![]() ![]() His father, Ethan Gardner, a former academic - his professional trajectory is described as "linguistic professor to book shelver" - wants only to avoid trouble and to protect his son. The anti-PACT movement invokes a phrase from one of Margaret's poems - the titular "missing hearts." When Margaret reaches out to her son in the form of a drawing, Bird's desire to reconnect with her is stronger than his fear of the mail-inspecting, book-banning authorities.īird's plight is complicated by his race - his mother is Chinese, and PACT is rife with racist doctrine - and by his father's dutiful adherence to PACT. When he tries to look up his long-absent mother, the poet Margaret Miu, he receives the message " No results" - a meaningful result, in spite of itself. People are "removed" as casually as books when Bird visits the library, he sees "gaps in the rows like missing teeth." ![]() ![]() The advent of PACT - "the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act" - instills an official atmosphere of paranoia, racism and repression resistance is met swiftly with consequence. Celeste Ng's latest work is concerned with polarization - even the central character, Noah/Bird, has two names - and in its dystopian setting, in the wake of what is known as "the Crisis," fear has saturated public life. ![]()
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