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Summary
FINALIST FOR THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION
Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Entertainment Weekly , the Los Angeles Times , BuzzFeed , Bustle , and Electric Literature
"There was a time I would have called Lisa Ko's novel beautifully written, ambitious, and moving, and all of that is true, but it's more than that now: if you want to understand a forgotten and essential part of the world we live in, The Leavers is required reading." --Ann Patchett, author of Commonwealth
Lisa Ko's powerful debut, The Leavers , is the winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver for a novel that addresses issues of social justice.
One morning, Deming Guo's mother, Polly, an undocumented Chinese immigrant, goes to her job at a nail salon--and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her.
With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left mystified and bereft. Eventually adopted by a pair of well-meaning white professors, Deming is moved from the Bronx to a small town upstate and renamed Daniel Wilkinson. But far from all he's ever known, Daniel struggles to reconcile his adoptive parents' desire that he assimilate with his memories of his mother and the community he left behind.
Told from the perspective of both Daniel--as he grows into a directionless young man--and Polly, Ko's novel gives us one of fiction's most singular mothers. Loving and selfish, determined and frightened, Polly is forced to make one heartwrenching choice after another.
Set in New York and China, The Leavers is a vivid examination of borders and belonging. It's a moving story of how a boy comes into his own when everything he loves is taken away, and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of the past.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Ko's debut is a sweeping examination of family through the eyes of a single mother, a Chinese immigrant, and her U.S.-born son, whose separation haunts and defines their lives. Eleven-year-old Deming's mother, Polly, suddenly disappears from the nail salon where she works, leaving him at the Bronx apartment they share with her boyfriend, Leon, Leon's sister, and her 10-year-old son. Weeks later, Deming is handed over to a "new family"-white suburban college teachers Kay and Peter, who name him Daniel. But it hardly guarantees a storybook ending; Daniel fails in college and struggles to make it as a musician. And then he learns that his missing mother is alive. The narration is then taken over by Polly, who describes her journey to America as an unwed pregnant teenager, and the cramped living arrangements and low-paying jobs that finally take her and Deming to the Bronx. "It was a funny thing, forgiveness," Deming finds. "You could spend years being angry with someone and then realize you no longer feel the same." Ko's stunning tale of love and loyalty-to family, to country-is a fresh and moving look at the immigrant experience in America, and is as timely as ever. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
When Deming is 11, his Chinese American mother vanishes, leaving him with a surrogate family that, no longer able to provide for him, places him with foster parents, two academics who move Deming from New York City to upstate New York and subsequently adopt him. Flash-forward 10 years. Now 21, aimless Deming has flunked out of college, more interested in his music than his studies but always wondering about his mother. How could she have left him? Where is she? Then, after all these years, he learns she has returned to China, and, securing her phone number, he calls her. The action then shifts from his point of view to the first-person voice of his absent mother, telling her side of the story. Will son and mother be reunited? Though obviously skillfully written it's a winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction the book can sometimes be difficult to read, thanks to its bleak subject matter, which, nevertheless, is reflective of today's reality. Those who are interested in closely observed, character-driven fiction will want to leave room for The Leavers on their shelves.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SOMEBODY WITH A LITTLE HAMMER: Essays, by Mary Gaitskill. (Vintage, $16.) In her first collection of nonfiction, Gaitskill, ever prescient, tackles everything from date rape to politics to her own creative process. Gaitskill borrows from Anton Chekhov for the collection's title; in a way, the essays serve to remind "that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws." THE LEAVERS, by Lisa ??. (Algonquin, $15.95.) Ko's novel opens with the disappearance of Deming Guo's mother, Polly, an undocumented Chinese immigrant in the Bronx. Deming is adopted by a wellintentioned white family, but he is soon called back to China to investigate the mysteries of his life. This novel of migration is a story of belonging, home, loss and identity. THE BEST MINDS OF MY GENERATION: A Literary History of the Beats, by Allen Ginsberg. Edited by Bill Morgan, with a foreword by Anne Waldman. (Grove, $20.) Between 1977 and 1994, Ginsberg gave 100 or so lectures about the cultural movement he helped lead. Morgan has condensed these addresses, organizing them around the figures Ginsberg discusses: Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Ginsberg himself. THE BARROWFIELDS, by Phillip Lewis. (Hogarth, $16.) An Appalachian family's saga is at the center of this debut novel. Henry Aster grows up in North Carolina as the son of a brilliant, troubled man, but once he leaves for college his ties to home become ever weaker, and he breaks his promise to remain close to and protect his younger sister. Years later, Henry grapples with the specter of his father's alcoholism and other demons. The tale is ultimately one of a troubled's family redemption, and of the miracle of forgiveness. THE FIRST LOVE STORY: Adam, Eve, and Us, by Bruce Feiler. (Penguin, $17.) A reconsideration of the Genesis story attempts to scrub away its sexist taint, instead casting Eve as a curious and modern woman, and her relationship with Adam as a healthy, dynamic marriage. Our reviewer, Rich Cohen, called the book "the literary equivalent of breathing life into a figure made of clay." FAST: Poems, by Jorie Graham. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $15.99.) Graham, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, explores the erosion of the body, the environment and even the nation, in writing from a time of trauma: Her parents were dying, she was receiving cancer treatment and the country was in tumult. Our reviewer, Adam Fitzgerald, called the collection "an autopsy of self and nation in the face of overwhelming loss."
