FINALIST FOR THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, BuzzFeed, Bustle, and Electric Literature “There was a time I would have called Lisa Ko’s novel beautifully written, ambitious, and moving, and all of that is true, but it’s more than that now: if you want to understand a forgotten and essential part of the world … want to understand a forgotten and essential part of the world we live in, The Leavers is required reading.” –Ann Patchett, author of Commonwealth
Lisa Ko’s powerful debut, The Leavers, is the winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver for a novel that addresses issues of social justice.
One morning, Deming Guo’s mother, Polly, an undocumented Chinese immigrant, goes to her job at a nail salon–and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her.
With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left mystified and bereft. Eventually adopted by a pair of well-meaning white professors, Deming is moved from the Bronx to a small town upstate and renamed Daniel Wilkinson. But far from all he’s ever known, Daniel struggles to reconcile his adoptive parents’ desire that he assimilate with his memories of his mother and the community he left behind.
Told from the perspective of both Daniel–as he grows into a directionless young man–and Polly, Ko’s novel gives us one of fiction’s most singular mothers. Loving and selfish, determined and frightened, Polly is forced to make one heartwrenching choice after another.
Set in New York and China, The Leavers is a vivid examination of borders and belonging. It’s a moving story of how a boy comes into his own when everything he loves is taken away, and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of the past.
Lisa Ko’s fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2016, Apogee Journal, Narrative, Copper Nickel, the Asian Pacific American Journal, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Writers OMI at Ledig House, the Jerome Foundation, and Blue Mountain Center, among others. She was born in New York City, where she now lives. Visit her at lisa-ko.com.
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At the beginning of the reading the book slowly started, but then I was conquered. The language is excellent and versatile. Deming-Daniel felt the music in all his senses, a burst of colors and emotions, both walking the streets, traveling, meeting people. The feeling of suffocation is also here in full force – Lack of belonging to any of the worlds and the desire to be one of them all. A particular place in the book said he did not know how exhausting it was to be inconspicuous. Not an exact quote but that’s the feeling: Please do me to be like everyone else. And of course the harrowing subject of the illegal immigrants. The expectations that not realized, the administrations that are trying to brutally expel them back to their bitter fate, the lack of conditions and the futility of improving the situation, there is always someone else who is increasingly exploiting you, still the illegal immigrant at the bottom of the food chain. There was a reason why he had left his natural habitat and gone to graze in external fields. The United States has a long history of xenophobia and persecution, and now in the Trump era, the matter is once more floating and becoming a subject.
Our son grew up with a boy born in Asia who, as an infant, was adopted by an American, middle class family. He had perfectly nice parents and a biracial adopted sister. Our son told us the boy felt sad, wondering why his mother gave him up, and about how he was conflicted by being different as the only Asian in school. There was always an air of sadness about the boy.
I thought of that boy, now a man, while reading Lisa Ko’s debut novel The Leavers. The book is a moving journey into the lives of Deming/Daniel, a Chinese American child adopted by an American family, and his birth mother Pelian/Polly, bold and strong but whose fierce love of her child cannot save them from the forces–poverty and the law– that inevitably separate her from her child.
Pelian/Polly Gao is an unforgettable character, born in rural China, daughter of a fisherman. She imagines possibilities of another life and will do anything to achieve her dreams. She could have settled for marrying the village boy who loved her, remained in China, taking care of her aging fisherman father. She could have had an abortion and stayed in the Chinese factory dormitory, working long hours. Instead, she takes out a loan to go to America.
Her son Deming was born in New York City. But Polly’s debt meant long hours working for low wages. She sends her son to live with her father in China. After the death of his grandfather, Deming rejoins his mother, who is living with her boyfriend and his sister and nephew. Those years are Deming’s happiest. He adores his mother and has a ‘brother’ for best friend.
One day Deming’s mother disappears. He is placed in a foster home and is adopted by an educated and well-off family. Now called Daniel, the boy never feels at home in his new world, any more than his mother had felt at home in her rural village.
