as a nation. Under the policy, formally known as “Zero Tolerance,” the US government forcibly separated migrant children from their parents as a deliberate measure to deter others from attempting to migrate or seek asylum. Crueler still, the federal agencies that separated families failed to track which children were separated from which parents. In total, at least 5,569 children were separated from their parents or guardians under the Trump administration, a figure that includes separations during and after the formal zero tolerance policy. More than 1,000 children remain separated from their parents as of November 30, 2023. Out of these 1,000 children, the government’s Family Reunification Task Force still does not have any ability to contact 68 of the separated parents, further complicating the reunification process and prolonging families’ suffering.
Our Missing Hearts tells of the collective suffering that occurs in a society that suddenly decides that some subgroup is the reason why the society is in decline.
It happened before in many other countries, and it’s happening right now in the United States. Slowly, gradually, we are getting desensitized, and more and more of us are willing to commit atrocities in the name of our country.
…You won’t have a country anymore……