School Library Journal Review
Ko is the deserving recipient for the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for this socially engaged novel. Raised in rural China, bold Peilan realizes she is pregnant and decides she does not care to be a wife. She knows the best opportunities are in the United States, so she pays a loan shark to be smuggled to New York. Years later, Peilan, now "Polly," and her son, Deming, live in a cramped apartment in the Bronx. For Deming, life is good. But the day Polly doesn't come home, 11-year-old Deming must start a new life. Adopted by a white couple from rural New York, Deming Guo becomes Daniel Wilkinson. In a predominantly white town, Daniel's coming-of-age is difficult. At a low point in his college years, he unexpectedly discovers a link to his mother and embarks on a journey to find her-and, thus, himself again. Ko adroitly moves back and forth in time and between New York and China. The two parallel and sometimes overlapping stories come full circle as Peilan becomes Polly, Deming becomes Daniel, and the two return to their original names. Mastering English becomes an important status symbol to Polly, just as reclaiming his childhood language of Fuzhounese becomes vital to Daniel's own identity. -VERDICT Ko's characters and their experiences will resonate with most readers. This moving work will particularly appeal to students interested in issues such as undocumented immigrants, poverty, cross-racial adoption, and second-generation Americans.-Tara Kehoe, formerly at the New Jersey State Library Talking Book and Braille Center, Trenton © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
A Chinese woman who works in a New York nail salon doesn't come home one day; her young son is raised by well-meaning strangers who cannot heal his broken heart.We meet Bronx fifth-grader Deming Guo on the day his mother disappears without a trace. From there, the story moves both forward and backward, intercutting between the narrative of his bumpy path to adulthood and his mother's testimony. Gradually the picture comes togetherDeming was conceived in China and born in America because his unmarried mother, Peilan, decided she would rather borrow the $50,000 to be smuggled to America than live out her life in her rural village. After her baby is born she tries to hide him underneath her sewing machine at work, but clearly she cannot care for him and work enough to repay the loan shark. She sends him back to China to be raised by her aging father. When Deming is 6, Yi Ba dies, and the boy rejoins his mother, who now has a boyfriend and lives with him; his sister, Vivian; and her son, Michael. After Peilan disappears, Deming is shuffled into foster carehis new parents are a pair of white academics upstate. Ten years later, it is Michael who tracks down a college dropout with a gambling problem named Daniel Wilkinson and sends a message that, if he is Deming Guo, he has information about his mother. The twists and turns continue, with the answers about Peilan's disappearance withheld until the final pages. Daniel's involvement in the alternative music scene is painted in unnecessary detail, but otherwise the specificity of the intertwined stories is the novel's strength. Ko's debut is the winner of the 2016 Pen/Bellwether Prize for Fiction for a novel that addresses issues of social justice, chosen by Barbara Kingsolver. This timely novel depicts the heart- and spirit-breaking difficulties faced by illegal immigrants with meticulous specificity. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, Ko's debut novel brings together the voices of Polly Guo, a manicurist from China, and her young son, Deming, a fifth grader. All are living happily in New York with Polly's boyfriend, Leon; his sister Vivian; and her son Michael, who is like a brother to Deming, until Polly suddenly disappears. Deming is turned over to social services and renamed Daniel Wilkinson by his foster parents, Peter and Kay. When Daniel is later reunited with Michael, the truth about Polly's whereabouts is revealed. What follows is a moving story of Daniel's search for his identity as an abandoned child and young adult in a world where he seeks to find balance as either American, Chinese, or Chinese American. Touching upon themes such as identity, determination, addiction, and loyalty, the author clearly shows readers that she is an emerging writer to watch. VERDICT Ko's writing is strong, and her characters, whether major or minor, are skillfully developed. Readers who enjoy thoughtfully told relationship tales by authors such as Lisa See, Jamie Ford, and Nadia Hashimi will appreciate. [See Prepub Alert, 11/14/16.]