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Young life, upbringing, and education
Celeste Ng was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Dr. Daniel L Ng and Marilyn Lee after they moved from Hong Kong to America in the late 1960s. She had one sister Her father, Dr. Daniel L Ng was a physicist at NASA in the John H. Glenn Research Center. Her mother, Marilyn Lee, was a chemist who taught at Cleveland State University. At the age of 10 years old, Celeste, her sister, and her parents moved from Pittsburgh to Shaker Heights, Ohio. She attended Woodbury Elementary and Shaker Heights High School. While at Shaker Heights high school she was involved in the SGORR. SGORR stood for Student Group On Race Relations. She was a part of this organization for three years. She was also a co-editor of the literary magazine called Semanteme. She graduated from Shaker Heights High School in 1998. After high school, Celeste went to Harvard University, where she studied English and American Literature and Language. After Harvard, she attended graduate school at the University of Michigan where she earned her Master of Fine Arts in writing.
Cultural Background
Celeste Ngs parents were both born in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is where her parents met, got married, and decided to emigrate to America in the 1960s. Celeste Ngs paternal great-grandfather came to the United States in the early 20th century as a paper son. He returned to China a few times, to marry and then to visit his wife, who remained in China. Celeste Ngs grandma and father grew up without knowing him due to him staying in the United States. Ngs grandparents weren't able to come over to the United States until her father was naturalized and allowed to bring his parents and siblings over. "So, like many Chinese immigrants, my family did have to hide things." Ng continues to say "When communists came to power, a lot of records were destroyed. I'm not sure if we'll ever find out much more, and that's both a huge loss and a space for imagination." This interview explains a topic that Celeste Ng is extremely passionate about. Ng is known to write about cultural and family dynamics.
Jobs and what she is doing now
After graduating from college, Celeste Ng didn't jump right into being an author. After college, she briefly worked at a tech startup company. She was a teacher who taught creative writing at the University of Michigan, was an editor of blogs at the website Fiction Writers Review, and she also took on freelance proofreading and copy editing work to support herself. Once she became a New York Times best selling author she made that her main priority and source of income. Celeste Ng is very passionate about family, you can see it in her writing and her interviews. Speaking of how important family is to her, she started her own family. She got married to her husband Matthew T. Fox, together they have one son and live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She writes to this day, just recently she came out with a novel called “Our Missing Hearts” which was released on October 4th, 2022.
Novels and Awards
Celeste Ng has released lots of amazing pieces of work and lots of them have been publicly appreciated. As described by Celeste Ng, “Our Missing Hearts is an old story made new, of the easy supposedly civilized communities can pretend to ignore the most searing injustice. It's a story about the power- and limitations- of art to create change, the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children, and how any of us can survive a broken world with our hearts intact. Our Missing Hearts was published on October 4, 2022. Another famous novel by Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere, is described “to explore the weights of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood- and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster.” This novel was released on September 12, 2017. Lastly, Celeste Ng's first novel "Everything I Never Told You" was described as “A profoundly moving story of family, history, and the meaning of home. Everything I never told you is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, exploring the divisions between cultures and the rifts within a family, and uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.” Everything I Never Told You was released on June 26, 2014. While she has multiple other stories and poems she is mostly known for her novels listed and described above. Her first novel, “Everything I Never Told You”, acquired multiple awards throughout the years. It was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, named best book of the year by over a dozen publications, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the ALA’s Alex Award. The novel “Everything I Never Told You” has been translated into over thirty languages and is being adapted for the screen. Her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere was a #1 New York Times Bestseller, a #1 Indie Next bestseller, and Amazon’s Best Fiction Book of 2017. It was named a best book of the year by over 25 publications, the winner of the Ohioana Award and the Goodreads Readers Choice Award of 2017 in Fiction, and has spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list. This novel has been translated into 30 languages and has been turned into a limited series on Hulu. Her third and final novel, “Our Missing Hearts” was published in 3 countries and instantly became a New York Times bestseller.
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