Daniel flounders in life. Then he is brought into contact with people from his past who led him on a quest to find his mother. And finally learns the harrowing events that led to their separation.
Illegal immigration, the immigrant experience, the love between a mother and a child, and the search for authenticity and a place to belong are all themes in the novel.
The novel has garnered much well deserved praise and I purchased it to read. The beauty of Ko’s writing and the memorable characters made this an outstanding read.
Really an eye opener on the Chinese/American immigrant experience in the late 20th Century and present today. Wonderfully written and it is a realistic portrayal. Excellent!
Good reminder of the sacrifices immigrants make in order to come to America.
Lisa Ko’s The Leavers is an especially well-written book that looks at some key issues in American life: the experience of immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, first-generation children of immigrants, the mother-child relationship, adoption across racial and cultural lines, and a topic rarely addressed in reviews of this book, the meaning of The American Dream.
Polly Guo, poor in money and education but rich in ambition and drive, leaves her small town home in Fuzhou Province, PR China, to go to work in the sweatshop factories of southeast China. Then she has a chance to go to America to work. This involves paying an astronomical fee to a smuggler with years of debt-repayment so she can work in the sweatshop factories of New York City. Polly has a problem. She’s pregnant, and despite her efforts to get an abortion first in China and then in New York City, she fails. Deming Guo is born in New York, a citizen of the U.S.
Polly doesn’t get paid enough to pay back her loan, pay for living expenses, and pay for child care. So she, like so very many undocumented workers, sends Deming back to China to live with his grandfather. When his grandfather dies, Polly arranges for Deming to be returned to New York. They live with Polly’s boyfriend Leon and his sister Vivian (both undocumented workers from China, too), and Vivian’s son Michael who becomes Deming’s best friend and brother in spirit. Deming enters elementary school, and despite the distress of losing his grandfather and coming to America to live with a mother he doesn’t even know, Deming learns to adjust.
Polly starts talking about moving to Florida. Polly is a free spirit who wants to see the world, to make more money, to have adventures, and, as she states, to have enough money “to buy useless things.” She wants and she wants and she wants, often to the point that she doesn’t consider those around her. Or as her boyfriend Leon says, “You only want to go to Florida for yourself. Not for Deming or me. It’s always about you…..You’re not a nice person sometimes.” Polly constantly talks about how she loves her son, and she does. But he’s also a major inconvenience. Then one day she doesn’t come home from work, and no one knows where she is. Deming is convinced that she left him again, this time for Florida. But he doesn’t really know and not knowing is a burden. Deming ends up being adopted as an abandoned child to an affluent, white, culturally insensitive but well-meaning couple of college professors in upstate New York. Deming is renamed Daniel.
Ko constructed her book in a very clever way. The chapters about Deming/Daniel are written from his point of view but in the third person. We learn that he decides no one can be trusted and he best not get close to anyone. He decides, “If he held everyone at arm’s length, it wouldn’t hurt as much when they disappeared.” He ends up engaging in some dysfunctional behavior (especially gambling), and he pretty much feels lost most of the time. At the same time, Daniel discovers the world of music, the lights and colors that sounds produce in his head, and the act of artistic creation. Still, he cannot resolve himself to Polly’s disappearance, and he feels his life is on hold.
Chapters about Polly are all written in the first person. That was Ko’s great move as a writer. To discover the deeply conflicted nature of Polly Guo, her desire for wealth and respect pitted against her unformed drive toward self-fulfillment and for the love for her son, could only be revealed by Polly herself. Knowing her thoughts allows Polly to explain and justify to herself actions that are at best ambivalent and sometimes cold-hearted. Polly has ambition but she doesn’t have the internal resources to know what will really make her feel self-fulfilled, free and happy. So she chases money instead.
