Polly looks after Deming while living in a cramped room with other undocumented immigrants and working nonstop to pay back the obscene $50,000 in passage fares that she borrowed from a moneylender.
Her subsequent determination to make a life for herself and her son is impressive. Escaping her village of Minjiang as a teenager for the bright lights and lowly working conditions of Funhou, she buys passage to America when she discovers she’s pregnant and is unimpressed when a doctor won’t carry out an abortion: “This clinic in New York with its stupid rules on twenty-four versus twenty-eight. Polly, whose story comes to life in a moving first-person narrative, is an equally complex character. Daniel’s past has resulted in an insecure, selfish young man who rejects his adoptive parents’ affections, consistently lies to those closest to him and steals money from a close friend to feed a gambling addiction. Ko is similar to Franzen in her fearlessness of presenting protagonists who are far from sympathetic at times. The human need to be wanted is at the centre of this beautifully written novel, whose clarity of expression and command of voice invoke the work of a more established author – the immigrant family experience in the writing of Julia Alvarez, and the brutal reality of relationships, particularly parental bonds, in Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. The Leavers unfolds through the eyes of Deming, now Daniel, as he drops out of college and returns to live in New York to ostensibly further his music dreams, but really to find out more about his mother and, in turn, himself. When Polly doesn't return, Deming is put up for adoption and finds himself plucked from his life in the city to live in a small town in upstate New York with two American lecturers, Kay and Peter – his new Mom and Dad. For months he carries on living in a tiny apartment with his mother's boyfriend, Leon, Leon's sister Vivian and her son Michael. Deming Guo is an 11-year-old Bronx native whose mother, Polly, disappears one day without a trace. I decided: I wanted you." At the heart of Lisa Ko's stunning debut novel The Leavers is a mother-son relationship rent apart by the cruel conditions forced upon undocumented immigrants. "I want you to know that you were wanted.
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