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How To Submit Content For The Magazine

All content for consideration as well as all correspondence regarding Lake Arrowhead Living Magazine should be directed ONLY to layccnews@gmail.com. This is an integral process in place for checking to be sure all content received has been considered for each particular month's publication. Items sent to any other email address will possibly be omitted.

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Note that Lake Arrowhead Living is published monthly (12 issues per year) in an overlapping format that covers 2 months at a time. Magazines generally arrive in mailboxes around mid-month. For example, the June/July issue will promote late June and July events and will feature articles submitted by May 10th covering happenings that took place in April and early May.

New content is always due by the 10th of each month to be published in the next month's issue on the following deadline schedule. Please note that the 10th is a HARD deadline for all content unless previously discussed and planned with the layout designer. This means that if you do not have a standing dedicated section of the magazine, your content is considered "new" and the deadline of the 10th applies. Those with standing dedicated sections have a grace period for submission decided by and agreed upon with their layout designer.

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Reading For The Ages

Our Missing Hearts

by Jeanne Schwartz

Celeste Ng | Penguin Random House LLC

The title of this book could be taken as a bit misleading. If you pick up a copy thinking you’re in for a romantic story, you would be wrong. The book is partly a Hero’s Journey, partly about the power of words. It’s the story of a dystopian future, which has many elements of our present and our collective past, so as one reviewer put it, it’s a “future five minutes away.” The title of the book actually refers to the last line of a poem in book that did not sell well when it was published, and as far as the author, Margaret Miu knows, has faded into obscurity.

Margaret is a Chinese-American, and in the years between the book’s publication and the time of the story, she has lived with her husband Ethan and son Noah (nicknamed Bird), through a time of the Crisis: a world-wide economic breakdown has occurred, allegedly caused by Chinese market manipulation. As a result of the Crisis, the U.S. government has enacted PACT -- Preserving American Culture and Traditions-- a law which is designed to uphold American ideals. For anyone who seems unpatriotic, the government will take action. The authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic. Books are not even burned, they are pulped and turned into toilet paper. Library shelves are empty, as Bird notices every time he visits his father, a former linguist and now a book shelver with very little to do. Both Ethan and Margaret are keeping a very low profile, trying to avoid any suspicion that they are dissidents to keep their child from being “re-placed” in a foster home.

But then, one day, when a Black girl is shot and killed by a police officer, a protester holds up a sign with a big red heart on it and the words “Our missing hearts,” the last line of Margaret Miu’s poem. (A poem, which by the way is about a pomegranate)! The slogan and graphic go viral, and soon proliferate at protests and begin to show up in giant banners hanging from trees, painted on streets; seemingly everywhere. “Find our Missing Hearts.” “Return our missing hearts.” Obviously, the source of this phrase becomes known, putting Margaret in clear danger. And not only her. Bird is in imminent danger of being “re-placed,” so the family makes the painful decision to separate. Before they can remove Bird, Margaret removes herself, becoming a fugitive never in contact with her family.

Bird is twelve at the time of the story, and lives with his father in Cambridge, MA. He spends a lot of time with his father at the library, and does not understand why his mother is gone, or why he has to keep his head down. His best friend Sadie spends time at the library with him, but one day she is gone, having been re-placed herself. And then, after receiving a mysterious letter in the mail, Bird decides to search for his mother. How that search happens, and the eventual climax of the book are yours for the reading. No spoilers. But what I can say is that it is beautifully written, and striking.

This book echoes much of present-day and past expression of repression and defiance. “The Handmaid’s Tale” comes to mind, but this book is quiet for the most part, serene even, so that the bursts of violence and horror that happen are that much more jarring. Also, the fact that the “story” is about things that have happened and are happening today makes it frightening. Indigenous children have been displaced from their families in large numbers, slavery was a fact of life in the U.S. and the power of words has been demonstrated often.

In the author’s note at the end of the book, Ng cites Vaclav Havel’s 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless” in which he writes about the power of words as the vehicle for how an individual can undermine the machinery of an oppressive state. In our world, words and phrases have become shorthand for entire philosophies of life. “I can’t breathe,” for example. “Witch hunt,” “pro-life,” “Black lives matter” have the power to firm up a person’s thinking without them digging underneath to find meaning or understanding.

There is symbolism, also. How can anyone survive a broken world with our hearts intact? “Bird” embodies Emily Dickinson’s vision of “hope as a thing with feathers that perches on the soul.” And in the end, one can only conclude that the antidotes for fear and suspicion are empathy and love.

Celeste Ng is the author of “Everything I Never Told You,” published in 2014 and “Little Fires Everywhere,” published in 2017. Little Fires Everywhere became a limited series streaming on Hulu, and featured Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington, among others. Some critics have described “Our Missing Hearts” as weaker than Ng’s previous books, but I would rank it as her best, followed closely by “Everything I Never Told You.” The issues it takes on are larger and more encompassing. That having been said, however, all three books are excellent. I recommend them all.