The Leavers

by Lisa Ko

Overview

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. 
 
 
Lisa Ko’s fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2016, Apogee Journal, Narrative, Copper Nickel, the Asian Pacific American Journal, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Writers OMI at Ledig House, the Jerome Foundation, and Blue Mountain Center, among others. She was born in New York City, where she now lives. Visit her at lisa-ko.com.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781616207137
Publisher:	Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Publication date:	05/02/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	42,751
File size:	947 KB

About the Author

Lisa Ko’s fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2016, Apogee Journal, Narrative, Copper Nickel, the Asian Pacific American Journal, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Writers OMI at Ledig House, the Jerome Foundation, and Blue Mountain Center, among others. She was born in New York City, where she now lives. Visit her at lisa-ko.com.

Read an Excerpt

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.
 

Interviews

Lisa Ko and Kaitlyn Greenidge in Conversation

"I'm stubborn as hell," is Lisa Ko's pithy self-description in the "About Me" section of her blog. Herself the first U.S.-born child of Chinese immigrants, Ko, forty-two, drew upon a large percentage of bullheadedness reserves in gestating, writing and distributing The Leavers, her much-discussed first novel, which won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. In May 2017, Ko discussed her plot, her characters, and her process in pithy conversation with Kaitlyn Greenidge (whose own well- wrought debut novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, received similarly enthusiastic critical approbation upon its 2016 publication), before responding to questions from the audience that attended the encounter at the Barnes & Noble branch on Manhattan's East 86th Street. —Miwa Messer, Director, Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers

Kaitlyn Greenidge: Talk about the story that inspired the book.

Lisa Ko: I started writing The Leavers eight very long years ago. It was inspired by an article I'd read in the New York Times about an undocumented immigrant who had been in a detention center in Florida for over two years. What struck me most about her story is that she had a young son she had tried to bring into the U.S., and he'd gotten caught by immigration and adopted by a Canadian family. This really shocked me, and I started finding out about all these other undocumented immigrant parents who had their U.S.-born children taken away from them by the U.S. courts, adopted by mainly white American families while they were being deported or detained. It just seemed to bring up a lot about how we look at immigrant bodies, why do the parents have to go and the kids had to stay — what that says about who should be assimilated and who couldn't.

So I started writing about a character named Holly, who paid fifty grand to get smuggled into the U.S. from China. She has a son named Deming, and one day, when he's eleven years old, she goes to work in New York City and she never comes home. After that, Deming gets adopted by a white family, moves upstate from the Bronx; his name is changed to Daniel Wilkinson, and ten years later he starts to look for his mom. So the book is really about mother and son and what happens to them before and after their separation, and also it's his search for belonging and family at home.

KG: I was struck that this woman, whose real-life story was so horrible, gets to have an afterlife in your novel. That's a wonderful thing that novels can do, different from any other way of writing. Also, as I was reading, I was reminded again and again about how society has decided to classify certain bodies; we seem to think that certain people are allowed the natural benefits of parenthood and other people are not. This book plays with that question a lot.

Can you talk about writing about motherhood in particular, and writing about a mother?

LK: My character, Polly, who is Deming's mom, is sort of ambivalent. It's interesting that she's not a very likable character. I like reading about unlikable women. Why do we have to be likable? We can be human. We can be ambivalent, and full of different complexities. I tried to create as human a character as I could, putting some of my own ambivalence and fear about motherhood, while also thinking about somebody in her position. She's someone who, as a teenager, had the drive to leave this small town in China and make it all the way to New York. She's a bit of a badass and a rebel; it makes sense that would be her character.

KG: It's also about the relationship between a mother and a son, which is tricky to write about — a bond that isn't explored much in fiction.

LK: The book started off with Polly as the main character. But I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that she had this son. That became the compelling story, one I wanted to keep going with, imagining what it was like for the kids in these real-life stories to grow up in adoptive families, knowing that their parents wanted to take them but weren't able to. What was it like for them to grow up in these white communities? What was it like to have that conflicted sense of identity and displacement? So I started writing more about his character, and it grew on me. He's sort of a lost kid. He's searching for belonging and searching for his mom as well, which parallels his search for identity.

KG: What is so palpable when he's young is his fascination with his mother. She's almost kind of a superstar for him.

LK: Yeah, and she was gone for a while, too. She can't take care of him as a single mom, so she sends him back to China to live with his grandfather — which happens frequently with a lot of recent Chinese immigrants. So when she comes back, it's like he's meeting her for the first time.

KG: When you're working on a project that long, it's so helpful to find different communities to work in. What different writing communities did you find when you were working on the book?

