Books

‘The Leavers’ a poignant look at the realities and

dreams of an immigrant family
Originally published May 26, 2017 at 7:00 am

(Mary Cauffman / The Seattle Times)

In “The Leavers” we come to see that to be Chinese American is to hold

tight to what separates these two cultures, these two realities.

By Tyrone Beason
Special to The Seattle Times

“The Leavers”
by Lisa Ko
Algonquin, $25.95, 338 pp.
In Lisa Ko’s heartfelt and timely immigration-themed novel “The Leavers,”
the coming-of-age tales of a boy named Deming and a boy named Daniel
sometimes feel like the stories of two parallel lives, but in reality they are
one and the same.

“The Leavers” traces the troubled, convoluted upbringing of an American-

born young man in New York City named Deming Guo, whose
undocumented Chinese-immigrant mother Polly suddenly disappears.
Deming is taken in by Polly’s boyfriend Leon, his sister Vivian and Vivian’s
son Michael, Deming’s best buddy.

What is doubly traumatizing about Polly’s vanishing act is that after Deming
was born, she sent him back home to the Fujian province of China to live
with his grandfather.

Author appearance
Lisa Ko
The author of “The Leavers” will speak at 7 p.m. June 7 at Elliott Bay Book Co.; elliottbaybook.com
or 206-624-6600.

But Polly, tough as brass, impulsive and missing her son, has Deming
brought back to America to live with her in New York after the grandfather
dies.

So by the time she fails to come home one day from her nail-salon job, she
has given up Deming twice.

The two had grown close up until then in New York, a single Chinese mom
without papers who speaks limited English and a preteen American son who
loves “everything bagels” who also speaks a Chinese dialect.

During the period when they are reunited, mother and son communicate in
that dialect, Fuzhounese, but they also communicate through life lessons and
dreams as Polly instills wisdom and warnings to steer Deming clear of the
temptations and obstacles that might keep him from living the life she never
can have in America.

Nothing can prepare a child for the shock of realizing that your parent is
never coming back, though.

In time, Deming is turned over to foster care and is later adopted by a white
family in upstate New York. They give him the Anglo first name Daniel and
their surname, Wilkinson.

We see Daniel assimilating and trying to become his own man, playing guitar
in a band and attending college. But his identity is split between his old life
and his new life, between the Old World and the New World, between
memories of his Chinese family and his adoptive American family’s vision
for his future.
As we learn the reasons why Polly came to America in the first place, why
she left Deming and what hardships she faced as an undocumented resident
after that, the story explores what it means at the most personal level to live
in a nation of immigrants.

In “The Leavers” we come to see that the Chinese-American identity is to

hold tight to the hyphen that separates these two cultures, these two
realities.

We constantly feel the tug as Daniel and Polly shuttle between those poles,
and between grief and hope.

Daniel ostensibly has moved on to a more stable family situation, without

her. During a phone call with his estranged mom when he’s 21, he senses
that Polly has moved on to better things too, without him. But their sense of
loss binds them.

Ko won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Fiction for “The Leavers” and
while it is a quiet story, it comes at a time when a little breathing room, time
to reflect on ourselves as a country, seems urgently necessary.

America is a restless nation built around the dream of mobility — from other
countries to this one but also from lesser circumstances to better
circumstances.

We are always moving. Yet like Daniel and Polly, we are also, always,
searching for home.

Tyrone Beason is a writer for Pacific Northwest Magazine.