The Leavers by Lisa Ko
Polly Lin runs an English language school in Fuzhou, China. She lives with her husband Yong, a successful businessman, in a new high rise. They are renovating their kitchen. He is preparing to make a speech at the Fuzhou Business Leaders Forum awards. Their friends are discussing buying second homes, should it be ocean or mountains? What should their next holiday destination be?
From humble village beginnings Polly Lin has made it. She is part of China’s new rich, and this dinner is symbolic of that success “I looked around the room and saw the same table duplicated over and over: fat men in dark suits, lipsticked women in tight dresses, plates and plates of food, empty beer bottles. I didn’t look out of place. My purple dress had been tailored to fit, and I wore a pair of diamond earrings and a matching ring, a gold bracelet with oval hoops that resembled a chain.”
Polly Lin née Polly Guo née Pelian Guo is the heroine of Lisa Ko’s debut novel, The Leavers and in this character’s life Ko tells a richly drawn story about one undocumented immigrant and the heartbreak and pain of that status. Polly may have made it, yes. But along the way she lost, or left her son. This isn’t a predictable tale of a mother torn asunder from her child, however, unable to realize her full potential until she fills that hole.
In Polly Lisa Ko has created a character who is many things – a loving mother, an ambitious woman, hardworking and incredibly strong. In other words, a multi-dimensional person who defies your pre-conceived notions from the get go.
An unforeseen pregnancy by a fellow villager with no prospects, Peilan Guo cannot end the pregnancy in China as an unmarried woman. She heads for the U.S. where she plans to make her fortune and send money to her father (after paying off the smugglers). When the harsh voyage does not end her pregnancy she finds out that neither can she do that in the United States since she is now seven months pregnant. She becomes Polly Guo, an undocumented immigrant in New York, with an American born child, part of the underground economy of seamstresses and nail salon workers. She sends her son, Deming, to be brought up by his grandfather in China, until he reaches school age, when he returns and Mother and son live a tough but happy life.
Deming is unaware that they are living a life in the shadows, cramped in an apartment with Polly’s boyfriend Leon, his sister Vivian and her son Michael, practically a brother to Deming, a blended family that seems to work. They struggle but they are not dysfunctional.
At the age of eleven Deming’s world is turned upside down when his mother doesn’t return from her job at a nail salon. She has disappeared without a trace. Within a few months he is handed over to foster care and moves from the only life he has known in New York’s Chinatown, where Fuzhounese filled the air and everyone looked like him, to “Ridgeborough, New York, population 6,525.” He is in the care of liberal college professors Peter and Kay Wilkinson. Deming is now Daniel Wilkinson. He is thrust into a school full of white children, he’s uncomfortable with his English, and the only friend he makes is Roland, the only other non-white child in the school.
Ko’s book seems to be particularly timely at this moment as the immigration debate becomes more and more polarized. We may be consumed with policy and legislation as a nation, but it is the individual stories that illuminate how real lives are affected and fiction, when it’s at its best, allows us an insight into the lived experience.
Not only does Ko grapple with the issue of undocumented immigration in this book, but with the fostering and ultimate adoption of Deming she takes on the issue of transracial adoption.
Peter and Kay Wilkinson are portrayed as do-gooder liberals who want to give Deming, now known as Daniel, a better life. Because a life that they can give him is going to be “better” a house, material goods, stability. But in the process they wipe out any cultural vestiges that were part of his life – his name, his language, even his life as a city child, now thrust into small town order “After school, he walked home by himself. It wasn’t that far, only a half hour, but the view was relentlessly unchanging, house after house, tree after tree. The tight streets unrolled into mini-fields, so vast that looking at them made him dizzy, frightened at the unendingness. As he got farther from school, the spaces between houses were bigger than the biggest houses themselves. He had grown so unaccustomed to hearing cars that when one drove past, he jumped.”
The Leavers alternates between the third person telling of Deming’s life and the first person story from Polly. Deming, now Daniel grows up an unmoored teenager, unhappy in school, unsure of his relationship with his “parents,” constantly questioning why his mother would abandon him. It’s a sad, achingly told story as he spirals downward, music providing him some solace but not preventing him from dropping out of college and becoming addicted to gambling. His quest for his mother is, of course, about mooring himself once more and he will not rest until he can find out why she left.
It is in Polly’s telling that the book really shines. This is not a story of a sacrificial martyr of a mother who is paralyzed by the ‘loss’ of her child. We endure the hardships that she lives through as a seamstress then her work in a nail salon, hustling, striving and still clinging to her ambition to move up. “I took out another loan to cover fees for nail art training. Intricate designs became my specialty. I could draw palm trees, diamonds and checkerboard patterns…I made more in tips alone than I had earned working at the factory.” Her devotion to her child is obvious and it is only near the end of the book that we find out the circumstances under which she left.
This is a story about love and family, longing and belonging, ambition and aspiration. And while at its core it deals with a heart wrenching situation, the separation of a child from his mother, Ko avoids the sentimentality trap. Yes, Daniel is a lost boy but will finding his mother really fix everything? Polly sacrifices so much yet continues to thrive.
It’s a book that feels authentic, a tale that seems plausible and in Polly, Ko has written a woman full of contradictions who you will continue to think about long after the last page.
BEFORE YOU READ:
Length: 338 pages
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Themes: immigration, family, trans-racial adoption, motherhood
Commitment: A captivating read, illuminating the lives of people who are usually just statistics on the news.
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