The Leavers

Three months later, Daniel has taken a position teaching at the company where his mother works. Polly is pleased and has hopes of him becoming a director someday, but Daniel is unsure. He has adjusted to life in Fuzhou and has made friends with the other Chinese English teachers. For lunch, they go to a restaurant they say is Italian, and Daniel considers Italian American. This leads to a conversation about whether people can be of two different cultures, both Italian and American, a notion that confuses the other teachers.

It is Daniel’s birthday, so Daniel is even more aware of feeling alone, a feeling that intensifies because everyone around him has plans. He’s started to pay Angel back, but she has yet to speak to him. He hasn’t spoken to Roland but read a negative review of Psychic Hearts. Daniel feels at home in Fuzhou, but also conspicuous. Although his relationship with his mother is going well, as he heads home after work, he worries she will have forgotten his birthday and let him down again. Polly, however, has thrown him a surprise party. His friends from home also message Daniel, and Peter and Kay call him. Daniel tells them he’s in China with his birth mother. They seem sad that he’s far away but happy he’s doing well. Polly walks in as he is talking to them. Daniel introduces her, wanting them not to see her as a stereotype, but Polly is unusually quiet. Before his adoptive parents hang up, however, Polly tells them Daniel’s name is Deming.

Later, Daniel thinks of having lied to his mother that he never called Kay “Mom.” He continues being torn. He hadn’t wanted to do what his adoptive parents wanted, and now, he doesn’t want to stay in Fuzhou the way his mother wants him to either. Daniel realizes that she loves him, and that his adoptive parents do as well, but that they’d always been trying “to convince him they were deserving of his love, not the other way around” (322). He goes to sign the visa form his mother provided him.

Four months after Daniel leaves Fuzhou, Polly leaves as well. She heads to Hong Kong to teach at a school in Kowloon, leaving her job, her apartment, and everything she knew and was dependent on, behind. As she reaches her new home through a boat, she thinks of being with Daniel by the Harlem River when he was 10 or 11: “I had found her: Polly Guo. Wherever I went next, I would never let her go again” (326).

In New York, Daniel is playing shows again, this time by himself. The songs he plays are also deeply personal songs he’s written himself. Although Daniel always feels scared exposing himself to that degree, he feels compelled to keep doing it, and it grants him fulfilment. Daniel’s has heard from Angel, who he keeps paying back, and spends time with Roland. For work, Daniel teaches music to affluent middle schoolers from the Upper West Side and to children at a community center in Chinatown. He’d left China after having seen a picture of New York and listening to songs he’d written during the past summer at Ridgeborough. His mother and Leon see him off at the airport.

In the States, Peter and Kay meet him and welcome him back. Daniel finds it difficult to talk about his journey or his mother to them. He feels that the source of his tension with them was that they thought “he needed to be saved” (332). Peter and Kay don’t know the Chinese side of him, and while he has found some peace with them and recognized Ridgeborough was “home, a home” (334), he also knows he has to leave. Daniel returns to New York, his “best home,” and moves in with Michael, visiting Vivian during the weekends. His mother telling him via video chat that one day she will come visit him.