Finished: Our Missing Hearts (Ng) A powerful, heartbreaking, but necessary, book! It is beautifully written and is about the very real danger of how a community can begin to ignore the oppression of and discrimination against members of their own community who happen to be "different" from them. The story is centered around Ethan Gardner and Margaret Miu, a Caucasian man and Chinese American woman who fall in love, move in together and have a child they nickname Bird. They happen to be living in an America that has recently passed the PACT act...Preserving American Culture and Traditions. The passing of this law is brought about by the growing instability of America's economy which has incited discord and violence. The leaders of America decide that China is to blame because they have a better economy, are raising prices, beating America, etc. etc. For this reason, Asian people become targets of violence and prejudice. Margaret is aware of what is going on because both of her parents have been murdered by strangers, just because of what they look like. However, when she meets Ethan, who is a linguistics professor at Harvard, and they begin to have a more fortunate income, unlike the majority of Americans, who are still struggling in long lines for food and other products, Margaret is able to put that knowledge aside and concentrate on their baby to be. During her pregnancy, Margaret writes poetry. She's a talented writer and finds a way to put her feelings about being pregnant and what other mothers must feel like into words. She writes a poem called All Our Missing Hearts, which becomes the cornerstone of the book she publishes. When Bird is born, both parents are thrilled. They are loving, caring parents who do their very best for him. In the meantime, the government has implemented a plan that gives authorities the ability to take a person's child from them, for the very slimmest of reasons, and "relocate" them to another family. Ethan and Margaret are aware of what is going on, but like everyone else, they must struggle between keeping their own family safe, or speaking up when an injustice is committed. When Bird is nine, the anti-PACT movement has become much larger and more vocal as people insist that the missing children be reunited with their parents. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to Margaret, her poem, All Our Missing Hearts, is used by the dissidents as their slogan. They begin painting red hears on public property and put up flyers demanding that their missing hearts, aka, their children, be brought home. The government now has Margaret on a list, and she and Ethan feel it's only a matter of time before they come and remove Bird from their home. They make the difficult decision for Margaret to exit their lives and go to another city...and...to burn everything that had belonged to Margaret, especially her poems, so Ethan can claim that he completely supports the PACT and has cut his wife and Bird's mother out of their lives. It is utterly heartbreaking. :-(  Bird and his mother were so very close and one day she's just gone from his life. His father refuses to speak of her and tells Bird that they must forget about her. Of course, he still loves her, but Bird looks more like his mother than his father, and he's terrified that Bird will be persecuted in some way. Because a "known dissident and author of their slogan" was his wife, things take a downturn for Ethan and Bird. Ethan loses his job as a professor and can only work as a librarian shelving books day and night. Bird is relentlessly bullied at school, and has only one friend...a girl named Sadie, who happens to be a child who has been relocated because her parents were in extreme and vocal opposition of the PACT. She wants nothing more than to find her parents and be reunited, but she is powerless to do so. When Bird is twelve and Margaret has been gone for three years without a single communication, Bird receives a cryptic letter in the mail from his mother. Bird figures out the hidden meaning behind his mother's letter and decides to go searching for her in New York City. I'm not going to go into any more detail about whether they reunite, and what Margaret has actually been doing all that time, but the entire situation is emotional in so many ways. I encourage everyone to read this excellent book and absorb these characters and situations for yourselves. Not a book to pass up!