Contemporary Authors

• The Leavers ( novel) Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC), 2017

1. The leavers LCCN 2016043934 Type of material Book Personal name Ko, Lisa, author. Main title The leavers / a novel by Lisa Ko. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Chapel Hill, North Carolina : Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2017. Description 338 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9781616206888 CALL NUMBER PS3611.O135 L43 2017 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER PS3611.O135 L43 2017 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• NBC News - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/leavers-novelist-lisa-ko-found-success-through-massive-failure-n750811

  NEWS MAY 1 2017, 8:38 AM ET
  ‘The Leavers’ Novelist Lisa Ko Found Success Through Massive Failure
  by MELISSA HUNG

  Lisa Ko, the author of "The Leavers," which is scheduled to be released May 2. Bartosl Potocki
  SHARE
  If Lisa Ko hadn’t set out to lose, she wouldn’t have won a prestigious literary prize, leading to the publication of her debut novel, “The Leavers,” on May 2.

  The Brooklyn-based writer had set a goal in 2014 to get 50 rejections a year, she told NBC News. The idea was that the more she put herself out there, the more chances she had of getting her work accepted. It was nearing the end of 2015, and she needed to bump up her rejection numbers. She had been working on a novel for years. It wasn’t quite ready, but on a whim, she sent it to a competition.

  “Whatever, I’ll never win. But I’ll get another rejection,” Ko said of what she was thinking at the time.

  “I was always really conscious of being different on the outside, but I think there was a way that I was able to use that to my advantage in terms of being creative and having fun with it.”
  Months later, when the author Barbara Kingsolver called Ko to tell her that she had had won the 2016 PEN/Bellweather Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, Ko didn’t get the message at first. She was vacationing in the Bahamas without cell phone reception and then accidently left her phone behind. She returned to New York City to find that Kingsolver had been trying to reach her all week. The $25,000 prize is awarded biennially to the author of a previously unpublished novel. It also comes with a book contract.

  “I was in disbelief. My first reaction was maybe she was calling all the people who had lost to tell them they lost," Ko said. "I was super jetlagged and out of it. It didn’t really sink in 'til the next day.”

  Ko, 41, started writing “The Leavers” in the fall of 2009 after she read a story in the New York Times about the detention of Xiu Ping Jiang. Jiang, an undocumented immigrant, had been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as she traveled from New York to Florida to start a job at a Chinese restaurant.

  Deemed a suicide risk, she was kept in detention, often in solitary confinement, for over a year, the Times reported. Her mental state deteriorated. She had tried to bring one of her sons to the United States, but he was caught in Canada, placed in the foster care system, and eventually adopted. Ko also read about other cases where parents had been deported but were not allowed to take their U.S.-born children with them.

  “I just wondered what it said about us as a country and what it says about how Americans view immigrant bodies. Like the idea that these immigrant parents could be deported or seen as unassimilable while the children had to stay,” Ko said.

  “The Leavers” tells the story of Polly, an undocumented Chinese immigrant, who goes to work one day and never comes home. Calls to her phone go unanswered, and no one knows what happened to her.

  Her 11-year-old son Deming is soon adopted by a well-intentioned white family who rename him Daniel. The new parents try to give him an all-American upbringing, but the boy is haunted by his mother’s disappearance. When he is older, he goes looking for her.

  Ko grew up in a New Jersey suburban town that was overwhelmingly white, an upbringing that informed her character Daniel, she said.

  “I was always really conscious of being different on the outside, but I think there was a way that I was able to use that to my advantage in terms of being creative and having fun with it,” Ko said. “It really formed a lot of my early identity and also who I wanted to write about and who I wanted to center in my work.”

  Much of the emotion around Daniel’s experiences growing up Asian in a white town came from Ko’s own memories.

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  Lisa Ko @iamlisako
  I just saw my actual book on the shelves at an actual bookstore.
  8:48 PM - Apr 23, 2017
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  As a five-year-old, Ko started writing stories and keeping a journal. The only child of Chinese immigrants from the Philippines, she was the first in her extended family to be born in the United States.

  “I was always really aware that my family’s history ended with me ’cause I was the only grandchild on one side,” Ko said. “So there was a lot of anxiety about being the receptacle of all of my family’s story and not wanting to forget from a very young age.”

  “I was in disbelief. My first reaction was maybe she was calling all the people who had lost to tell them they lost. I was super jetlagged and out of it. It didn’t really sink in 'til the next day.”
  Ko didn’t show anyone the stories she wrote until high school, when supportive teachers encouraged her. At Wesleyan University, she majored in English and took writing workshops but found them discouraging. She credits spaces specifically for writers of color, like the Asian American Writers Workshop — where she was an intern one summer — and the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation, for giving her role models and a writing community.

  With other writers of color, Ko said, “you don’t have to necessarily explain your characters. … People aren’t going to question, ‘I don’t believe racism happens to Asian Americans.’”

  It took eight-and-a-half years for Ko to write and edit her book. Meanwhile, she juggled all kinds of jobs, from freelancing as an editor to adjunct teaching and full-time office work, writing when she could. Her persistence has paid off. The book launches in Manhattan on May 2, followed by a national book tour in May and June.

  “It takes a lot of extreme stubbornness and failure,” she said. “Like failing over and over again and getting rejected over and over again, and still really believing in the work and wanting to get it done more than wanting to give up.”

• Lisa Ko Home Page - http://lisa-ko.com/about/

  About Me

  lisa ko headshot
  Lisa Ko is the author of The Leavers, a novel which won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2016, The New York Times, Apogee Journal, Narrative, O. Magazine, Copper Nickel, Storychord, One Teen Story, Brooklyn Review, and elsewhere. Lisa has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the MacDowell Colony, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Writers OMI at Ledig House, the Jerome Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, the Van Lier Foundation, Hawthornden Castle, the I-Park Foundation, the Anderson Center, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. Born in Queens and raised in Jersey, she lives in Brooklyn.

