The Leavers

Wow, “The Leavers” is a completely heartbreaking story that needs to be read, especially in today’s political climate. Deming/Daniel spends his childhood moving around… in New York, in China with his grandfather, then back to New York to be with his mother. Then one day his mother vanishes, and Deming is given up to foster care and adoption by a white couple.

It’s a heart-wrenching story, especially as the narrative unfolds and we learn the truth about what happened to Deming’s mother—who in his ten year old mind must have abandoned him—and the poverty she has struggled to escape her entire life. The emotional consequences of their separation, despite people trying to care for Deming int eh aftermath, despite food and show more shelter being offered, are so poignantly rendered, and so critical to understand. 5/5 stars.

Please excuse typos/name misspellings. Entered on screen reader. 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 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 show more 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

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 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 show more fully deserves all the attention and awards its receiving. 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 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 show more 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

How do you go through life when you don't know who you are? It's a question Lisa Ko examines in her new novel "The Leavers" that tells the gut-wrenching tale of a boy shifting between two worlds, two families, two languages, and wondering where he fits in.

Deming/Daniel is born in New York to a young Chinese immigrant who has no moorings of her own and struggles to support herself and her child in a factory filled with other women like her, sleeping on the floor of an overcrowded apartment.

Overwhelmed, she sends her one-year- old back to China to live with her father in a rural village where he learns to speak, savor the flavors of traditional China, and play with whatever is at hand. At the age of 5, he returns to America - learning show more another language, culture, and family routine - until his mother disappears. His subsequent placement in the foster system and his adoption by an educated, white family leave him questioning his identity and making some very poor choices along the way.

Told in two voices - Deming/Daniel's and his mother Peilan/Polly's - "The Leavers" opens a window onto the plight of illegal immigrants and the toll it takes on children and parents. Lisa Ko's writing is assured, insightful, and true, bringing the reader on a journey that is at turns perilous, poignant, and infuriating, but ends on a satisfying note.

"The Leavers" won the PEN/Bellwether prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, deservedly so. Thank you to Algonquin Books and LibraryThing for the beautiful pre-publication copy. show less

One of the most powerful and informative sub-genres of fiction is one that focuses on the stories of immigrants to a new country. What and why are they leaving? What are they looking for? Why are they willing to take risks and what are the outcomes? "The Leavers" by Lisa Ko is perhaps the most moving and effective novels on immigration, present-day immigration into the US. Polly Guo emigrates from China to New York, eventually bringing her son Deming with her. When she literally disappears, Deming is taken from his familiar Bronx neighborhood and adopted by a couple in upstate New York. Deming has no explanation for his mother's absence and has to not only navigate his new all-white middle-class world, but figure out where he fits in. show more When at 21 he decides to search for his mother, the narrative shifts to Polly and we learn about the complicated and sometimes soul-crushing background to immigration from China. All of the questions I posed at the start of this review are answered. Ko skillfully provides a voice to both Deming and Polly and provides us with a novel that leaves us deeply moved and so much more aware of what might lie behind the surface when we are aware of individuals who have recently immigrated. . I believe this novel, though being nominated for the National Book Award and winning the PEN / Bellwether Award has not received the widespread readership it deserves. show less

This is a quietly powerful book about identity and acceptance. At first, I struggled a bit to get into this. The pace is fairly slow and I was probably not in the right frame of mind to fully appreciate the depth of this book when I started it. I debated with myself whether I should just DNF, but then felt drawn back into the story and I am truly glad I stuck with it until the end.

I can in all honesty say that for most (if not all) the book, I profoundly disliked Deming/Daniel. He is a difficult character to accept, but at the same time he is a difficult character to relate to, in light of his experiences and profound suffering. Moving along with him, it slowly becomes clearer and clearer that Deming is essentially a lost child, show more suffering the loss of his mother and of his own identity. No matter how many years have passed, he cannot accept his situation, but even more so, he cannot accept this new persona that was imposed on him by his adoptive parents.

Polly's disappearance hangs as a permanent shadow of Deming's life, hurtful as it is incomprehensible. When we readers, are finally made aware of the truth behind it, it is tinted with the quiet pain of those who are used to seeing things go differently from what they had hoped. Through the struggle and long-lasting pain of Polly and Deming, this book provides a striking commentary of modern society, and the human impact of immigration and integration policies.

Extremely delicate in its weaving of the tale and in its social commentary, The Leavers brings to light the reality of what it means to be foreign, to be different in a society that values appearance and homogeneity above all else; it explores the struggle to rebuild your life from scratch without losing sight of where you come from and who you are; and above all else, it doesn't shy away from the pain and suffering of losing those dearest to you and what it means to never lose hope.

I received an e-arc of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. This did not affect my opinion of the book in any way. show less