Wishing real world wasn’t starting to feel so much like her dystopian novel

The personal is political in Celeste Ng’s books. In her three best-selling novels, the Cambridge resident highlights Asian American characters and how issues around ethnicity and cultural origin can create tensions for them, both in their families and in the wider world.

Her third and latest novel, “Our Missing Hearts,” follows a mother and biracial son in a future Cambridge where behavior considered unpatriotic is criminalized and can result in children being taken from their parents. Here “un-American” art and books are banned, and an underground network of librarians keeps such books — and our knowledge of the past — alive.

The novelist noted her dystopian creation is starting to feel increasingly familiar amid all of the global headlines.

“I was really hoping the world would move further away from the novel,” said Ng ’02 during a conversation sponsored by the Harvard Radcliffe Institute with Erika Lee, the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Faculty Director of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library and Bae Family Professor of History.

The seed of the novel was personal experience, rather than politics, she explained. “When I got the idea for this, it was focused on this mother, Margaret, a Chinese American woman and her son, who is mixed race, and goes by the nickname Bird,” said Ng, who is also the mother of a son. (She made a point of noting during the event that while her work draws from her life it is fiction, not memoir.)

At the time, she said, “I was doing a lot of book tours. I was on the road a lot, and I was thinking ‘Does he resent me being away from home so much?’” This, she acknowledges, is a return to familiar themes. “In ‘Little Fires Everywhere,’” her 2017 bestseller that was turned into a 2020 Hulu miniseries, “There’s a mother who asks her daughter to sacrifice quite a bit. I started asking what if the child wasn’t really on board? What is it that a mother who is creative might have to sacrifice for her child? What if a child saw his mother’s creative work as a rival for his mother’s time?”

That question led to her vision of a future dystopia, “maybe 1 or 2 degrees off of our reality,” she said. The harrowing vision “didn’t take a lot of imagining, honestly,” said Ng. “I really wish we as a country learned more from our history.”

In the book, one group — Persons of Asian Origin — are “particularly suspect,” Lee said. This mirrors the anti-Asian bias that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Ng was working on the book. But Ng said she’s “always been aware” of this bias.

Other people — specifically non-Asian people — weren’t, she found.

“When violence began against Asian Americans … a lot of people were really surprised,” said Ng. “The Asian people I know were not surprised. The violence against us was always imminent. But you don’t know what you don’t know. I wanted to highlight that, and as the COVID pandemic kept going, and we started to see a lot of the violence, it seemed important to bear witness.”

Being idealized — the flip side of being scapegoated — is not much better for Asian Americans, she said. “You’re the model minority. You’re used as this wedge to push other groups out of the center or even downward.”

These days, Ng said, people have been turned off by the news, and many have felt the need to withdraw. However, in this tumultuous time, art — including literature — can bridge the gap.

“Fiction can come in sideways. It can get around your immediate reaction to what might be the front page of the headlines.” Citing “resistance art” installations that dramatized the family separations of the first Trump administration, she said, “If you bypass the intellect and go straight for people’s emotions, sometimes you can spur people to action.”

Turning the discussion to the writing process, she acknowledged her first drafts are “very inefficient.” If every book begins with a question, she explained, “Writing the first draft is where I tend to figure out where my question even is.”

Along those lines, she rejectedthe idea of using AI in the writing process, particularly in the beginning of a project. Writing a first draft engages “the space where hopefully you were thinking about stuff,” she explained. “The more you use [AI], the less your brain gets exercised.”

Addressing the problems of tokenism — of being labelled “the next Amy Tan” — she talked about how many stories need to be told.

“There’s not a single story that encompasses not only all Asian Americans but all Chinese Americans, or Chinese American women,” she said. “We’re getting stories that are not especially about being Asian, but in which the character’s ethnicity and background experience are part of them and part of what shapes them, but maybe not the whole story.”

Ng concluded that in the end, people will see her work as inspiring.

“I want ‘Our Missing Hearts’ to be a story that gives people hope,” she said. “It is a novel, essentially, of me trying to find hope.”