  First Person

  a man, woman, and child in the 80s, in the parking lot of an holiday innThe first of my family to be born in the US, I was a good observer and a better spy. My family ran a stand at local flea markets and craft shows, where I learned that inside every piece of so-called junk is the big, beating heart of a secret story. On long Saturday afternoons, as we sold doll clothes and spray-painted wooden teddy bear figurines, I’d listen to my parents talk about the uncle that gambled too much, the friend they called the Boogie King of Flushing, the distant cousin who had a bad marriage and a tragic death. These were stories about people I never saw in the books I’d binge read from the town library, and it’s that younger me, hungry and breathless to see herself on the page, that I write for today.

  1988 school photo of a 12 year old girl with a mullet and a striped shirtGrowing up in the ’80s as one of the only kids of color in a New Jersey suburb was no joke. A lonely only child, I wrote the community I craved into existence, filling our house up with fictional families, writing their letters, sketching their pictures, and scribbling their lives. I wrote my first book, Magenta Goes to College, when I was five years old, naming the title character after my favorite crayon. I was an outsider and a weirdo – in second grade, my favorite book was about the bubonic plague – and I studied everyone around me until I knew them better than they’d ever know me.

  two teenage girls dressed with black nails, capes, chain necklaces, red lipstick, and fangsAll this time, the city beckoned. Just thirty minutes away, it was where we went to buy Chinese groceries, where I’d been born; the place from where family friends would visit, bringing mix tapes and copies of albums. I played music obsessively, rewound and recorded, listened to the staticky alternative radio station and found another identity at the record store, a tribe of cooler weirdos. When I write now I think of squeezing notes out on my laptop keyboard, turning words into rhythm and melody.

  I read all the time, to escape, to dream, but it wasn’t until middle school that I finally found a book with an Asian American protagonist, Bette Bao Lord’s In The Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson, and when I read it I cried at the peculiarity of recognition, yet I was also chilled, like I’d suddenly been implicated, made too visible, and that was dangerous. It wasn’t until college that I read another book by an Asian writer. I started to devour books by writers of color and questioned why all the stories I wrote were about white characters. I began writing about people who looked like me.

  a woman in a gray coat and pink scarf standing outside the black wall of a barI graduated college and moved to New York City, where I worked in book, magazine, and web publishing. I found my people at last, other writers, artists, and activists. I moved to San Francisco for five crazy years, where I worked for a film production company and helped start an Asian American magazine, then back to New York on my thirtieth birthday so I could finally finish a book. It took me ten years.

  Internalized oppression runs deep. When you’re a girl from an immigrant family where financial anxiety is paramount, and your grandparents had third-grade educations, becoming a writer was not encouraged. There were no role models, no path to follow. Who the hell did I think I was? I’d ask myself whenever I tried to write. I should concentrate on my real career, settle down, do what’s expected of me. Stop being such a disappointment.

  But luckily, I’m also stubborn as hell. I got into residencies, published short stories. So what if I wasn’t going to publish a book by thirty, or thirty-five, or even forty? I’d worked too long to give up now (though I thought of giving up all the time). David Mura, one of my teachers at VONA, the life-changing workshop for writers of color, once said: “In order to write the book you want to write, you have to become the person you need to be in order to write that book.” To finish my novel, I had to learn how to value myself, to believe in the importance of my work. I had to give myself permission to be myself.

  a man and a woman, both in hats and glasses and jackets, smiling by the oceanThese days, I live in a crappy Brooklyn apartment with my partner. We cook big meals in a tiny kitchen and grow flowers on the roof. Now I spy on my characters, writing to find out what drives them to make the choices they do – the ones that are irrevocable, that change their lives in unexpected ways.

  a.k.a.

  Triple Scorpio
  Chilipino
  Player of the long game
  Defender of the underdog
  Musical Tourette’s
  Headphone life
  Forever wistful
  Forever anxious
  Chronic potty mouth
  Former librarian
  Recovering night owl

• Hyphen - https://hyphenmagazine.com/blog/2017/05/interview-leavers-author-lisa-ko