-Shirley Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The day before Deming Guo saw his mother for the last time, she surprised him at school. A navy blue hat sat low on her forehead, scarf around her neck like a big brown snake. "What are you waiting for, Kid? It's cold out." He stood in the doorway of PS 33 as she zipped his coat so hard the collar pinched. "Did you get off work early?" It was four thirty, already dark, but she didn't usually leave the nail salon until six. They spoke, as always, in Fuzhounese. "Short shift. Michael said you had to stay late to get help on an assignment." Her eyes narrowed behind her glasses, and he couldn't tell if she bought it or not. Teachers didn't call your mom when you got detention, only gave a form you had to return with a signature, which he forged. Michael, who never got detention, had left after eighth period, and Deming wanted to get back home with him, in front of the television, where, in the safety of a laugh track, he didn't have to worry about letting anyone down. Snow fell like clots of wet laundry. Deming and his mother walked up Jerome Avenue. In the back of a concrete courtyard three older boys were passing a blunt, coats unzipped, wearing neither backpacks nor hats, sweet smoke and slow laughter warming the thin February air. "I don't want you to be like that," she said. "I don't want you to be like me. I didn't even finish eighth grade." What a sweet idea, not finishing eighth grade. He could barely finish fifth. His teachers said it was an issue of focus, of not applying himself. Yet when he tripped Travis Bhopa in math class Deming had been as shocked as Travis was. "I'll come to your school tomorrow," his mother said, "talk to your teacher about that assignment." He kept his arm against his mother's, loved the scratchy sound of their jackets rubbing together. She wasn't one of those TV moms, always hugging their kids or watching them with bemused smiles, but insisted on holding his hand when they crossed a busy street. Inside her gloves her hands were red and scraped, the skin angry and peeling, and every night before she went to sleep she rubbed a thick lotion onto her fingers and winced. Once he asked if it made them hurt less. She said only for a little while, and he wished there was a special lotion that could make new skin grow, a pair of superpower gloves. Short and blocky, she wore loose jeans--never had he seen her in a dress--and her voice was so loud that when she called his name dogs would bark and other kids jerked around. When she saw his last report card he thought her shouting would set off the car alarms four stories below. But her laughter was as loud as her shouting, and there was no better, more gratifying sound than when she slapped her knee and cackled at something silly. She laughed at things that weren't meant to be funny, like TV dramas and the swollen orchestral soundtracks that accompanied them, or, better yet, at things Deming said, like when he nailed the way their neighbor Tommie always went, "Not-bad-not-bad-not-bad" when they passed him in the stairwell, an automatic response to a "Hello-how-are-you" that hadn't yet been issued. Or the time she'd asked, flipping through TV stations, " Dancing with the Stars isn't on?" and he had excavated Michael's old paper mobile of the solar system and waltzed with it through the living room as she clapped. It was almost as good as getting cheered on by his friends. When he had lived in Minjiang with his grandfather, Deming's mother had explored New York by herself. There was a restlessness to her, an inability to be still or settled. She jiggled her legs, bounced her knees, cracked her knuckles, twirled her thumbs. She hated being cooped up in the apartment on a sunny day, paced the rooms from wall to wall to wall, a cigarette dangling from her mouth. "Who wants to go for a walk?" she would say. Her boyfriend Leon would tell her to relax, sit down. "Sit down? We've been sitting all day!" Deming would want to stay on the couch with Michael, but he couldn't say no to her and they'd go out, no family but each other. He would have her to himself, an ambling walk in the park or along the river, making up stories about who lived in the apartments they saw from the outside--a family named Smith, five kids, father dead, mother addicted to bagels, he speculated the day they went to the Upper East Side. "To bagels?" she said. "What flavor bagel?" "Everything bagels," he said, which made her giggle harder, until they were both bent over on Madison Avenue, laughing so hard no sounds were coming out, and his stomach hurt but he couldn't stop laughing, old white people giving them stink eye for stopping in the middle of the sidewalk. 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. A bus lumbered past, spraying slush. The walk sign flashed on. "You know what I did today?" his mother said. "One lady, she had a callus the size of your nose on her heel. I had to scrape all that dead skin off. It took forever. And her tip was shit. You'll never do that, if you're careful." He dreaded this familiar refrain. 