The works of bestselling novelist and Cambridge resident Celeste Ng are perhaps more relevant now than ever. Her 2014 work, Everything I Never Told You, looked at the secrets and desires swirling in a Chinese-American family in Ohio during the 1970s. Her Little Fires Everywhere, which she penned in 2017, raised the stakes with the story of a mother and daughter when they intruded on the lives of a “perfect” family in late 1990s Ohio.

Given the current political climate – and the return of the so-called “Make America Great Again” rhetoric – Sampan spoke with Ng about these works, the state of our society, her most recent novel, Our Missing Hearts, and our uncertain road ahead.

The interview was conducted by email and lightly edited for brevity.
Sampan: The hero of Our Missing Hearts, a 12-year-old boy named Bird Gardner, is living in a society that uses anti-Asian sentiment as currency. People are referred to as “Kung-PAO” (Person of Asian Origin) and “Traitorous Chinese sympathizers. Tumors on American society.” You’ve noted that the focus on anti-Asian sentiment is there, because it’s your story to tell, and you can sympathize with victims of racist attacks, because you have felt them. You’ve written elsewhere:
“…as a woman and a person of color, my very existence is political through no choice of my own. I don’t get to take a break, even if I want to.”
Considering the speed with which our traditional political infrastructure is currently being dismantled, what role do you think this novel (and your voice) can play in providing a sane counterbalance to the instability?
Ng: I hope that Our Missing Hearts (and my voice generally) remind people that the world doesn’t have to be this way. That another world is possible, that it’s worth fighting for, and that individual people still can fight for it. It isn’t a handbook and it certainly doesn’t have all the answers —possibly not any answers. But maybe reading it can hold a mirror up to the world we’re in now, which is hell-bent on returning us to a time when only white straight men had any power. Maybe that can help you feel less alone. It’s powerful to hear someone else say: “Nope, you’re not losing your mind ­— I see it too, and you are right, that is bad.”
And maybe, if you know other people out there also feel that way, you remember that you have more power than you think, and you’ll be able to work toward the world you want instead just accepting the world that Trump and Musk and their cronies are trying to give us.

But honestly, I hope that my novels, and my voice, are just a small part of the “counterbalance to instability,” as you beautifully put it. I don’t believe in solo superheroes; there’s no one person who can save us all, nor should there be. No one book or voice could ever be the silver bullet that solves this whole problem. There are many, many books and voices out there — many predating mine! — that have been trying to make change for a long time. And we need even more of them. If there’s any way forward, it’s not going to be through a lone savior, but via collective action and many people working together, which is also one of the themes of Our Missing Hearts, as it turns out.

Sampan: In the novel, the reader jumps into a dystopia that has a profoundly moving mood and tone sometimes sacrificed with this genre. How difficult was it to balance your commitment to humanity in your characters with the dystopia?
Ng: I don’t think I know how to write any other way. For me, the story always starts with characters—I’m interested in people, why they do what they do. We’re a weird species. We often act confusingly. I often find myself wondering why a person would do such and such a thing — why someone might burn down their family’s house, why a parent might leave her child — and stories are a way of exploring that. So, I always begin with a character and let the story spiral out from there. If the character isn’t fully imagined, if their humanity isn’t fully there, then the story just falls flat. It isn’t interesting, and it doesn’t feel real. That’s when I know I have to go back and think about the characters more — who they are as people, what they’ve experienced, what they want and fear. When I can understand a character on that level, then hopefully their humanity will shine through, even if the world they’re in is dark.

Sampan: Your first two novels were set in small-town Ohio, in the 1970s and late 1990s. Our Missing Hearts is set in Boston and Cambridge at an indeterminate time. American society is dealing with an unclear crisis and an allegiance to PACT (Preserving American Culture and Traditions, which is uncomfortably close to Project 2025 ideology. Why were Boston, Cambridge, and New York the best locations for this story? Is it coincidental that Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was also set here? What is it about this area that added to the urgency of your narrative?

Ng: I should say that I’m not a prophet — I just looked at history and tried to imagine what it would look like if that happened again. Even back in 2018, there were already communities that were working to ban books at scale, that were passing laws restricting protest and free speech, or proposing that every classroom display the Ten Commandments, to take one example. It just wasn’t happening everywhere, so these cases seemed like outliers, and most people didn’t pay attention. But if you know enough history, you start to see patterns: Those outlying cases become the norm, if no one stops them.

We like to think that history is dead and done with, and that bad things only happen in other places to people that aren’t “like us.” Cambridge and Harvard are often thought of — and think of themselves — as a liberal bubble, the least likely place where “things like that” might happen. The stereotype is, “Well, sure, they ban books and harass trans people in Florida and Texas, but that would never happen in Cambridge!” So I purposely set the story here, to remind readers that there’s no place where this isn’t possible. And of course, The Handmaid’s Tale is famously set here too, so it was a little nod to that on my part as well.