  INTERVIEW WITH "THE LEAVERS" AUTHOR LISA KO
  Melissa Hung
  May 28, 2017
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  Lisa Ko
  Shortly after I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from Texas, I attended a meeting about starting a new Asian American magazine. In a San Francisco apartment, seven people sat around a kitchen table, eating pizzas we had made, and discussing what we wanted to see in a magazine for our community. That evening, I met Lisa Ko, who was also a recent Bay Area transplant, from New York. As time went on, the magazine project got a name (Hyphen), I became the editor in chief, Ko signed on as the magazine’s first books editor, and we became friends.
  That was 15 years ago. When Ko moved back to New York, we kept in touch and slept on each other’s couches when visiting the opposite coast. I’ve known that for nearly nine years, she’s been working on a novel, balancing jobs with writing during any time she could find. This month, her highly-anticipated novel, The Leavers, launched. It won the PEN/Bellweather Prize for Fiction, awarded by the author Barbara Kingsolver for a novel that addresses issues of social justice, and has been touted as a must-read on many lists.
  The Leavers tells the story of Polly, an undocumented immigrant, who goes to her job one day at a nail salon and never comes home. Her bereft 11-year-old son Deming is soon adopted by a white couple who renames him Daniel. He grows up to be a directionless young man. Set in New York and China, and told from the perspective of both Daniel and Polly, Ko’s novel explores borders, belonging, and family.
  Ko, the daughter of Philippine nationals of Chinese descent, was born in Queens and raised in a mostly white town in suburban New Jersey. I talked to her about her debut novel and her writing process.
  Your character Deming is adopted by a white family and grows up in a very white town. Reading about his experience made me uncomfortable.
  It’s interesting. I remember being in a workshop and having a white reader say, “But this would never happen. This doesn’t feel believable to me -- that an Asian child would experience this amount of racism nowadays.”
  Wow, what was your reaction?
  I was thinking about the ways that Asian Americans are seen, I guess, by white Americans, and in particular, with regards to transracial adoption. I’m not saying this to criticize or generalize, but it always interested me how it seemed that many white families seemed more open to, say, adopting a child from China, or in particular a Chinese girl, rather than children of other races. What does that say about how Asian Americans are seen, and our proximity to whiteness in this country? How does anti-black racism play into that? Going back to those kinds of comments -- because of the model minority stereotype, or the ways that Asians are seen as honorary whites, even though that’s bullshit -- people don’t seem to believe that Asians experience racism that’s unique to Asian Americans.
  Did you use transracial adoption as a way to explore proximity to whiteness in the novel?
  Part of the impetus of the novel was based on a real story. There were a lot of cases I’d seen in news about eight years ago when I started working on [the novel] that were about undocumented women -- immigrants who had been deported or detained -- and their kids who are U.S.-born and were adopted by American families. … The whole story seemed so improbable and enraging, and so that was what sparked the idea. … There were these cases where the parents were being deported to, say, Central America and wanted to take their children but the U.S. courts were like, “No, they belong here. You’re an unfit parent.” And that seemed really crazy to me. Why couldn’t these parents take their kids with them? So, just this idea of separation of family, and the way that the deportation and adoption industries are linked was something I never thought about before.
  Tell me about the process of working on the book. You worked on it for eight-and-a-half years, and I know you had to make financial sacrifices to make this happen.
  I did many, many jobs while writing this book from adjunct teaching, to running an Airbnb hustle in my apartment, to freelance editing and writing, to working a full time office job and just writing at night or on my days off. All were helpful in different ways, trying to figure out how to balance the amount of time that, say, having a more flexible schedule can give you versus spending that free time stressing out about money. Or having an office gig that requires you to be in the office 40 hours a week, but you don’t have to worry about getting a paycheck or paying your rent or having health insurance. There’s advantages and disadvantages to both.
  How many times was your novel rejected?
  I didn’t send out the novel as a whole, really, until I submitted to the prize. But part of why I submitted it to the prize was I started this goal to get 50 rejections a year. And it was close to the end of the year. I was like, “I need to bump up my rejections.” [laughs] I knew the novel wasn’t totally ready. It felt like it was six months to a year out from where I felt it was ready to be sent out, but I did it on a whim.
  That’s awesome. I’m starting a rejection goal too.
  I never hit 50. But it always works. ’Cause the more you send out, the more you put yourself out there and the more chances there are of you getting stuff accepted.
  The Leavers: A Novel by [Ko, Lisa]
  You wrote stories as a kid. Did you always feel like you were a writer?
  I was definitely always writing since I was five. I spent a lot of time writing stories. I never showed them to anyone until high school. I was really lucky to have one or two supportive teachers who saw something in me and published my stories in the school literary magazine and even sent them out. I won this fiction contest for Sassy magazine sponsored by Always maxi pads! [laughs] There’s a lot of early encouragement on that end. But you know, the path was complicated because there was lot of self doubt and learning that it takes a lot of work. It just doesn’t take talent or the ability to write a nice sentence. It just took a long time in terms of really being able to believe in my own work and my ability to do it, and also just having to figure out how to do it.
  What did you study in college?
  I was an English major. I took nothing but English classes. I took a couple writing workshops. I remember being discouraged by them. I found them difficult. It was mostly white students. … I was an intern for Asian American Writers Workshop when I was 20 one summer in college and that really changed a lot of things for me in terms of seeing working Asian American writers and those gave me my first role models and writing community in a way I didn’t have in my school.
  Let’s talk about that for a second, the importance of having these spaces for writers of color.
  I don’t want to talk about stereotypes, but in particular for me and my family, I didn’t grow up in a family that read the New Yorker. My parents are immigrants and weren’t like, “Yes, Lisa, you should grow up to be a freelance writer and write short stories for a living.” So part of my own self doubt was being, “Is this possible? Is this responsible? Am I letting down my ancestors?” [laughs] So, finding like-minded people is huge, I think, because so much of writing is solitary. It means a lot to find people struggling through the same stuff, or having the same experiences when you don’t normally get to see that. For instance, at VONA (Voices of our Nation Arts Foundation), you start from that ground of having writers of color and Asian American readers and writers centered, rather than having white readers and writers, which was really transformative.
  You know how people say that you have to write every day, even if you just sit down for 30 minutes? Do you find that to be true? I feel like it produces a lot of crap. I don’t know if it’s helpful. I’m just wondering: what works for you?
  That’s a good question. I think everybody’s different and you have to find what works for you. Like, I feel like I’m definitely an over-writer, as in my process is producing a ton of crap and then deleting it. A lot of the bulk of my work is editing for years and years. I have friends who, in an hour, can write one really good sentence. And I can write 10 pages and then delete everything but one sentence. In the end it all kind of comes out to be the same.
  Do you find you have to write very day?
  No, I definitely don’t write every day. I guess it depends on where I am in the process. So, finishing this novel -- that was a lot of editing. Because I’m a very to-do- list, goal-oriented person who thrives on shame [laughs], and who’s motivated by guilt and shame by my Catholic upbringing, I’d set some goal. I want to be finished with this draft by X date. Part of how it got done was really treating it like a job, which is hard when we live in a capitalist society and things that don’t make money aren’t valued. I’m going to need to put aside a few hours a week, whether it’s Saturday morning or Wednesday night or the morning of whatever to do this -- and not to compromise. For me, that was using this app to disable your wireless. Or go to a café if that works.
  I know that music is really important to you. You made a playlist for the book, and music is woven throughout the book. Can you talk about the importance of that to you?
  Knowing that I was different in my hometown, part of reclaiming -- or a way to have identity as empowerment -- was to define myself through music, which was a really big thing back in the ’80s before the Internet. Also, finding solace in what was back then called alternative music and art provided this way out. And also, I think a lot about mixtapes and music as being similar in so many ways to writing. Like those early mixtapes that my friends and I made -- you made them to evoke an emotional reaction, right? I remember being really conscious about what I put in the beginning and what would be track seven and balancing out a fast one and a slow one. That’s sort of what any writer does. You arrange scenes or paragraphs to produce a certain emotion in the reader. There’s sort of similarity in that.
  I still have all my mixtapes.
  Me too.