What underlies these two people is a search for the American Dream. But what does that mean? For immigrants, it often means escape from danger and an opportunity to escape poverty, too. But then, so very often, it turns into a chase after material wealth and a desire for public recognition and respect – or “face” as the Chinese put it. Since famine and then anarchy and chaos during Cultural Revolution, the Chinese have been deeply concerned about the loss of spiritual depth. Many have returned to traditional Confucian vales and others have turned to religion, including Christianity. They also are deeply concerned about personal economic welfare. They may chase the Chinese Dream or they may come to the U.S. and chase the American Dream. But for many Chinese, the definition is to be able “to buy useless stuff.”
That applies not just to the Chinese, but also to many Americans who seem to be on an endless treadmill of making money so they can “keep up with” or better the Joneses, to buy the latest digital gadget, to be take an expensive vacation in the tropics so they can forget for just a week or two that they are virtually slaves at their jobs.
Deming/Daniel has to struggle with the meaning of the American Dream. He finds it eventually, not by becoming a professor like his adopted parents, or by becoming the director of an English-language school which is Polly’s ambition for him (they all demand that he fill out multiple forms). After several missteps, Daniel discovers that he is an American boy who lives for music and who has deep family-like relationships with Michael and other friends. Even Polly eventually discovers that chasing after the almighty yuan isn’t going to make her happy and she leaves yet again, this time for a destination that seems especially appropriate for her.
Ko’s book ends happily but with a serious question for each of us to ponder. What exactly is The American Dream?
SPOILER ALERT: When Polly doesn’t come home from work, it wasn’t because she took off for Florida. She had been caught in an ICE raid and sent to a detention center in Texas for undocumented (illegal) workers. She was traumatized by this event as are most of the individuals who suffer this fate.
Even worse are the ones who cross the border in the desert, get lost, and die from heat and water deprivation. To learn more go to Humane Borders and No More Deaths. The United States desperately needs immigration reform (not a $25 billion dollar 30-foot high wall). As long as dysfunctional immigration laws prevail, we’ll continue to see (and largely ignore) more suffering.
This book really moved me. I will never forget the part where an undocumented immigrant is picked up by ICE. The descriptions of the facility and the hopelessness there, the isolation created by both language and circumstances, and the needless cruelty of small indignities is powerful. The tragic repercussions involving her son are heart-breaking.
It was the first book I’ve read about Chinese people living in America. There was a sadness to the story, and the main character, Deming, aka, Daniel Wilkinson, and his mother, Vivian, as well as the family and friends, I would like to read more about the Chinese in America. Lisa Ko writes beautifully.
One of my favorite books to date…things aren’t always as they seem.
A well written story about a young woman in China who feels trapped by traditional Chinese values and when she finds it nearly impossible to arrange for an abortion when she becomes pregnant by a boy in her village she seeks a better life via illegal immigration to the U.S. Life as an illegal immigrant in New York City is harder than expected, and she is not able to raise her child as she would like…further complications ensue and she is separated from her son. This is an insightful story about the plight of immigrants and the struggle to achieve a better life.
Chinese immigration story explored the difficulties of 2 worlds
reframes the immigrant experience
I’m at a loss as to how to review this novel which is very well written, but whose characters are difficult to like. Both mother and son are frustratingly unsympathetic for the most part, even though they both endure bitter loss. I wanted to feel so much more than the author was able to evoke.
Very slow. I skipped many pages – predictable.
beautifully written!
This book prompted me to ask the question, ” Where are people detained when ICE picks them up? How many detainees are there? What are their rights?” Checking the CIVIC website to get the answers opened my eyes to the sad and awful secret that we are allowing man’s inhumanity to man to thrive in the USA in institutions that harken to the Japanese and German internment camps of WWII.
Not my favorite read, I did not find the characters appealing and I felt the mother and son in the story needed to realize what they had as far as opportunity and friends versus only focusing on the negative. The ending was ok, but the rest of the book was depressing
love, loss, survival, recovery – families, relationships
Hard to read, I put this book down after having read about 10% of it. I guess it just wasn’t my cup of tea.
The story will take you into the unpredictable and sometimes scary world of undocumented immigrants.