Celeste Ng’s first novel, Everything I Never Told You, about a Chinese American family in 1970s Ohio, became a bestseller in 2014. Her follow up, Little Fires Everywhere, explored the underside of the seemingly utopian community of Shaker Heights, Ohio, where Ng lived in her teens, and became a hit TV series starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. Her latest, Our Missing Hearts, is something of a departure; it is set in the near future, when laws have been passed to preserve “American culture”, resulting in discrimination against Asian Americans and ultimately tearing families apart. She explains why what she planned as a domestic novel turned so dark.
Your new book reads as a nightmare scenario, yet it could so easily be true. How did it take shape for you?
I started writing in October 2016, right after I had finished Little Fires Everywhere, and I thought it was going to be a fairly realistic and conventional novel about a mother-son relationship. And while this idea was still coalescing, Trump was elected. We saw the rise of the far right, we saw a lot of the elements that had been bubbling under the surface come right up to the top. These feelings of anger and resentment and hatred and bigotry. That only increased throughout the years that followed, and that started to leach its way into the story. The book felt like the only way for me to wrestle with some of these questions that I was asking myself, like how do we move through this? How do you raise the next generation in this world?