• Flavorwire - http://flavorwire.com/604893/the-sweetest-debut-lisa-ko-on-adoption-the-wire-and-believing-you-deserve-to-have-the-time-to-write

  The Sweetest Debut: Lisa Ko on Adoption, ‘The Wire,’ and “Believing You Deserve to Have the Time to Write”
  "There's not one right way to be a writer."

  Books | By Sarah Seltzer | May 4, 2017
  Welcome to The Sweetest Debut, a new and regular installment in which we reach out to debut (or near-debut, we’re flexible!) fiction, poetry and nonfiction authors working with presses of all sizes and find out about their pop culture diets, their writing habits, and how they explain their books to different people in their lives.

  This week, we heard from Lisa Ko about her debut novel, The Leavers, winner of the Pen/Bellweather Award for Socially Engaged Fiction. The Leavers examines cultural identity and adoption, deportation and globalization and through the lives of a mother and son who’ve been torn asunder by one of many of America’s xenophobic policies. “What Ko seeks to do with The Leavers is illuminate the consequence of [deportation] facilities, and of the deportation machine as a whole, on individual lives,” writes Louise McCune in the L.A. Review of Books. “She has created two memorable characters with the capacity to spark empathy in audiences inured to a dismaying status quo.” Below, Ko discusses everything from her reasons for writing the book, to the long process of completing it (giving up on endowing Word Docs with finalizing labels), to the other authors whose work guided her.

  What is your elevator pitch to folks in the industry describing your book?

  It’s about a boy named Deming Guo, whose mother Polly, an undocumented Chinese immigrant, mysteriously disappears when he’s 11 years old—after which he gets adopted by a white couple who move him from the Bronx to a small town upstate and rename him Daniel Wilkinson. The novel takes place in New York and China and follows both Deming’s and Polly’s stories, before and after their separation, and what happens when he starts searching for her ten years later. It’s based on real-life stories and draws links between immigration, globalization, and the adoption industry — and it’s full of music, heart, and hustle.

  What you tell your relatives it’s about?

  Mom, I swear the mom character isn’t based on you.

  How long was this project marinating in a draft or in your head before it became a book deal?

  I started writing The Leavers in 2009, when I was seeing all these news articles about undocumented immigrant women who’d had their U.S.-born children taken away from them and adopted by American families. Early, optimistic, and wildly delusional plans were to finish it in two years, then three. Around the four-year mark I finally stopped labeling Word documents with names like “novel-final.doc” and “novel-finalFINAL.doc” and “novel-FORFUCKSSAKEFINAL.doc.”

  It ended up taking seven years. Most of that time was learning how to write a novel, or how not to write a novel. That involved failing over and over, just writing and deleting hundreds of pages. Though the characters and general storyline are the same, there’s very little that remains from those first drafts in the published version.

  In February 2016, I was working on yet another draft that I felt was coming along (this was after realizing a previous draft was doomed and deleting over a year’s worth of work in one terrible afternoon) when I lost my cell phone while on vacation, flew back to New York, then checked my email for the first time in a week to find a message from Barbara Kingsolver’s assistant saying they’d been trying to call me for days, and to please call her office immediately. It was about the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, which I’d submitted The Leavers for on a whim a few months back, and figured I had no chance of winning. When I reached Barbara, she told me that I’d won the award, and with it, a book deal. Overnight—or seven years later, depending on how you want to look at it—everything changed.

  Name a canonical book you think is totally overrated.

  Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

  A book you’ve read more than two times.

  Sigrid Nunez’s The Last of Her Kind

  A book or other piece of art that influenced your writing for this particular project.

  A big part of writing The Leavers was figuring out how to best tell the story, so I sought out books that could offer lessons on storytelling, pacing, and structure. I re-read Beloved and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao several times for those reasons, as well as Danzy Senna’s Caucasia, and returned to the lyricism of Sesshu Foster’s City Terrace Field Manual. Also, I watched every episode of The Wire. Twice.

  What’s the last movie you saw in theaters?

  Get Out. On opening night in a sold-out theater in Brooklyn. I also saw I Am Not Your Negro and a restoration of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust this month. Oh, and Moonlight—three times. So, just celebrating Black cinematic genius.

  Do you listen to music while you’re writing? If so, what kind?

  When drafting, I’ll listen to music from certain times in my life when I want to access a certain emotion, or bass-and surge-heavy songs when I need to drown out the self-doubt in my head. I also make playlists for my characters, and there’s one for The Leavers.

  When editing, music with words make it hard to concentrate, so I usually do silence, or something instrumental, anything from Chopin nocturnes to Coltrane.

  Who is your fashion icon?

  Debbie Harry circa 1977, Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club, and Zadie Smith.

  If you could buy a house anywhere in the world just to write in, where would it be?

  Big Sur or Maui.

  What did you initially want to be when you grew up?

  A writer. Ever since I was five years old (though I misspelled it as “whirter” back then). Or a rock star.

