Lisa Ko

Deming is twelve when his mother disappears. He'd been secure and happy, although he knew his mother, an undocumented immigrant had her worries and money was always tight. But in his neighborhood everyone was poor and from someplace else and he had a best friend and a mother whom he adored. Her disappearance and his subsequent adoption by a pair of white university professors is traumatic, even as he tries to fulfill his new role as Daniel Wilkinson.

There's a lot going on in Lisa Ko's debut show more novel, which addresses immigration, integration, adoption, cultural dislocation and growing up as a permanent outsider. At it's heart, though, it's a story about a mother and a son and their love for each other. It's a lovely novel, well-told, that fully deserves all the attention and awards its receiving. show less

I may bump this up to 5 stars, depending on how it sits with me over time. I think this is an important book for us now as Americans - if reading fiction is supposed to make us more empathetic, as the studies say it does, then this book needs to reach people who don't see or understand the urgent need for compassion for undocumented persons. This is a very humanizing story, and it doesn't seek to depict pristine martyrs. Ko created characters that are people, not symbols. They aren't show more perfectly good or perfectly bad - they are three dimensional, and that makes it easier to see ourselves in them.

As an adopted person, this book probably held some special interest for me, even though the circumstances of my adoption could not be more different than Deming's. Adoption is not a topic that I often see depicted in adult literature, and it was interesting to see it explored in this context. show less

Lisa Ko's 2016 PEN/ Bellwether Prize winning novel centers around two narrators, Polly who puts herself in debt for 50,000 dollars to immigrate to the US, and her son, Deming who at first is sent back to China to stay with his grandfather while his mother makes some money and then is returned to live with her at age five in NYC. For five years we read of their existence, living with her boyfriend Leon and his sister Vivian and her son Michael. They scrape by, trying to live a semblance of show more the American dream until one day his mom disappears. The novel then alternates narration as the two tell of the ensuing years and struggles. For Deming, who is eventually adopted by wealthy white parents, his name is changed to Danial, he feels unmoored and isolated in school until he meets a friend, Roland, whose similar love of music bonds them." the real him remained stubbornly out there like a fat cruise ship on the horizon, visible but out of reach, and whenever he got closer it drifted farther away". He is forever a bit angry that his mom left him and it is the mystery of her disappearance that propels the action of the novel. Ko relates in an interview that she first got the idea for the novel from an article she read about a woman held in a detention center whose American son gets adopted by white parents. "Nearly a quarter of those deported are parents of U.S.-born children who remain in the country, so you have all these families that have been permanently fractured."
Highly recommend this novel and look forward to her future work.
Lines:
Deming and his mother loved everything bagels, the sheer balls of it, the New York audacity that a bagel could proclaim to be everything, even if it was only topped with sesame seeds and poppy seeds and salt.

His mother could curse, but the one time he’d let motherfucker bounce out in front of her, loving the way the syllables got meatbally in his mouth, she had slapped his arm and said he was better than that.

You had to hunt for her beauty, might not even catch it at first. There was a sweetness to her mouth, her lips lightly upturned, lending her a look of faint amusement, and her eyebrows arched so her eyes appeared lively, approaching delighted.

Music was a language of its own, and soon it would become his third language, a half-diminished seventh to a major seventh to a minor seventh as pinchy-sweet as flipping between Chinese tones. American English was loose major fifths; Fuzhounese angled sevenths and ninths.

Four shots and Leon was reshaped into the man he had been when I first met him, a prize I had wanted to win, whose attention was sudden, precarious, instead of this man whose aging sometimes took me by surprise, like when he was putting money on his card at the subway station and I noticed how his body was stiffer, his neck thinner, the skin around his throat loosening. show less

"In the city, he had been just another kid. He had never known how exhausting it was to be conspicuous."

I have been sitting on this review for almost two weeks because it is so beautiful. The Leavers by Lisa Ko is the story of Deming, a transracial adoptee who thinks his mother abandoned him when he was eleven. He grows up trapped between two worlds and never reconciles his feelings about his mother being gone. Polly, his mom has her own story and issues she is dealing with and she never show more stopped thinking about her son. An email from his old friend Michael set Deming, now Daniel on a path to possibly finding his mother and reconnecting with his Chinese roots.

The story is told from both perspectives and you get an in depth view of what each of them is going through. The writing really carries this story through the slow start. Both characters have flaws but I was invested in both of their stories until the end. There were points in the story where I wanted to rip the pages because the adoptive parents are so cringey and I know that there are actual people out there that share their beliefs. I found it difficult to garner any empathy for them at all.

I loved this book because I got to see the other side of the story. Media glorifies celebrity transracial adoptions but you never get to hear the stories of the adoptees themselves. This a story that many adoptees will be able to identify with.

The thoughts that stay with me after I finished were:

🌸 The U.S. deems white mothers to be more fit parents than immigrant parents.
🌸 The U.S. immigration policies are racist and continue to separate families.
🌸 Older transracial adoptees are forcibly assimilated and lose their connection with their home country.
🌸 The English only narrative harms more than helps.
🌸 Women still don't have the same economic and educational opportunities as men in many countries.
🌸 Women are expected to be mothers and wives and not have career goals and expectations for themselves.
🌸 Transracial adoptions is another way that the U.S. perpetuates ethnic cleansing and cultural erasure.
🌸 The pathway to citizenship for Blacks and POC is full of impossible red tape.

Bookdragon rating 4.75 🔥 show less