The Leavers

“If only he had the right clothes, knew the right references he would finally become the person he was meant to be. Like Roland—self-assured, with impeccable taste—but less vain. Deserving of love, blameless.”

Throughout the second half of his childhood in Ridgeborough, Daniel conflates the otherness he feels as a racial and cultural other with his trauma of abandonment. In his eyes, he is responsible for losing his old family and believes that if he lets go of his old identity as Deming Guo in favor of Daniel Wilkinson, he might find the belonging he craves.

“There were other children like him in Minjiang, American born, cared for by their grandparents, with parents they knew by telephone. ‘I’ll send for you,’ the voice would say, but why would he want to live with a voice, leave what he knew for a person he didn’t remember?”

Deming was sent to his grandfather in Minjiang, China, as a baby when Polly can’t afford to keep him amid her mounting debts. This creates a gulf between Deming and his mother that they have to bridge when his grandfather passes away and Deming reluctantly returns to live with her.

“Stopping at a corner, she introduced a new game ‘There could be a Mama a Deming who live here too, another version of us.’ Like a best friend, but better; like a brother, a cleaved self.”

Polly and Deming bond over their imaginative explorations of New York City. In this exploration, Deming sees their doppelgängers as promising belonging and wholeness, something they lack in the city where their relationship and day to day struggles are largely characterized by privation—the lack of money—and cultural alienation.

“One week later, tucked into a double bed sheathed with red flannel, Deming Guo awoke with the crumbs of dialect on his tongue, smudges and smears of dissolving syllables, nouns and verbs washed out to sea.”

After he is taken to Ridgeborough by his white foster parents, Deming feels his identity start slipping away, first through his language. The Wilkinsons urge Deming to speak in English and there are no Chinese speakers around him, much less Fuzhounese speakers. This loss of his native language compounds his isolation.

“So many things could be growing inside him, inside every person. He carried Mama and Leon, Michael and Vivian, the city. Reduced to a series of hairs, a ball of fingernail clippings and one stray tooth. A collection of secret tumors.”

Although Deming finds himself changing into Daniel through his new environment, he feels his past through his old family, and the city itself remains within him. Unseen, the memories of his past, specifically his abandonment, affect his present day. As an adult, he seeks to come to terms with them by returning to the city and reconciling with all of them.

“His mother said she had wanted big things for herself, but then she had him. If he could love Peter and Kay, they could leave, too. They had been waiting for a younger child who would have been easier, whom they had wanted more.”

The loss of Polly prompts Deming to go over his memories of her as he tries to find a reason for her disappearance. He thinks of himself as insufficient to keep his mother. These ideas persist when he overhears Peter and Kay discussing the challenges of adopting him as a school-aged child. He mistakes their doubts on their own insufficiency as parents with his own feelings of inadequacy.

“It was that kind of a mindfuck: to be too visible and invisible at the same time, in the ways it mattered the most.”

In his school, Deming feels like an outsider because his cultural and racial otherness, when not mocked, is ignored. Those around him—be it Kay, Peter, or his friends, Roland or Cody—can’t understand Deming’s background. When he tries to express it to them, they don’t pay attention to him.

“On the second day of school, Deming decided he had been imported from another planet to come to Planet Ridgeborough. He was not aware of the length of his assignment, only that one day he’d be sent home.”

To cope with the trauma of being abandoned, a loss at once of his family, his home, and his culture, Deming creates a fantasy where this is a temporary break. Gradually, as he adapts to his surroundings, he loses this fantasy.

“He would learn how to create music, matching tones to shades to feelings, and translating them to melody.” 

Music becomes a way for Daniel to find his own identity independently from what his families and his peers have imposed on him. While his playing with Roland leads him astray as Daniel finds himself following his friend and not his own inner voice, he eventually breaks from his friend to compose his own music.

“Ridgeborough had made Daniel an expert at juggling selves; he used to see Deming and think himself into Daniel, a slideshow perpetually alternating between the same two slides.” 

At Ridgeborough, Deming becomes “Daniel,” but this identity is an additional self and does not supplant his previous one as Deming. When Daniel returns to New York, that shuttling between Daniel and Deming intensifies. In Fuzhou, Daniel recovers more of his “Deming” identity, but he does not quite feel comfortable there. His return to New York City and his comfort there suggests that Daniel’s identity is comprised of that endless back and forth between “Daniel” and “Deming.”

“My life felt like a confection, something I had once yearned for, but sometimes I still wanted to torch it all over again, change my name again, move to another city again, rent a room in a building where nobody knew me.”

Now in married and with a stable and successful life in Fuzhou after undergoing a horrific detention and deportation after years of struggling to make ends meet in New York City, Polly’s previous restlessness continues unabated. After being in inspired by Deming’s return to New York City, Polly lets go of her old life and starts anew in Hong Kong by the end of the novel.

“If you knew more about me, Deming, maybe you wouldn’t blame me so much, maybe you would understand me more.” 

The sections that Polly narrates in the novel are structured around explaining to Deming who Polly is and what drove her up to the moment where she was separated from Deming. Polly claims that she would have never left Deming had it not been for her being detained and deported.

“But I had walked into a trap, proving my father right. Yi Ba thought anything bad that happened to a woman was her fault. It made me sick.”