  What freaks you out the most about four years of Trump as US President?

  That a coup is underway and America is becoming an authoritarian state run by rich white supremacists, and that this dictatorship, with all of its violent policies, will not be easily reversed, especially not through electoral politics.

  Do you prefer a buzzing coffee shop or silent library?

  Coffee shop, but only if I have headphones or if no one bothers me or can see my screen.

  Do you write at a desk, bed or couch?

  Mostly at my desk, which is the same desk I’ve had since I was a kid. It’s ergonomically horrible since it’s too small to fit my chair under. And the desk is in a room that my boyfriend also uses as his closet, since we live in a tiny New York apartment without actual closets. Where’s that house in Maui, now?

  Is morning writing or late-night writing your go-to-time?

  I used to be a diehard night owl but then I quit drinking a lot of coffee and alcohol and now my ideal is to get up early in the morning and get straight to writing before the anxiety sets in.

  Do you tend towards writing it all out in one big messy draft and then editing, or perfecting as you go (or something in between)?

  Messy. I’m an over-writer and a binge writer; I write pages and pages of crap and then delete 90 percent of it. It took me years to be okay with this process: vomit out crappy draft in a minute, then obsessively edit for years on end.

  How do you pay the bills, if not solely by your pen and your wit?

  I’ve had so many random writing, editing, and teaching jobs to pay the bills. I worked full-time as a web content specialist in a university marketing department while finishing The Leavers, but now I’m back to freelance writing and editing.

  What is your trick to finding time to write your book while also doing the above?

  Saying no to things. Putting apps on my computer to shut off the internet. Residencies helped a lot, and when I couldn’t get away to do one for a month, I’d make my own mini-residencies, like cat-sitting for friends when they were out of town so I could be in a different apartment for a weekend.

  But honestly, finding time to write was more about getting to the point where I believed I deserved to have time to write. I had to see my writing as important, to see myself and my work as important, so I could prioritize it and be unapologetic when I wanted to be alone and write. It’s still tough.

  I also read interviews with writers who took a long time to write their first books, who were in their 40s, who weren’t wealthy or being financially supported by anyone else. It helped to know that I wasn’t alone, and that there’s not one right way to be a writer.

• Leslie Lindsay - https://leslielindsay.com/2017/07/19/wednesdays-with-writers-lisa-ko-talks-about-her-stunning-debut-the-leavers-what-it-means-to-be-restless-stubborn-independent-how-music-provides-a-sense-of-identity-cultures-reinventi/

  Wednesdays with Writers: Lisa Ko talks about her stunning debut, THE LEAVERS, what it means to be restless & stubborn & independent, how music provides a sense of identity, cultures, reinvention and so much more
  Posted on July 19, 2017 by leslie1218
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  1 Vote

  By Leslie Lindsay

  THE LEAVERS is at first a story of immigration/deportation, social justice, adoption, but it is so much more: it’s about heart, family, culture, and dare I say: required reading.
  Ko_TheLeavers_HC_HR
  It’s hard to believe Lisa Ko’s THE LEAVERS (May 2, Algonquin Books) is a debut. It’s eloquently crafted, well-researched, and absolutely beautifully executed. In fact, Lisa is the latest winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver to a novel that addresses contemporary issues of social justice.

  Timely, topical…and oh, so emotionally rich, it’s really hard to categorize THE LEAVERS–but ultimately, it’s darn good fiction with well-developed, fully dimensional characters; I loved every one of them and for different reasons.

  Deming Guo’s mother, Polly (Peilan), an undocumented Chinese immigrant, fails to come home from work (a nail salon) one day, and he’s left on his own. He’s eleven. (On a personal note, I have 10 and 12 year old daughters–I couldn’t imagine!). He’s in limbo for awhile while family friends decide what’s best for him. Deming is eventually adopted by ‘older’ American (white) professors at a local college, Kay and Peter Wilkinson. They change his name to Daniel. They give him an all-American life. They love him. But Deming/Daniel struggles to accept his new life. What happened to his mother? And why does he feel so out-of-place?

  Told in sections, traversing NYC and China, from the POV of both Deming/Daniel and Peilan/Polly, we learn just what happened to his mother and a bit about why (though it’s still pretty unfair and ambiguous).

  THE LEAVERS was inspired by recent, real-life stories of undocumented immigrant women whose U.S.-born children were taken away from them and adopted by an American family. This story is fiction…but there are so many truths within these pages.holidayinn

  THE LEAVERS is truly a book for everyone: mothers, children, adoptive parents…and most of all, the human spirit. It’s about finding oneself, reinvention, doing what’s right and adhering to expectations.

  I am so honored and touched to chat with Lisa Ko, author of THE LEAVERS. Please join us.

  Leslie Lindsay: Lisa—welcome and oh—what a story! The cultural and emotional challenges of the scope of THE LEAVERS is huge. There’s immigration, deportation, adoption…poverty. This is tough stuff. What propelled you to delve into such prickly subjects?

  Lisa Ko: Thanks! When I first read real-life stories about immigrant mothers being separated from their children, I was furious that this was happening, and that our government has and continues to criminalize immigrants for profit. But to me, the novel is less about tackling prickly subjects and more about simply wanting to write about the world we live in. We can’t separate ourselves from class, race, gender, and politics. The issues that surround Polly and Deming are part of this, but the novel is more about themes like assimilation and culture, identities and survival, and definitions of home and family.

  L.L.: I loved all the characters in THE LEAVERS. But I really connected with Polly/Peilan. What a strong, independent woman! She’s funny, snarky, deep…there’s a lot to her. I guess my question is two-fold: one, in China, women/girls are sort of disregarded and not brought up to be…independent. What do you think might have happened to Peilan/Polly had she stayed in China the entire course of the novel? And how did you connect with her character?

