Celeste Ng wants to tell you a story. The acclaimed Cambridge-based author of “Everything I Never Told You” and “Little Fires Everywhere” said on…
Celeste Ng wants to tell you a story.
The acclaimed Cambridge-based author of “Everything I Never Told You” and “Little Fires Everywhere” said on Twitter that she was giving family members a walking tour of Harvard Square on Monday when they came across a wailing little girl outside J. P. Licks.
The girl was about 3 or 4 years old, according to the author, and was surrounded by a group of adults trying to help her. She couldn’t speak through her tears.
Suddenly, a woman came running from a nearby shop and scooped the girl in her arms and the situation “became clear,” Ng said. They were tourists and the child had wandered out of the shop, away from her mother, and got lost.
The Cambridge writer shared the story on Twitter on Wednesday, saying she’d been thinking about it since it occurred, connecting it to the separation of families at the U. S. border.
“What a terrifying thing for this mom and child: to be far from home, to be separated and not know where the other was,” Ng wrote. “And, in the case of the child (maybe the mother too?), to be unable to speak to those around. Now imagine that instead of trying to help, the passers-by had taken the child away. Now imagine that instead of trying to calm the child, they’d put her in a cage. Now imagine that instead of the mother coming back, she’d been locked in jail.”
More than 2,000 children were separated from their parents in recent weeks under the Trump administration’s, now-abandoned, zero-tolerance policy for families entering the United States illegally, according to the Associated Press. Following international backlash, President Donald Trump stopped the forced separations through an executive order, and, on Tuesday, a federal judge ordered border authorities to reunite separated families within 30 days.
Ng called on her followers to take “small actions” to foster “inclusion and tolerance and love.”
“I realize this scene from Monday and what’s happening at the border have many differences,” she wrote. “But I keep thinking it, and wishing we’d see the similarities first. Ask yourself: If you’d been walking down Mass Ave and seen a crying, lost child, what would you do? Then extend that to the separations of children at the border, to the refugees searching for safety worldwide, to the people everywhere just trying to keep their kids safe & alive.”
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