Celeste Ng is set to attend the Auckland Writers Festival, to talk rage, dystopia and her 2022 book Our Missing Hearts. Photo / Kieran Kesner
Ahead of her visit to Tāmaki Makaurau, Celeste Ng speaks to Madeleine Crutchley about the upcoming Auckland Writers Festival, the Little Fires Everywhere TV adaptation and her newest dystopic novel.
Celeste Ng is fascinated by the pursuit of perfection.
“I am really interested in the idea of people who believe that they can make things perfect, who believe that they can escape all the messiness and fallibility that humans have,” she tells the Herald.
This curiosity has drawn the author to interesting places, where she scours shiny ideals to uncover what lies beneath the polish.
In her first book, Everything I Never Told You, she explores the splintering of a family under the weight of swollen secrets. In her second, Little Fires Everywhere, she catalogues the conflicts between two houses in a neighbourhood with utopian aspirations. In her 2022 release, Our Missing Hearts, Ng cracks open a draconian nation with great precision.
This contemplative approach has earned the novelist a loyal following of readers — many of whom will be first in line to see Ng expand on her stories at the Auckland Writers Festival in May.
The author is set to speak on an array of panels at this year’s festival. One will explore writing Asian female rage with local creative Nahyeon Lee, writer Amanda Chong and horror author Lee Murray. It’s a topic Ng “cannot wait to talk about”.
“I’ve never been on a panel with this topic before. I love the idea of it. The stereotype of many Asian women, particularly East Asian women, is that we’re very submissive, we’re very demure, and we maybe don’t have many opinions of our own. That does not align with how I see myself, and I think for most other women it doesn’t either.”
At another session, Ng will consider the blurriness of dystopian writing in times of turmoil, alongside local authors Anna Smaill (The Chimes) and Tīhema Baker (Turncoat). At her headline events, Ng will also delve into the intricacies of her latest and darkest book Our Missing Hearts.
In the novel, Ng examines an alternate vision of the United States. An authoritarian government has assumed control after a major crisis, bolstered by false nostalgia, heavy censorship and threats of force. Ng explores the devastating effect this has on those labelled as “un-American” and excluded from a vision of the “perfect” state (see: people of colour, especially Asian Americans, and anyone who dares question this violent power).
At its release, Our Missing Hearts was classified as dystopian. Ng, who has primarily written realist fiction, says this resemblance developed while writing.
“I started doing it and I had to pause and think: why is the book coming out this way?”
The work that would eventually become Our Missing Hearts began in 2016, after Ng completed her second book. However, she was concerned that the darker world wouldn’t connect with her own writing style, or the potential audience.
“I wasn’t sure if it was a book that anybody would want to read.”
The author shelved the work until the pandemic struck in 2020. Lockdown, growing social divisions and a rise in anti-Asian discrimination and racism throughout the US (also noted here in New Zealand) brought the world of the book into sharper focus for Ng.
While navigating this turbulent contemporary context, Ng also dove into intense historical research — looking at “times of political censorship or times where civil rights were being curtailed”.
“I would get these stacks of books that were like The Origins of Totalitarianism and other dark books, and my husband was like ‘Are you sure this is what you want to be reading?’ But that was what I needed to figure the book out.”
Ng also examined Asian-American histories and “situations in which children are taken from their parents in the US and in other places around the world”.
All events in Our Missing Hearts, like the separation of parents and their children (the plot unfolds as 12-year-old Bird attempts to find his mother) have historical precedent. This closely aligned the writing with Ng’s realist approach and complicated its labelling as a “dystopia” for the author.
“I always want to raise the question... how dystopian is it? Is this something that might happen in the next 20 years — or 6 months?”
In her research, Ng was especially taken with accounts of active resistance during these periods, from strident acts of defiance to more subtle shows of solidarity. The author recalls records of people bending cigarette matches to form a “V”, symbolising the victory of the Allies during Vichy France in WWII, and dropping them on the ground — quietly littering their rebellion.
“I thought that was so interesting, that protest in some way is not necessarily about import, it’s sometimes about keeping hope alive,” Ng says.
This observation also aligned with questions she had begun asking herself during the pandemic. It cemented her grasping of hope at the centre of Our Missing Hearts.
“[It] really brought into view how important community is, how important it is to be able to communicate with other people. I was asking myself as a parent; how do you give the next generation hope, when it really seems that things are going quite badly?”
These relationships within families and neighbourhoods are a reliable site of investigation for Ng. She pressure-cooks these interpersonal dynamics, captured within an unrelenting structure of oppressive ‘isms, until they rupture spectacularly.
She says these relationships become a “microcosm of everything else that’s happening outside” that is “so ripe for some kind of nuclear explosion”.
This approach propelled the blazing drama in Little Fires Everywhere. Ng says the site of the suburbs was also key to creating conflict — the idealism of living with both city and country, the class conflict and the prideful posturing provided great dramatic consequences.
“It seems like a doomed experiment. For a fiction writer that’s the goldmine of places to take your story.”
Little Fires Everywhere was also adapted into a TV miniseries by Liz Tigelaar, Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington in 2020. It’s the first of Ng’s works to be adapted for the screen, a potentially nerve-wracking process for an author. Her experience? “Amazing and fun.”
“It’s almost like it’s translated into another language,” she says. “They’re going to say essentially the same thing, but they’re going to use different words to say it because they’ve got a different vocabulary on-screen.”
Some of those changes kept Ng on the edge of her seat as a viewer.
“I was watching it with my husband and there was a part where I grabbed his arm and I was like ‘oh my god, how is this going to work out?’ And he looked at me and was like ‘You know! You wrote the book!’”
For her free time in Tāmaki Makaurau, the author is excited to uncover other new stories. She plans to visit bookish nooks amongst the city’s sprawl (“recommendations welcome”).
“I’m really excited to come to New Zealand and go to a local bookstore, to get some books that people are excited about. I’m going to bring a big suitcase.”
Ng will likely find a connection here with our own inquisitive authors — especially those who reveal disarray and find a sense of hope, despite it all.
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park
The School For Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan
The Incendiaries by R. O. Kwon
Martyr! A novel by Kaveh Akbar
Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan
For more information about the Auckland Writers Festival visit writersfestival.co.nz. The full programme has been announced today and tickets are on sale from March 15.
From where to get the best view to when the roads will close.