  Lisa Ko: I’d hesitate to generalize about the treatment of girls and women in China—sexism in America is certainly going strong! For Polly, moving to the U.S. allows her to live a life far from her small hometown. In New York City, she can be anonymous, away from the expectations of her family and neighbors, though this comes with a literal and emotional price. I’d like to say that if Polly had stayed in China, she would have found a way to get out of her hometown and still retain her independence. Maybe she’d move to a big city with her son and create a new life there. She’s too stubborn, too restless—and these traits easy for me to connect with her character—to stay in one place for long.

  L.L.: My read of THE LEAVERS is that it is not just a novel about immigration, deportation, adoption…but at the heart, it’s about reinvention. It’s about identity as culture and family and fitting in while also standing out. Did you learn anything new about yourself, or our world as you wrote this story?

  Lisa Ko: Through my research, I learned a lot about immigration, deportation, and adoption—both about individual stories and about larger policies. Questions of belonging and reinvention were things I was exploring throughout. Writing the novel raised more questions than answers, which is why I write fiction.

  L.L.: I’m a bit intrigued about your research into the factory life—not just here in the U.S., but also in China. It sounds positively grueling and of another world. In your acknowledgements, you mention a few books you referenced: FACTORY GIRLS by Leslie T. Chang and SMUGGLED CHINESE by Ko-lin Chin. Can you give a little more insight, however harrowing, into that life?

  41UqjJHGPmL._AC_US218_ 61LqkaaEhoL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_
  Lisa Ko: One thing that stood out for me was how factory work can be both economically and socially empowering for young women, despite of, or in addition to, the grueling conditions. It’s done out of choice as well as out of necessity, and provides a way for rural residents to migrate to urban areas and reinvent themselves. That was something Polly experiences in the book.

  L.L.: There’s this lovely section in THE LEAVERS in which Peilan/Polly is recounting her time away from her son. It’s told in fragments, vignettes with deep imagery: ‘Starry night. Grassy field. Cricket chorus. Clucking chicken. You. […] Glass of water. Cup of tea. Wet kisses. Leon. I tried to relax, hoping for a few hours of sleep before the first bed check. Warm hands. Loud music. You.’ Can you tell, us, in a similar style what was going on in your life as you wrote THE LEAVERS (which I realize spans 8 years)?

  Lisa Ko: Binge writing. Deleting drafts. Binge writing. Deleting drafts. Many jobs and many daydreams.

  L.L.: I have to touch on music. Deming/Daniel strongly connects with the musical world. It’s a place he can let down, express emotion, and sort of lose himself. Can you speak to that, please? How did this aspect of his character develop?

  Lisa Ko: Music has always influenced my writing. I gave Deming music because I needed to bring some joy into his life and give him something that he could hold onto for himself, even in times of chaos. It’s a way that he’s able to form an identity for himself that goes beyond the expectations of his adoptive parents. Language is also a central part of the novel, and music is Deming’s third language, a language of his very own.

  L.L.: It was a pleasure. Thank you, Lisa.

  Lisa Ko: Thank you, Leslie!

  For more information about THE LEAVERS, to connect with Lisa Ko via social media, or to purchase a copy, please see:

  Website
  Facebook
  Twitter: @iamlisako
  Instagram
  Amazon
  Barnes & Noble
  IndieBound
  Powell’s
  Lisa-Ko-Bartosz-Potocki_2MBABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lisa Ko is the author of The Leavers, a novel which won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2016, The New York Times, Apogee Journal, Narrative, O. Magazine, Copper Nickel, Storychord, One Teen Story, Brooklyn Review, and elsewhere. Lisa has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the MacDowell Colony, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Writers OMI at Ledig House, the Jerome Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, the Van Lier Foundation, Hawthornden Castle, the I-Park Foundation, the Anderson Center, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. Born in Queens and raised in Jersey, she lives in Brooklyn.

Spotlight / Lisa Ko
Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal. 142.9 (May 15, 2017): p103.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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In Lisa Ko's The Leavers, an acutely rendered tale of parent and child torn apart, 11-year-old Deming's Chinese immigrant mother, Polly, does not return one day to their Bronx, NY, apartment, and he is doubly abandoned when Vivian, sister of Polly's boyfriend and mother of Deming's best friend Michael, surrenders Deming to the authorities.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Adopted by well-meaning but oblivious white professors, he becomes Daniel Wilkinson, a rebel with a guitar lost in suburbia and anguishing over what happened to his mother. It takes a lot of living for Daniel to realize, "God, it was great to be himself again," a sentiment Polly echoes as she narrates her own jaggedly painful saga in an alternate story line.

Thus Ko's nuanced narrative communicates not just the burdens of the immigrant experience but the important lesson that one must learn--and sometimes fight--to be oneself. As Ko clarified in a phone interview with LJ, those themes fit together seamlessly.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"I was thinking a lot about the meltingpot fantasy, how we melt into culture and everyone is happy," she explains. "That version doesn't give credence to the violent realities of what it means to assimilate into a dominant culture." Ko wanted her characters to be honest with themselves about how they really want to live, and Polly, raised in a society that severely restricts women, could at least use immigration "to empower herself in terms of reinvention, in ways that benefited her and on her terms."

Daniel, meanwhile, is trapped in a system dominated by the idea that "economic privilege and social capital are in the best interest of the child and can serve as a stand-in for the biological family," says Ko of the wealthy, well-educated Wilkinsons. Yet they haven't a clue or, finally, much concern about Daniel's real feelings and can never provide the sense of belonging he had with the family he lost, however straitened their circumstances. For Daniel, family means "the place he can feel most at home," argues Ko, "and in the end he designs his own family with his friends, by choice."

