Trading China for New York and Back Again with The Leavers
One of the things about life that has always struck me as strange is the fact that we’re prisoners of our own experience. Though we dedicate much of our leisure time to trying to get in other peoples’ heads – watching movies and TV shows about the lives of others, having dinner or drinks with friends to hear their stories, and reading books to get a different perspective – ultimately, we can only see the world through our own eyes. I sit in meetings, in Uber Pools, and in coffee shops every day surrounded by people and have no idea what they’re thinking or going through.
And when you can only guess at someone else’s state of mind, it can be tempting to think that everyone is like you. There’s a limit to our imaginations. Since my life is all about babies, about work, about fruitless attempts to reign in and replace bad habits, it’s easy to picture the world being full of people preoccupied with similar things.
But Lisa Ko’s The Leavers has changed that for me. It’s a novel about Deming Guo, an eleven-year-old who is adopted by a white family and renamed Daniel Wilkinson after his undocumented mother is swept up in an immigration raid and deported. But the story that really haunted me wasn’t his but that of his mother, Polly, who borrowed $50,000 from a loan shark to get to the US only to spend years being slowly crushed beneath the weight of financial and familial obligations. In the few stretches of time when she isn’t working in a nail salon or caring for Deming, she delights in riding the subway to unfamiliar neighborhoods and emerging above ground to discover something new.
Now, when I ride the subway, I no longer look passively upon others, wondering idly whether, like me, they’re going home to a comfortable life of children, emails, and decisions about what to make for dinner. Instead I consider the very real possibility that their lives are like Polly’s – almost untenably demanding and difficult. I can’t stop wondering what situations and stressors lie behind the placid faces of the people I sit across from and stand next to on my way to and from the office each day.
Other members of my book club have been similarly wrenched from their insular existence by this book. We met at Chinese Graffiti, a fusion restaurant that combines Chinese food with gastropub cuisine into bizarre concoctions such as cotton candy pork belly and wok lobster pasta (I chose it as an homage to Deming’s two identities, albeit not a particularly delicious one), and shared stories of how Ko made us newly sensitive to being but a small bit of a big world full of (often sad) stories.
Beyond being moved by Polly, I was also touched by Deming’s actions in the aftermath of her disappearance. When Polly is rounded up by immigration, she’s put in a US detention center for years without the ability to contact her family. And so her son, previously so close to his Mom, is left wondering why she abandoned him, if she’ll return, and whether she ever loved him at all:
“The worse he felt, the more it would make her return. He decided not to eat for a day, which wasn’t hard as Vivian and Leon were always out and dinner was a bag of potato chips, a cup of instant ramen. Now she would have to come home. He fell asleep in school, lightheaded from skipping breakfast. She would take him out for enchiladas but be glad he lost weight because she wouldn’t have to buy him new clothes. She stayed gone. If he cracked an A in geometry, she would come back. He pulled a B-minus on a quiz. She stayed gone. Vivian was right. She’d left and left him, too.”
When months pass without word from Polly, Deming is eventually adopted by two white professors who live in an almost entirely white town upstate –well-meaning but clueless caricatures who are bent on integration and assimilation. This fractured his life into a series of befores and afters – from freedom to structure, from New York City to Ridgeborough, from Fuzhouese to English, from Deming to Daniel:
“Ridgeborough had made Daniel an expert at juggling selves; he used to see Deming and think himself into Daniel, a slideshow perpetually alternating between the same two slides. He wanted Deming to walk out of the building, for the two of them to do that little dance people did when they tried to pass one another on the sidewalk but kept moving in the same direction, over-anticipating the other’s next move.”
“While Deming was growing up in Chinatown and the Bronx, was Daniel hibernating, asleep in Planet Ridgeborough? Or had they grown up together, only parting ways after the city? Daniel had lay dormant in Deming until adolescence, and now Deming was a hairball tumor jammed deep in Daniel’s gut.”
The Leavers is lightly written yet hard to read – full of difficult circumstances, impossible decisions, opportunities missed, and occasions not risen to. Everyone is so human and hurt and fallible that it’s often impossible to imagine a happy ending. And yet, Ko gives us one – an ending that delivers a future for Daniel, freedom for Polly, and a beautiful reconciliation between them. It even made me feel a little more hopeful about what’s happening in the heads and lives of all those people I see on the subway.