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. Now he silently said the word to himself as he walked, one syllable per footstep. "Did you think that when I was growing up, a small girl your age, I thought: hey, one day, I'm going to come all the way to New York so I can pick gao gao out of a stranger's toe? That was not my plan." Always be prepared, she liked to say. Never rely on anyone else to give you things you could get yourself. She despised laziness, softness, people who were weak. She had few friends, but was true to the ones she had. She could hold a fierce grudge, would walk an extra three blocks to another grocery store because, two years ago, a cashier at the one around the corner had smirked at her lousy English. It was lousy, Deming agreed. "Take Leon, for instance. He look okay to you?" "Leon's always okay." "His back's screwed up. His shoulders are busted. Men don't work in nail salons. You don't finish school, you end up cutting meat like Leon, arthritis by the time you're thirty-five." It seemed disloyal to talk like this about Yi Ba Leon, who was so strong he'd do one-arm push-ups for Deming and Michael and their friends, let them punch him in the gut for kicks, though Deming stopped short of punching as hard as he could. "Do it again," Leon would say. "You call that a punch? That's a handshake. Even if Leon wasn't his real father--on this topic, his mother was so tightlipped that all he knew about the man was that he'd never been around--he made Deming proud. If he could grow up to be like any man, he wanted to be like Leon, or the guy who played the saxophone in the subway station, surrounded by people as his fingers danced and his chest heaved and the tunnel filled with flashes of purples and oranges. Oh, to be loved like that! Fordham Road was unusually quiet in the snow. Ice covered the sidewalk in front of an abandoned building, a reddish piece of gum clinging to it like a lonely pepperoni atop a frozen pizza. "This winter is never-ending," Deming's mother said, and they gripped each other's arms for balance as they made their way across the sidewalk. "Don't you want to get out of here, go somewhere warm?" "It's warm at home." In their apartment, if they could just get there, the heat was blasting. Some days they even wore T-shirts inside. His mother scowled. "I was the first girl in my village to go to the provincial capital. I made it all the way to New York. I was supposed to travel the world." "But then." "But then I had you. Then I met Leon. You're my home now." They started up the hill on University Avenue. "We're moving." He stopped in a slush puddle. "What? Where?" "Florida. I got a new job at a restaurant. It's near this Disney World. I'll take you there." She grinned at him like she was expecting a grin back. "Is Yi Ba Leon coming?" She pulled him away from the puddle. "Of course." "What about Michael and Vivian?" "They'll join us later." "When?" "The job starts soon. In a week or two." "A week? I have school." "Since when do you love school so much?" "But I have friends." Travis Bhopa had been calling Michael and Deming cockroaches for months, and the impulse to stick a foot out as he lumbered down the aisle was brilliant, spontaneous, the look on Travis's face one of disbelief, the sound of Travis's body going down an oozy plop. Michael and their friends had high-fived him. Badass, Deming! Detention had been worth it. They stood in front of the bodega. "You're going to go to a good school. The new job is going to pay good money. We'll live in a quiet town." Her voice was a trumpet, her words sharp triangles. Deming remembered the years without her, the silent house on 3 Alley with Yi Gong, and saw a street so quiet he could only hear himself blink. "I'm not going." "I'm your mother. You have to go with me." The bodega door slammed shut. Mrs. Johnson, who lived in their building, walked out with two plastic bags. "You weren't with me when I was in China," he said. "Yi Gong was with you then. I was working so I could save money to have you here. It's different now." He removed his hand from hers. "Different how?" "You'll love Florida. You'll have a big house and your own room." "I don't want my own room. I want Michael there." "You've moved before. It wasn't so hard, was it?" The light had changed, but Mrs. Johnson remained on their side of the street, watching them. University Avenue wasn't Chinatown, where they had lived before moving in with Leon in the Bronx. There were no other Fuzhounese families on their block, and sometimes people looked at them like their language had come out of the drain. Deming answered in English. "I'm not going. Leave me alone." She raised her hand. He jolted back as she lunged forward. Then she hugged him, the snowy front of her jacket brushing against his cheek, his nose pressing into her chest. He could hear her heartbeat through the layers of clothing, thumping and determined, and before he could relax he forced himself to wriggle out of her arms and race up the block, backpack bumping against his spine. She clomped after him in her plastic boots, hooting as she slid across the sidewalk. Excerpted from The Leavers: A Novel by Lisa Ko All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