Ko has an excellent ear for dialog, and Daniel is also attuned to the sounds around him, at one point declaring, "The city had been one long song, vivid, endlessly shading, a massive dance mix of bus beats, train drums, and passing stereos." That he misses those sounds shows how much he misses the city and its electric vitality, so unlike the presumably healthy hush of his upstate New York home.

This aural sensitivity explains why he finds solace in music, though of course playing rock guitar is also a "natural fit" for a teenager at odds with his environment, notes Ko. It finally leads free-spirited Daniel back to New York City and a lifestyle that blasts away the aspirations of his bookish adoptive parents.

To tell Daniel's story, Ko drew on the real-life stories of children taken from undocumented immigrant parents, reading memoirs and articles about transracial, transnational adoptees and even traveling to Polly's hometown in China. Though Ko builds suspense by slowly unfolding what happened to Polly, getting the right flow after shifting around scenes over seven years' worth of experimentation, it's no mystery how traumatic her characters' experiences have been.

"I would love for the book to add a little awareness of how immigration policy, even before Trump, ends up permanently fracturing families," says Ko. "In the end, this is the very American story of immigration, identity, and self-definition." And that's a story that concerns us all.

May 2017 List

1 Honeyman, Gail. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. Pamela Dorman: Viking. ISBN 9780735220683. $26; ebk. ISBN 9780735220706. F

2 Moore, Kate. The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women. Sourcebooks. ISBN 9781492649359. $26.99; ebk. ISBN 9781492649366. HIST

See LJ's starred review: ow.ly/9Pcj30aMcPE

3 Lehane, Dennis. Since We Fell. Ecco: HarperCollins. ISBN 9780062129383. $27.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062129406. F

See U's review: ow.ly/jHv830aMcU5

4 KO, Lisa. The Leavers. Algonquin. ISBN 9781616206888. $25.95; ebk. ISBN 9781616207137. F

See LJ's starred review: ow.ly/wRHF30aMcYP

5 Ludwig, Benjamin. Ginny Moon. Park Row: Harlequin. ISBN 9780778330165. $26.99; ebk. ISBN 9781460397961. F

See LJ's starred review: ow.ly/ClpN30aMd5K

6 Sullivan, J. Courtney. Saints for All Occasions. Knopf. ISBN 9780307959577. $26.95; ebk. ISBN 9780307959584. F

See U's review: ow.ly/nsCw30aMdd8

7 Andrews, Nona. White Hot: A Hidden Legacy Novel. Avon. ISBN 9780062289254. pap. 7.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062289261. ROMANTIC SUSPENSE

8 Chancellor, Bryn. Sycamore. Harper. ISBN 9780062661098. $26.99; pap. ISBN 9780062677129. $19.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062661111. F

See U's starred review: ow.ly/899K30beiwb

9 Tyson, Neil deGrasse. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. Norton. ISBN 9780393609394. $18.95; ebk. ISBN 9780393609400. sci

See U's review: U 5/15/17

10 Flynn, Kathleen A. The Jane Austen Project. Harper Perennial. ISBN 9780062651259. pap. $15.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062651266. F

