Wow. Celeste Ng continues to not disappoint. What a heartbreaker this was, for me*.
This is a Covid novel, set in a US where all Asian races are blamed for pretty much all that ails society.
I don’t consider myself a racist person, but what stuck with me on reading OMH was the notion that Margaret “didn’t have to know” about the kids being taken by the authorities, about how unjust PACT was, until she did. I don’t have to know a lot of stuff, as a cis-het white lady (example: three days after the police helped a very drunk me into an uber at the train station, an indigenous woman was arrested for public drunkenness on the train and died in custody here in Aus. Christmas 2022). We should all choose to know.
It’s very Atwood, and so close to coming true that it’s actually a little frightening to look closely at. Well done, Celeste Ng. I savoured it as much as I could, but also sped through it. Any views I have from my perspective of privilege are not going to be enormously relevant here, beyond that determination to be better. To know, to not look away. What a good book.
*With the caveat that I will never, can never, get behind the harming of an animal. Especially here, where I felt like it happened because of a fear that the reader was not sufficiently invested in a woman being beaten. But also, this incident kind of reinforces the whole point of the book – CN was genuinely uncertain that readers would not relate enough to an Asian lady in peril, and so included a dog.