It’s an image that haunts both of them throughout the next decade, as Deming is adopted by a white couple and raised as “American” upstate, and Peilan, also called Polly, settles into a comfortable life back in China, both wondering if that lady or that boy across the way could be the other. Days later, Peilan, undocumented and working under the table at a nail salon for scraps, is deported by immigration agents, having left her son confused and without even a goodbye.
They spy on a Chinese mother and son in the New York streets, and adopt them as their doppelgängers. The train emerges from underground, “tearing straight into the sunlight, and I couldn’t wait to see your face.” That’s a beautiful expression of love that every family should appreciate.Lisa Ko’s The Leavers opens with its central mother-son duo, Peilan and Deming Guo, on a tender rip through the streets and subways through New York.
Midway through the novel, Polly recalls a subway ride when Deming was little. Some of the story’s contrasts, especially between Deming’s birth and adoptive families, are too stark, but The Leavers (winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver) is a thoughtful work about undocumented immigrants and the threats they endure. All of these plans are upended when Michael, who hasn’t seen Daniel since the adoption, tracks him down with information about Polly. His adoptive parents encourage him to enroll in classes at their college, but the city and a music career hold greater appeal. By age 21, Daniel is an indifferent student, an aspiring rock musician and an inveterate gambler. He is adopted by a childless white couple, 40ish professors who live upstate and change Deming’s name to Daniel. After Polly disappears, Deming spends a brief stint in foster care. after his grandfather dies.īy that time, Polly is living with her boyfriend his sister, Vivian and Vivian’s son, Michael. But when Deming is 6, he returns to the U.S.
She soon discovers she can’t care for the boy while working to pay off the debt, so she sends 1-year-old Deming back to China, where her elderly father cares for him. She goes into debt to a loan shark for the money to travel to America, where she has the baby. That event is the catalyst for a timely story of immigrant families in America.Īs a teenager, Polly, born in a poor Chinese province, gets pregnant after a fling with a classmate. In The Leavers, Lisa Ko’s assured debut novel, Deming Guo, an 11-year-old Chinese boy living in New York City, experiences a child’s worst nightmare: His single mother, Polly, an undocumented immigrant, goes to work one day and doesn’t come home.
0 kommentar(er)
