The Leavers (National Book Award Finalist): A Novel

3.5 When I wake in the middle of the night and can’t fall back to sleep it will be because I can’t stop thinking about this mom and son, their choices and futures.

I've been trying to think about how to write this review as I got towards the end of the book, and I still don't quite know what I want to say. I was really interested in the topic of the book, both because the main characters are Chinese, and because I was adopted (though I was also adopted by Chinese parents).

I found the clash of cultures that Deming experiences and his feelings of being directionless and unsure of where he belongs extremely interesting and even relatable in a less intense way. I also really liked the descriptions of being a new immigrant in a big city and the struggles of trying to get by as well as the experiences of being deported by ICE. Finally, I thought that the characters of Peter and Kay were really great to show how people can have good intentions, but still be driven by their unexplored (and often unknown/unacknowledged) racist beliefs.

Despite enjoying all those parts of the book, I think I just felt like I could never really connect to any of the characters. For me, it's important to feel invested in the characters and their stories, whether they're good or bad people or in between, and I never got to that point with these characters. I was interested, but it's a book about the connection between mother and son, and I wish we'd gotten more of them together in order to really convince me of that connection.

Also things would just happen really suddenly with no feeling of bridge between then. For example, one moment Deming is saying he would stay with his mother and the next he is living in an apartment in NYC with Michael. Or one moment his mother is married with a nice job and the next she just left everything and moved to Hong Kong. Its not that those actions didn't make sense to have happen, but that there was no connection between those decisions and previous actions and decisions.

Overall though, I found the story and the journey that Deming goes on very poignant, and how finding his birth mother again really helped him with feeling like he isn't going to suddenly be abandoned by his friends and family at any time, grounding him and ultimately bringing him home again and making him whole.

It took me a long time to get into this book, but the last half made it worthwhile. The story of a young Chinese woman and her son, trying to make their way in a complicated world. On the one hand, this story unveils the sinister secrets about US immigration, and on the other, the inner turmoil of coming of age when you don't feel a part of anything, anyplace. The story is told mostly through the voice of Deming/Daniel, but occasionally in the voice of his mother. Both open windows into an experience of the world that is far different from what I have know. For that I am thankful.

Worth reading. It is the story of an undocumented woman and her child from China. One day the woman disappears but her whereabouts are unknown. Her child is eventually adopted by a well meaning white couple. The story explains the disappearance and the ultimate reunification, explores the instability and scars left by the uncertainty of surviving without legal status in the US.

When he is 11 years old, Deming's mother goes to work one day, and never returns. Deming is soon put into foster care and then adopted. We meet Deming again 10 years later, and struggling with an identity crisis. Does he want to try to be the academic his academic adoptive parents want him to be, or does he want to follow his own love of music and try to make it as a musician? Ko is more than a little heavy-handed in making the reader understand that this is something of a stand-in for his mixed feelings about being an American-born Chinese who spent half of his life in a lily-white upstate New York college town.

This character-driven story will appeal both to readers who enjoy books about immigrants, as well as those about characters searching for their own personal identity. Told through the point of view of Deming (in the third person) and his mother (in the first person), the full story of what happened to Deming's mother, both how she came to America and what happened the day she disappeared, is gradually revealed. This is a grim, but ultimately hopeful and redemptive novel that lays out the difficulties of immigration and assimilation without being overly preachy.