Polly highlights the double bind that women find themselves in her rural village. She quit school after being penalized for acting unladylike and left to make her own money in the city, dreaming of independence. Unfortunately, her pregnancy leaves her with dwindling options: she can either get married and remain unhappy and beholden to a husband she doesn’t love or drive her father to bankruptcy due to fines. In both cases, Yi Ba, her father, would make her to blame for her own unhappiness.

“Yi Ba thought that only men could do what they wanted, but he was wrong. I stood with my toes in the ocean, euphoric at how far I had come, and two months later, when I gave birth to you, I would feel accomplished, tougher than any man.” 

In New York City, Polly adjusts the way she thinks of possibility. Her pregnancy, instead of becoming limiting, becomes a new way of reinventing herself. This way of thinking is how Polly justifies her decision to stay with Deming and her family, a decision taken away from her when she is detained. 

“The night had confirmed his failures, and he’d freed himself from having to fight his inability to live up to Peter and Kay’s hopes. He didn’t want to go to Carlough, wasn’t ever going to be the kind of guy Angel respected, some law-school-applying-moral citizen, God, it was great to be himself again.” 

Deming constantly sabotages his relationships with Peter and Kay, as well as with his friends, by letting them pressure him into committing to paths he doesn’t want to take and then letting them down. Instead of forcefully telling Kay and Peter that he has no interest in college, he falls into poker playing and into debt twice. Deming is unhappy failing those around him, but he’s more frightened of trying his best to please them and fail, leading them to leave him.

“Better to be the one who leaves than the one who is left behind.”

Leon, Polly’s boyfriend, tells this to her when they first meet. Leon himself will leave his sister Vivian, her son Michael, and Deming after Polly is detained when they are unable to make ends meet. Apart from Leon, the novel presents this as a central theme through Polly and Deming. While both undergo their own traumas with respect to their separation, Deming’s loss of his family frames the narrative. Deming’s return to New York City after his reconciliation with his mother provides inspiration for Polly to leave again to find herself. 

“I wanted to give you the chances I hadn’t taken for myself. Show you that you didn’t have to settle, stay put.”

Polly’s life in China is marked by her lack of opportunities. In New York City, her debts and language barriers also present difficulties that at times seem unsurmountable to her dreams of independence and possibility. She fantasizes about these possibilities for her son, who would be able to have more mobility, social and otherwise, than she does.

“He had eliminated the possibility of feeling out of place by banishing himself to no place, stoic nights along in his bedroom or flipping through news magazines with Peter and Kay.”

After Daniel returns to Ridgeborough from New York City to please Peter and Kay, he doesn’t like spending time with acquaintances from his school outside of his classes because they make him aware of how alienated he feels. This strikes a contrast with his love of moving across the cities of New York and Fuzhou. 

“Against my will I’d think of your smile ripping open as we rode the subway, of the words that had dripped and skipped so easily on Polly’s tongue, delivered without strain or hassle.”

Polly is taken from her workplace a day after telling Deming that they should move to Florida. She is put in a detention camp in Texas where she struggles with Deming thinking she left him as well as with communicating in English. Her time in the U.S. is marked by her deficiencies with English. Better English would give her opportunities, but in her private life, Polly clings to Fuzhounese with Deming and with her boyfriend Leon.

“He hated that he could see her the way Peter and Kay must be seeing her, a mute Chinese woman with a heavy accent.” 

In taking on his “Daniel” identity, Daniel understands how his mother is being viewed as other by his adoptive parents. They wouldn’t see his mother in her individuality, they’d see her as a stock character. Instead of her being loud, foul-mouthed, and funny, as Daniel sees her, she is simply mute. When she speaks, instead of their attention being drawn to what she is saying, their attention would be drawn to her accent, another mark of how different she is from them. Daniel feels disloyalty in being able to see his mother the way white people see her because it reminds him of the differences between them, as well as the fragmentation in his own identity.

“Everyone had stories they told themselves to get through the days. Like Vivian’s belief that she had helped him, his mother insisting she had looked for him, that she could forget about him because he was okay.”

The worsening economic conditions that Deming’s family faces lead the adult figures to choose paths that break up the family. For Deming, who lives with the reality of being left behind by them, the explanations they give him seem to be simply justifications, fictions that allow them to bear their guilt.

“The water was Minjiang, New York, Fuzhou, but most of all, it was you.” 

For Polly, water, be it the rivers or the ocean, represent possibility and connection. Deming also represents possibility and connection to her. In her narrations, Polly tries to relate how much she loves her son and how she would have never abandoned him by choice. Although her pregnancy initially seemed like a burden, Polly embraces motherhood and views her relationship with Deming as limitless and meaningful.

“He wanted to flee, to safety and also to humiliation, but knew these were good songs, that he was worthy of being heard and he hated, more than anything, not being listened to.”

Deming’s return to the US is a reconciliation, not just with Peter and Kay, but with the music he started making when he moved back to Ridgeborough, bare confessional songs that made him feel more himself. His return to New York City finds him playing those songs before audiences. Even while exposing his true self to others is difficult, Deming feels fulfilled by it. The act of expressing his interiority, which includes his feelings about his dual identity, is a way of asserting his belonging.