Princeton Walk Book Club: The Leavers by Lisa Ko

December 14, 2017
The Leavers by Lisa Ko
Hostess: Michelle
Attendees: Cheryl, Mary Margaret, Amy, Susan, Emily, Pam M, Pam T

Our summary: a book about parenting, good parenting and bad.....
We gave this book a rating of 3.5

Excerpts from the New York Times review:

THE LEAVERS
By Lisa Ko
338 pp. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. $25.95.

Should fiction be relevant or timeless? Should it aim to put a human face on issues of the day? And if so, is that enough? Should it do more?

Lisa Ko’s debut novel, “The Leavers,” brings these perennial questions to mind. Her book centers on a Chinese boy named Deming Guo. Conceived by a strong-willed woman who does not want to have to marry the boy’s father, and who ships off for America only to discover that she cannot abort a 7-month-old fetus here, Deming is first sent back to China to live with his grandfather. When his mother can support him, though, he is reunited with her — formerly Peilan, now Polly Guo. They live in the Bronx with her boyfriend, Leon, as well as Leon’s sister and her son, Michael, a brother-like boy about Deming’s age. Deming is a rambunctious student. Polly, an undocumented worker in a nail salon, works brutally long hours. So, too, does Leon.

Still, their makeshift family is happy until Polly disappears. Has she simply moved to Florida for a better job, as she intended? Deming had insisted he didn’t want to move. But would she really abandon him as a result? Why does she never even call? And why does Leon disappear shortly after that?

Motherless Deming is eventually taken in by a well-meaning couple. Professors in a small, all-white upstate New York community, Kay and Peter give Deming a new name, “Daniel Wilkinson.” They try to get him to pay more attention to his schoolwork and less to the guitar. In moments of frustration they remind him of how much they are doing for him, and how grateful he should be. Then a crisis ensues when, out of the blue, Daniel/Deming hears from Michael. Soon he is headed back to China to solve the mysteries of his life.

Thoroughly researched and ambitious in scope, Ko’s book ably depicts the many worlds Deming’s life encompasses: As he switches cultures and milieus, Ko tackles the school scene, the music scene, the Bronx, and upstate New York, not to say Fuzhou and Beijing. And she draws on our sympathies: It is impossible not to root for a boy so foundationally unmoored by circumstance. Moreover, Deming’s feisty mother is compellingly complicated: Polly Guo has an itch for freedom she cannot ignore. Indeed, the greatest strength of the book lies in its provocative depiction of a modern Chinese woman uninterested in traditional roles of any kind. What she makes of herself, and what we might make of her, are of interest from any number of angles.

It is still heartening to see a novel put a human face on migration, and perhaps in future books, this budding novelist’s true promise will be realized. Meanwhile, Lisa Ko has taken the headlines and reminded us that beyond them lie messy, brave, extraordinary, ordinary lives.