LK: I started writing this book in my MFA program at City College. I also wrote it juggling many, many jobs, or during my lunch breaks. I went to residencies and sublet my apartment when I could. I've been part of a very important writing community through VONA, Voices of Our Nations Arts, which is a national writing workshop for writers of color. They've been a big support; we've traded work a lot as well.

KG: How did you start writing?

LK: I started writing stories when I was five years old. I was like a super-weird only child and lived in my head a lot — like I think a lot of writers do. I had a lot of imaginary friends.

KG: When did you first feel that writing was something you could do and wanted to put out into the world?

LK: It took a while to get to that path. It's not like you grow up in an immigrant family being told, "Yeah, you should really write some fiction." That's like, "so your ancestors suffered for you to write a novel and not make any money . . . " I did it on the sly. I took writing classes in college and published a few stories. But I didn't see it as a career. It was something that I did and did and did and did, and kept doing.

KG: What's surprised you most as you've gone through this book publishing process, or book-coming-out-into-the-world process?

LK: It's been super-gratifying and amazing to see people read it and connect with it. That's been beyond my wildest dreams. You write it in your head, alone in your apartment, and then all of a sudden a real human being is reading the words and quoting it back to you.

KG: How did you decide to apply for the PEN/Bellwether Prize?

LK: The PEN/Bellwether Prize was established by Barbara Kingsolver. Every other year it goes to a writer of an unpublished novel that focuses on socially engaged fiction, and it comes with a book deal with Algonquin. An article came out yesterday with a headline that's like, "Lisa Ko finds success after being a massive failure." Not just any failure. Massive failure. One thing that helped me keep going was to stop aiming for acceptances. The psychological trick was to rack up as many rejections as possible and keep sending shit out. You write because you have to — because you're more miserable not doing it than doing it. When I started looking at it that way, that I was more unhappy not writing than I was unhappy writing, it actually helped me. Anyway, the PEN/Bellwether application was due in October, and I needed some more rejections, so I sent them my draft and forgot about it, until Barbara Kingsolver called me six months later.

KG: Does anyone in the audience have questions?

WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: How did you flesh out the novel? Did you know the ending first?

LK: I wrote it many-many-many times. The first chapter changed, like, twenty times. It migrated to the fourteenth chapter. It disappeared. A lot of the process of writing was really trying to figure out what the best way to write was, and just kind of redoing it over and over again until it landed.

WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: How did Polly evolve with every iteration?

LK: She changed a lot. In some of the early drafts, she was overly victimized — all this bad shit happened to her. I was still trying to hold true to this New York Times article. As I stepped away from the parameters of that real person and just used that as this springboard, she began to grow as a character. I wrote another draft where she was a total asshole, terrible and super mean. Then I changed that back, and then it became this story.

WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: It's clear that Daniel is searching for himself but also is searching for his musical identity; he's being forced into different kinds of music and is conflicted with that. How did you decide to also make him a struggling musician?

LK: Some people who read my initial drafts were like, "He needs some good stuff in his life." Because his life really sucks. A writing teacher told me, like, "Nobody wants to read about just suffering all the time." (I was raised Catholic, so that's my thing.) So I gave him friends. I gave him a hobby. I gave him music.

MAN IN AUDIENCE: You mentioned doing a lot of research. What areas did you research? What was that process like?

LK: I always felt conscious that I was writing outside my experience, since I'm not a parent or an immigrant or an adoptee from China. So at the beginning I worried a lot about having to get all that stuff right. I flew to China. I went to Polly's home village to try to get some of the textures and sights for the book. I read a lot of narratives and spoke to people who are trans-racial adoptees and adoptive parents. But at the end of it, you have to let some of that go, because otherwise you become obsessed with getting everything completely correct, like a journalism piece, and you lose some of the story.

WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: Did you find yourself at any point in the writing process having to make choices between elements that relate to you and to some of your readers and perhaps not others?

LK: Someone told me, "This reads like anthropology." I was mad, but after a while I stood back and realized he was right, that part of it read like anthropology." I was obsessed with getting shit right, and it became a little too explain-y. So I had to strip all of that back, and try to stay true to the characters and the story without writing from a place of: Yes, I want to prove myself right; I want to prove that I know stuff about China and explain it to my reader.

MAN IN AUDIENCE: When you were working on the book, did you have any points of inspiration, literature you were looking at

? LK: I wrote the book I wanted to write. At least I hope I did. I was very much inspired by novels that go back and forth in time with a lot of characters, because I love reading books where you see a character change over a number of years. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was big; Americanah was also big in terms of its scope. The novel Caucasia, by Danzy Senna, which also has a young child sort of adventuring on her own, looking for her lost parents, was a great inspiration.

WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: Might you write a sequel, where you follow one of these characters, like get back on the ranch with them?

LK: I guess it would be interesting to see one of them ten or twenty years later. If Daniel was forty, where would he be living? It's sort of a fun game to play with the characters. Would I still like them? What would they be doing?

Editorial Reviews

Lisa Ko's first novel, The Leavers, has already won the PEN/Bellweather Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, an honor it surely deserves for its depiction of the tribulations of undocumented immigrants in the United States. Beyond that, and perhaps even more admirable, it is an exceptionally well written, fully realized work of art portraying the circumstances and inner worlds — the motives and emotional weather — of its two central characters. They are Peilan Guo, a woman who has paid to be smuggled into the U.S. from Fujian Province, China, and her American-born son, Deming.

Restless, ambitious, and bold — and pregnant by a boy from her village — Peilan leaves China, unable to bear the prospect of living out her days in a rural backwater, married to a man with whom she has little in common. She is one of the first women from her village to take this drastic and dangerous step, not the least of its perils being the $47,000 debt she has to repay to loan sharks who fund these ventures. She ends up in New York with no language, no skills, a child on the way, and the pressure of twice-monthly payments to people who do not mess around. Ceaseless effort and determination get Peilan, now called Polly, through her first couple of years, during which she lives in worse-than-dormitory conditions, works in a sweatshop for long hours, and, in time, juggles the baby with all that. Eventually, it becomes impossible to hold a job and keep her child, so she, like many other Chinese women, she sends her son, now a year old, back to China to be raised, in her case, by her widowed father. When, five years later, the old man dies, Peilan arranges for six-year-old Deming to be sent back to the U.S.

The novel, which moves back and forth through time, filling in the lives of mother and son, begins with this ominous sentence: "The day before Deming Guo saw his mother for the last time, she surprised him at school." Deming is eleven, and he and Polly have been living in a cramped, decaying apartment in the Bronx with Polly's lover, Leon, his sister, Vivian, and her son, Michael, who is about Deming's age. The adults labor at jobs legal workers disdain: Polly absorbing the abuse and toxic fumes of a nail salon, her hands eaten by corrosive solvents; Leon, wearing out his body working in a slaughterhouse, lugging around and processing meat carcasses; and Vivian, cleaning apartments and sewing piecework for a pittance.

Today, Deming is hoping his mother won't discover that he has been given detention. All he wants is to be back at the apartment "in front of the television, where, in the safety of a laugh track, he didn't have to worry about letting anyone down." On the way home they argue about Polly's plans to move both of them to Florida — which is to say, away from New York, where he now feels at home. When his mother fails to return from work the next day, he believes it's his fault, that he has, indeed, let her down. Just what happened to Polly is revealed only much later, to both her son and the reader. I will say only that her story, which occupies a good portion of the novel, is one of many shadings and much complexity of character.

After a few months living with Leon, Vivian, and Michael, Deming is uprooted again, adopted by a childless, middle-aged white couple, Peter and Kay Wilkinson, who live in Upstate New York. They both teach at a university and are worthy and well meaning, but perhaps not entirely aware of who Deming is — as neither, increasingly, is he. His confusion is only aggravated by his new parents telling him his name is now Daniel Wilkinson, the change meant to help him fit into a community in which he is the sole Asian.

Throughout the novel, Ko builds on Deming/Daniel's perplexity about his identity, his sense of abandonment, and his futile, self- immolating attempts to appease people. He grows into a young man who knows he is disappointing his adoptive parents through his lack of interest in or aptitude for academic learning: his sporadic attempts to placate them only leave both him and them frustrated. The only thing he is really good at and truly interested in, is music: playing the guitar. But here too – undermined by the anxieties set in train by his early abandonment — he manages to let down another friend.

He becomes addicted to online poker and racks up horrendous debt. Gambling and the mystery of luck and contingency have a special attraction for Deming, for he has, from a young age, been fascinated almost to obsession with the idea of the other lives he might have led had fate dealt a different card at any juncture. A sense of randomness underlies his feeling of uncertain, ungrounded identity: "He could be living in Sunset Park, or in the Bronx, or Florida or some place he'd never heard of. He had imagined his doppelgangers living the lives he hadn't, in different apartments and houses and cities and towns, with different sets of parents, different languages."

