{"id":42224,"date":"2017-05-04T10:33:22","date_gmt":"2017-05-04T14:33:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/?p=42224"},"modified":"2017-05-03T17:04:33","modified_gmt":"2017-05-03T21:04:33","slug":"leavers-lisa-ko-christian-science-monitor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/leavers-lisa-ko-christian-science-monitor\/","title":{"rendered":"The Leavers by Lisa Ko [in Christian Science Monitor]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"‘The Leavers,’ inspired by a real story, confronts transracial adoption<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone had stories they told themselves to get through the days,\u201d Deming Guo muses the evening of his 22nd birthday, summing up a lifetime of leaving \u2013 and being left \u2013 that has defined his short life thus far. Deming, also known as Daniel Wilkinson, provides half of the dual narrative of Lisa Ko<\/a>\u2019s achingly insightful, gorgeously redemptive debut novel, The Leavers<\/em>; the other half belongs to Deming\u2019s \u201cMama\u201d \u2013 the only person Deming will ever gift that name \u2013 a woman also multi-monikered as Peilan Guo, Polly Guo, and Polly Lin. Ko cleverly indicates changing, adapting, reclaiming identities by how mother and son use their names. In an uncertain world of ‘what-if\u2019s\u2019 and ‘might\/could\/should-have-been\u2019s,\u2019 the pair will become their own doppelg\u00e4ngers, imagining other lives, searching to live beyond mere survival.<\/p>\n

Born in Manhattan, Deming has had many homes, but never felt at home<\/em>. He arrived Stateside in utero<\/em> when Polly left her Chinese village, desperate for options beyond the tedium of being a factory girl or the boy-next-door\u2019s wife. Life as an illegal Chinatown immigrant \u2013 stifling hours at a sewing machine, sharing a crowded dormitory-style room, constantly calculating how to pay off the $50,000 smuggling fee \u2013 doesn\u2019t leave room for motherhood, forcing Polly to reluctantly send one-year-old Deming to China to be raised by her father.<\/p>\n

Deming returns to New York five years later, and for the five years that follow, Deming and Polly become a family with Polly\u2019s boyfriend Leon, his sister Vivian, and her son Michael. They\u2019re crammed into a one-bedroom Bronx apartment, never have enough money, the adults constantly worry over documentation \u2013 but none of that deters the family from planning, bonding, dreaming. Until Polly disappears.<\/p>\n

Without answers \u2013 or hope \u2013 the made-up family scatters: Leon leaves, Vivian and Michael leave, but not before Vivian leaves Deming in care of the foster care system. At 11, he moves to Ridgeborough, a small town in upstate New York, to live with white, affluent, college professors Kay and Peter Wilkinson; by 12, he\u2019s legally their son, his birth certificate rewritten to erase his connection to Polly. He\u2019s the only Asian American at his new school, friendless until he meets Roland, a mixed-race Latino classmate. \u201cAs long as he didn\u2019t think about his mother, Deming was not that unhappy in Ridgeborough.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ten years later, Daniel returns to Manhattan. He\u2019s left university, in debt, sleeping on Roland\u2019s couch. After a decade apart, Michael finds Daniel via email, and suddenly, Deming has links to his past \u2026 including his never-forgotten Mama.<\/p>\n

In a revelatory essay<\/a> on her website, Ko reveals how Polly was inspired by the story of Xiu Ping Jiang, an undocumented immigrant profiled in The New York Times<\/em><\/a>. That Jiang\u2019s 8-year-old son was caught by immigration officials while entering the US from Canada and later adopted by a Canadian family resonated sharply. Further research revealed comparable stories of children cleaved from their \u201cunfit\u201d immigrant parents and granted to \u201cfit\u201d American parents. Ko channeled further fury at the heinous conditions of the for-profit detention centers where the undocumented are imprisoned for months, even years.<\/p>\n

As the New York-born child of ethnic Chinese parents who were born and raised in the Philippines and then immigrated to the US from there, Ko grew up \u201clegal\u201d in a mostly-white suburb outside NYC. Her parents often reminded her how \u201clucky\u201d she was, \u201cbut lucky<\/em> also felt like a warning \u2013 how precarious status could be.\u201d Ko channels that unsettled anxiety into Deming: a boy who feels “visible and invisible at the same time,\u201d he observes, his bewilderment magnified with each of his displacements.<\/p>\n

In giving Deming\u2019s voice prominence, \u201cI want to decenter the narrative of transracial adoption away from that of the adoptive parents,\u201d Ko explains in an interview<\/a> with Barbara Kingsolver, who established the PEN\/Bellwether Prize<\/a> to \u201cpromote fiction that addresses issues of social justice,\u201d which Leavers<\/em> most recently won<\/a>. \u201cInstead,\u201d Ko continues, \u201cwe need to privilege the voices of adoptees, who are often missing from the conversation or dismissed as being bitter if they\u2019re honest or critical about their experiences.\u201d Ko doesn\u2019t shy away, exposing issues of cultural illiteracy between parent and child, even touching on the high rate of suicide among transracial adoptees.<\/p>\n

Although Ko began writing Leavers<\/em> in 2009, headlines regarding immigrants have hardly changed: round-ups, detention, deportation, separated families \u2013 especially tragic are recent international adoptees deported as adults<\/a> because of legal loopholes to a birth country they left as children. Beyond the desensitizing media coverage, Ko gives faces, (multiple) names, and details to create a riveting story of a remarkable family coming, going, leaving \u2026 all in hopes of someday returning to one another.<\/p>\n

Review<\/strong>: “‘The Leavers,’ inspired by a real story, confronts transracial adoption,” Christian Science Monitor<\/em>, May 2, 2017<\/a><\/p>\n

Readers<\/strong>: Adult<\/p>\n

Published<\/strong>: 2017<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘The Leavers,’ inspired by a real story, confronts transracial adoption \u201cEveryone had stories they told themselves to get through the days,\u201d Deming Guo muses the evening of his 22nd birthday, summing up a lifetime of leaving \u2013 and being left \u2013 that has defined his…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":41959,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,67,21,6,6535],"tags":[82,83,6608,148,22,10,25,7316,7317,13,216,39,44],"class_list":["post-42224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adult-readers","category-chinese","category-chinese-american","category-fiction","category-repost","tag-adoption","tag-assimilation","tag-bookdragon","tag-christian-science-monitor","tag-civil-rights","tag-family","tag-immigration","tag-leavers","tag-lisa-ko","tag-love","tag-mystery","tag-parent-child-relationship","tag-siblings"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Leavers by Lisa Ko [in Christian Science Monitor] - 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