Sampan: You’ve written quite eloquently about appearances, both literal and figurative. In “Keeping Love Close,” your 2021 New York Times essay in the wake of the Atlanta spa shootings, you wrote: “There is value in choosing how to be seen, in reclaiming the right to select the face you show to the world…” Margaret, seen as a revolutionary or even a terrorist, seemingly has no choice but to go underground in order to save her son from being taken by the government. As a woman of color who has published renowned popular and critically acclaimed novels, do you still see yourself susceptible to pigeonholing (self-imposed or otherwise) as a way to market your work?
Ng: I don’t think it’s possible to be a writer of color, or a writer in any marginalized group, and not have that affect the way people see your work. In some sense, that’s appropriate: Being an East Asian woman has shaped my life, and it’s part of my identity. Ignoring that aspect of my experience would lead to a pretty limited understanding of my work, while reading it with my identity in mind adds in new layers and additional meanings. There’s no such thing as being race-blind, nor should there be.
The real problem with pigeonholing isn’t that you’re put in a category—the problem is that you’re only allowed to be in one. You get reduced to the single label on that single box. But we all have multifaceted identities. I don’t mind being thought of as an Asian American writer, but I’m also a Chinese American writer, and an American writer, as well as a woman writer, and sometimes a Midwestern writer (if you ask my home state of Ohio!)… and the list goes on and on. We’re slowly starting to see the categories for writers flex and broaden and multiply, and I hope that continues.

Sampan: One of the more powerful themes in Our Missing Hearts is the importance of listening. Twelve year old Bird has been without his mother for three years. He takes a bus from Cambridge to New York City. He finds her, but her book is banned and hard to find. He eventually is able to literally piece together her poetry when he finds audio samples of it that had been planted by Margaret. How important are artistic acts of defiance in dark times such as these? How important is it to bear witness to testimony?
Ng: I’ve been thinking about this a lot, as the new administration busies itself dismantling our democracy and our society. Most of the time, I feel that I’m not doing enough to help fight back against what’s happening. I’m trying to find new ways to take action — organizing, volunteering, donating — but I’m also trying to remember that my work is a form of action, too. Fascism says that there’s only one way to be, that there is no other way, so don’t bother resisting. But art is the opposite: art, or any creative act, says “Actually, there are lots of possibilities out there. I can be any way I want to be. You can’t control my mind.” Art can’t be the only act of defiance we do—but it is nevertheless crucial.

As for bearing witness — if we don’t know or don’t remember what’s happened, we can’t learn from it. That means we can’t be better in the future or avoid the mistakes we’ve already made. And, equally as bad, we can’t honor and make amends for what’s happened in the past. So bearing witness is another thing that’s crucial even though it won’t solve the problem alone.

Sampan: Our Missing Hearts evokes Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and The Plot Against America as much as it does Margaret Atwood. It’s a viscerally beautiful and tender meditation on the power of identity, a mother’s love, a boy’s need for connection, the importance of stories and purpose when your infrastructure is crumbling down. What are your hopes for its longevity in a marketplace of ideas that seems to be becoming more and more fearful?
Ng: I have to admit that I don’t believe in a marketplace of ideas. To me ideas feel less like commodities to be consumed or preserved, and more like living things that grow and reproduce and evolve over time. If you look at it that way, then the lifetime of my one little book isn’t the big issue. Obviously I hope people will keep reading it and connecting with it for years to come—but my goal isn’t only the survival of the book. When you read a book that matters to you, the ideas within it plant seeds in your mind. To continue the metaphor, those seeds sprout and cross-fertilize with other ideas. All the books that fed into Our Missing Hearts are in its DNA, so to speak, and regardless of what happens to my book, those ideas will hopefully cause lots of sprouts in other people’s minds, and will live on that way.

Sampan: Could you tell us about the “Spreadsheet of Shame” collected before your breakthrough 11 years ago? How and why did you finally find your voice with novels?
Ng: The “Spreadsheet of Shame” was just a spreadsheet I started for myself when I first began submitting short stories for publication—so it’s now over 20 years old. It was just a way of keeping track of where I’d submitted each story and where to send it next. But it also ended up being a great motivational tool. First, it showed me that on average, a story usually gets rejected 10-12 times before finding the right magazine. (That matches most of my friends’ averages.) It was a good reminder that rejections are a normal part of the process, not necessarily a judgment on me personally. And second, when I did get a rejection, I’d just mark it down and then move on to the next magazine, which was already on the spreadsheet. That kept me focused on looking forward and reminded me that there are lots of places out there.
I think every writer goes through a process of figuring out what their voice is, and then where that voice “belongs.” Part of that is developing your personal writing style. But it’s also figuring out what you feel compelled to write about, and who it is you most want to reach with your words. So in a way, the spreadsheet also helped me keep track of what I tried as I figured all of that out. Finding my own voice—in both short stories and novels—was very much a matter of discovering what questions most interested me: what gets passed down (or doesn’t) from parents to children, what it means to “belong” somewhere, what role art can play in the world. Those are the questions that keep coming up in my work.