All this begins to sound depressing as hell, but Ko is so psychologically penetrating, so acute in her passing observations and deft in the quick views she affords of her characters' inner lives and surroundings, that her skill and empathy give real joy. For one thing, she shows aspects of the world that those who were born to security and material comfort will not even notice. Here, as just one example, is a character who has been used to the crudest form of immigrant life but who has finally settled in affluence: "There was very little sound in our apartment, only the refrigerator hum and other vague whirrings that powered the constant pleasantry of the place, keeping our life steady and moderate."

I don't think it's going to far to reveal that matters improve for Deming — and for his mother — in a believable and satisfying way. There is an element, however, that will leave the reader's blood boiling, and that is Ko's depiction of a detention camp for illegal immigrants in Texas, a place she calls Ardsleyville. This hell-on- earth — of crowded Kevlar tents, foul food, inadequate plumbing, arbitrary, cruel punishments, and almost nonexistent access to medical or legal assistance — is clearly based on Willacy County Correctional Center in Raymondville, Texas, a privately run "tent city" in which almost 3,000 undocumented immigrants were detained behind chain-link fences topped with razor wire. It was closed down in 2015 after a protest by inmates erupted into a riot that destroyed much of the facility. Still, the times being what they are, this place of horror seems most likely to be rebuilt and opened again. Reminding us to be alert to such renewed outrages is just one of the achievements of this fine novel.

Katherine A. Powers reviews books widely and has been a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. She is the editor of Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963.

The Barnes & Noble Review

…Lisa Ko has taken the headlines and reminded us that beyond them lie messy, brave, extraordinary, ordinary lives.

The New York Times Book Review - Gish Jen

★ 02/13/2017
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.)

Publishers Weekly

“Here is imperative reading: a vivid fictional exploration of what it means to belong and what it feels like when you don't . . . Ko gives us an unsparing portrait of the resilience and grit it takes to risk everything to break free of tradition and start over in a foreign land.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine (Favorite Books of 2017)

"[A] dazzling debut . . . Filled with exquisite, heartrending details, Ko’s exploration of the often-brutal immigrant experience in America is a moving tale of family and belonging.”
—People (Book of the Week)
 
“When Deming Guo was 11, his Chinese immigrant mother, Polly, left for work at a nail salon and never returned. In alternating perspectives, this heart-wrenching literary debut tells both of their stories. Grade: A”
—Entertainment Weekly

“Ambitious . . . Lisa Ko has taken the headlines and has reminded us that beyond them lie messy, brave, extraordinary, ordinary lives.”
—New York Times Book Review

“This wrenching and all-too-topical debut novel picks up the life of an 11-year-old American-born boy on the day his mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant, disappears . . . Ko uses the voices of both the boy and his birth mother to tell a story that unfolds in graceful, realistic fashion and defies expectations.”
—Janet Maslin, New York Times

“Lisa Ko's The Leavers is the year's powerful debut you won't want to miss. The Leavers expertly weaves a tale of the conflicts between love and loyalty, personal identity and familial obligation, and the growing divide between freedom and social justice. An affecting novel that details the the gut-wrenching realities facing illegal immigrants and their families in modern America, Lisa Ko's debut is the 2017 fiction release you can't afford to miss.”
—Bustle.com

“An exceptionally well written, fully realized work of art portraying the circumstances and inner worlds — the motives and emotional weather — of its two central characters. Ko is so psychologically penetrating, so acute in her passing observations and deft in the quick views she affords of her characters’ inner lives and surroundings, that her skill and empathy give real joy.”
—Barnes & Noble Review

"The Leavers describes the devastation caused by forced, abrupt and secret detentions that occur daily under our current Immigration Act. The novel weaves from past to present, from immediate abandonment to chronic loss, showing how the unfathomable disappearance of a mother eats into her son's effort to "move forward.” . . . The story soars when Ko writes of immigration detention— a civil detention for violation of a civil law­ that is as callous and brutal as the worst sort of criminal incarceration . . . [The Leavers] lets us feel the knife twist of sweeping government authority wielded without conscience or control. [Ko’s] work gives poignant voice to the fact the U.S. can, and must, write a better immigration system.”
—Ms. Magazine
 
“Consider this book a must-read: They may be fictional, but these characters have a lot to teach us about the difficulties of belonging and the plight of illegal immigrants.”
—Marie Claire
 
“Poignant and timely, this novel is ripe for discussion.”
—Real Simple
 
“One of 2017's most anticipated fiction debuts… The winner of last year's PEN/Bellwether Prize, which recognizes fiction that explores issues of social justice, The Leavers feels as relevant as ever as the future of immigrants in America hangs in the balance.”
—Time.com
 
“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. 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.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
 
“Touching upon themes such as identity, determination, addiction, and loyalty, the author clearly shows readers that she is an emerging writer to watch. 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.”
—Library Journal, starred review
 
“Vividly written and moving, The Leavers is an engrossing story of one young boy struggling to adjust to his new life without his mother and community.”
—Buzzfeed
 
“…a timely touching story…excellent: compelling, well-realized, gritty and complicated.”
—Kansas City Star
 
“…The Leavers is a masterful debut novel that examines borders and belonging, and the universal desire for love.”
—Redbook.com
 
“This excellent book has already won the PEN/Bellwether Award for Socially Engaged Fiction (selected by Barbara Kingsolver). One morning, eleven-year-old Deming Gao's mother is unexpectedly deported to China. Deming is then adopted by a white family and renamed Daniel Wilkerson. But as he grows up, he struggles to reconcile his new life with his former one.”
—Bustle.com
 
“Ko’s debut novel has already won the 2016 Pen/Bellwether Award for Socially Engaged Fiction, a prize created and selected by Barbara Kingsolver. The contest awards a novel “that addresses issues of social justice and the impact of culture and politics on human relationships,” and Ko’s book certainly fits that laudable description.”
—TheMillions.com
 
“An inspiring debut, which focuses on issues of assimilation and the true meaning of home. Ko’s unforgettable narrative voice is a credit to the moving stories of immigration, loss, recovery, and acceptance that feel particularly suited to our times.”
—Nylon Magazine
 
“Lisa Ko's The Leavers, which won the PEN/Bellwether Prize, may be a work of fiction, but the plot twists mirror America’s own urgent and timely political landscape.”
—W Magazine
 
“…gorgeously redemptive… Lisa Ko's debut novel is an achingly beautiful read about immigration, adoption, and the drive to belong. Beyond the desensitizing media coverage, Ko gives faces, (multiple) names, and details to create a riveting story of a remarkable family coming, going, leaving … all in hopes of someday returning to one another.”
—Christian Science Monitor

“If you come away from reading The Leavers with a sense of disconnect, that’s no surprise—disconnectedness is its central theme, its structural and stylistic touchpoint, and the emotional engine driving its main characters . . . The Leavers stands firmly as Lisa Ko’s act of arrival.”
—The Rumpus
 
“A searing novel about a mother and son who are separated by forces beyond their control in New York, a book that promises to challenge our perceptions of immigration, adoption, family and American values.”
—Kveller.com
 
“This timely novel depicts the heart- and spirit-breaking difficulties faced by illegal immigrants with meticulous specificity.”
—Kirkus Reviews
 
“…skillfully written…those who are interested in closely observed, character-driven fiction will want to leave room for The Leavers on their shelves.”
—Booklist
 
“What Ko seeks to do with The Leavers is illuminate the consequence of [deportation] facilities, and of the deportation machine as a whole, on individual lives. Ko’s book arrives at a time when it is most needed; its success will be measured in its ability to move its readership along the continuum between complacency and advocacy.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
 
“…The Leavers…using effective literary techniques and beautiful language – powerfully illustrates the impact that social policies and injustice have on the lives of individuals and families.”
—Bookreporter.com
 
An “assured debut novel…a timely story of immigrant families in America…a thoughtful work about undocumented immigrants and the threats they endure.”
—BookPage
 
"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
 
"Courageous, sensitive, and perfectly of this moment: The Leavers is everything I could hope for in a winner of the Bellwether Prize."
—Barbara Kingsolver
 
“In The Leavers, Lisa Ko has created one of the most courageous mother character's in recent memory. Polly is brash, brave and heartbreaking and her ferocity is marvelous to behold. The Leavers is about the bonds between parents and children and the many pulls of home. It was a book I did not want to end.”
—Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman
 
"A rich and sensitive portrait of lives lived across borders, cultures, and languages. . . one of the most engaging, deeply probing, and beautiful books I have read this year."
—Laila Lalami, author of The Moor’s Account
 
"A moving mother/son story and welcome contribution to immigrant literature.  In writing about Polly and her son Deming, Ko captures one family's unique experience of becoming American while also exposing the loss of status, economic desperation, physical endangerment, and psychological grit of the undocumented worker as well as the alienation, double consciousness, mobility, and comparative access of the first generation."
—Emily Raboteau, author of Searching for Zion
 
“The story’s most heartbreaking disclosures are powerful in their indictment of the unrealistic expectations placed upon struggling families.”
—Foreword Reviews

From the Publisher

★ 03/01/2017
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

Library Journal

09/01/2017
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

School Library Journal

2017-01-23
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 together—Deming 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 care—his 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.

Kirkus Reviews