See U's starred review: ow.ly/oGlA30beiSl

The Leavers
Michael Cart
Booklist.
113.14 (Mar. 15, 2017): p19.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Leavers.
By Lisa Ko.
May 2017. 352p. Algonquin, $25.95 (9781616206888).
When Deming is 11, his Chinese American mother vanishes, leaving him with a surrogate family that, no longer able to
provide for him, places him with foster parents, two academics who move Deming from New York City to upstate New
York and subsequently adopt him. Flash-forward 10 years. Now 21, aimless Deming has flunked out of college, more
interested in his music than his studies but always wondering about his mother. How could she have left him? Where is
she? Then, after all these years, he learns she has returned to China, and, securing her phone number, he calls her. The
action then shifts from his point of view to the first-person voice of his absent mother, telling her side of the story. Will
son and mother be reunited? Though obviously skillfully written--it's a winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially
Engaged Fiction-- the book can sometimes be difficult to read, thanks to its bleak subject matter, which, nevertheless, is
reflective of today's reality. Those who are interested in closely observed, character-driven fiction will want to leave
room for The Leavers on their shelves.--Michael Cart
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cart, Michael. "The Leavers." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2017, p. 19. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA490998413&it=r&asid=4ccf7b1a3dd183df1f3b07a150846fcf.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
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Ko, Lisa. The Leavers
Shirley Quan
Library Journal.
142.4 (Mar. 1, 2017): p77.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Ko, Lisa. The Leavers. Algonquin. May 2017.352p. ISBN 9781616206888. $25.95; ebk. ISBN 9781616207137. F
Winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, Ko's debut novel brings together the voices of
Polly Guo, a manicurist from China, and her young son, Deming, a fifth grader. All are living happily in New York with
Polly's boyfriend, Leon; his sister Vivian; and her son Michael, who is like a brother to Deming, until Polly suddenly
disappears. Deming is turned over to social services and renamed Daniel Wilkinson by his foster parents, Peter and
Kay. When Daniel is later reunited with Michael, the truth about Polly's whereabouts is revealed. What follows is a
moving story of Daniel's search for his identity as an abandoned child and young adult in a world where he seeks to
find balance as either American, Chinese, or Chinese American. Touching upon themes such as identity, determination,
addiction, and loyalty, the author clearly shows readers that she is an emerging writer to watch. VERDICT Ko's writing
is strong, and her characters, whether major or minor, are skillfully developed. Readers who enjoy thoughtfully told
relationship tales by authors such as Lisa See, Jamie Ford, and Nadia Hashimi will appreciate. [See Prepub Alert,
11/14/16.]--Shirley Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA
Caption: This family spans centuries & kingdoms; Ko is a keeper; a Cold War history mixed with mystery
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Quan, Shirley. "Ko, Lisa. The Leavers." Library Journal, 1 Mar. 2017, p. 77+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483702091&it=r&asid=eb9db07c3b48c91b93201b1e203c2c14.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A483702091
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The Leavers
Publishers Weekly.
264.7 (Feb. 13, 2017): p46.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Leavers
Lisa Ko. Algonquin, $25.95 (352p) ISBN 978-1-61620-688-8
Ko's debut is a sweeping examination of family through the eyes of a single mother, a Chinese immigrant, and her U.S.-
born son, whose separation haunts and defines their lives. Eleven-year-old Deming's mother, Polly, suddenly disappears
from the nail salon where she works, leaving him at the Bronx apartment they share with her boyfriend, Leon, Leon's
sister, and her 10-year-old son. Weeks later, Deming is handed over to a "new family"--white suburban college teachers
Kay and Peter, who name him Daniel. But it hardly guarantees a storybook ending; Daniel fails in college and struggles
to make it as a musician. And then he learns that his missing mother is alive. The narration is then taken over by Polly,
who describes her journey to America as an unwed pregnant teenager, and the cramped living arrangements and lowpaying
jobs that finally take her and Deming to the Bronx. "It was a funny thing, forgiveness," Deming finds. "You
could spend years being angry with someone and then realize you no longer feel the same." Ko's stunning tale of love
and loyalty--to family, to country--is a fresh and moving look at the immigrant experience in America, and is as timely
as ever. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Leavers." Publishers Weekly, 13 Feb. 2017, p. 46. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482198135&it=r&asid=9c976c5d704b6a754ba3ba0da98767de.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A482198135
10/8/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Ko, Lisa: THE LEAVERS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Ko, Lisa THE LEAVERS Algonquin (Adult Fiction) $25.95 5, 2 ISBN: 978-1-61620-688-8
A Chinese woman who works in a New York nail salon doesn't come home one day; her young son is raised by wellmeaning
strangers who cannot heal his broken heart.We meet Bronx fifth-grader Deming Guo on the day his mother
disappears without a trace. From there, the story moves both forward and backward, intercutting between the narrative
of his bumpy path to adulthood and his mother's testimony. Gradually the picture comes together--Deming was
conceived in China and born in America because his unmarried mother, Peilan, decided she would rather borrow the
$50,000 to be smuggled to America than live out her life in her rural village. After her baby is born she tries to hide him
underneath her sewing machine at work, but clearly she cannot care for him and work enough to repay the loan shark.
She sends him back to China to be raised by her aging father. When Deming is 6, Yi Ba dies, and the boy rejoins his
mother, who now has a boyfriend and lives with him; his sister, Vivian; and her son, Michael. After Peilan disappears,
Deming is shuffled into foster care--his new parents are a pair of white academics upstate. Ten years later, it is Michael
who tracks down a college dropout with a gambling problem named Daniel Wilkinson and sends a message that, if he is
Deming Guo, he has information about his mother. The twists and turns continue, with the answers about Peilan's
disappearance withheld until the final pages. Daniel's involvement in the alternative music scene is painted in
unnecessary detail, but otherwise the specificity of the intertwined stories is the novel's strength. Ko's debut is the
winner of the 2016 Pen/Bellwether Prize for Fiction for a novel that addresses issues of social justice, chosen by
Barbara Kingsolver. This timely novel depicts the heart- and spirit-breaking difficulties faced by illegal immigrants
with meticulous specificity.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Ko, Lisa: THE LEAVERS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479234670&it=r&asid=d4a190595943ab20bcdb17476f7ea6d0.
Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479234670

'The Leavers,' inspired by a real story, confronts transracial adoption
Terry Hong
The Christian Science Monitor. (May 2, 2017): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
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Byline: Terry Hong

"Everyone had stories they told themselves to get through the days," Deming Guo muses the evening of his 22nd birthday, summing up a lifetime of leaving - and being left - that has defined his short life thus far. Deming, also known as Daniel Wilkinson, provides half of the dual narrative of Lisa Ko's achingly insightful, gorgeously redemptive debut novel, The Leavers; the other half belongs to Deming's "Mama" - the only person Deming will ever gift that name - a woman also multi-monikered as Peilan Guo, Polly Guo, and Polly Lin. Ko cleverly indicates changing, adapting, reclaiming identities by how mother and son use their names. In an uncertain world of "what-if's" and "might/could/should-have-been's," the pair will become their own doppelgangers, imagining other lives, searching to live beyond mere survival.

Born in Manhattan, Deming has had many homes, but never felt at home. He arrived Stateside in utero when Polly left her Chinese village, desperate for options beyond the tedium of being a factory girl or the boy-next-door's wife. Life as an illegal Chinatown immigrant - stifling hours at a sewing machine, sharing a crowded dormitory-style room, constantly calculating how to pay off the $50,000 smuggling fee - doesn't leave room for motherhood, forcing Polly to reluctantly send one-year-old Deming to China to be raised by her father.

Deming returns to New York five years later, and for the five years that follow, Deming and Polly become a family with Polly's boyfriend Leon, his sister Vivian, and her son Michael. They're crammed into a one-bedroom Bronx apartment, never have enough money, the adults constantly worry over documentation - but none of that deters the family from planning, bonding, dreaming. Until Polly disappears.

Without answers - or hope - the made-up family scatters: Leon leaves, Vivian and Michael leave, but not before Vivian leaves Deming in care of the foster care system. At 11, he moves to Ridgeborough, a small town in upstate New York, to live with white, affluent, college professors Kay and Peter Wilkinson; by 12, he's legally their son, his birth certificate rewritten to erase his connection to Polly. He's the only Asian American at his new school, until he meets Roland, a mixed-race Latino classmate. "As long as he didn't think about his mother, Deming was not that unhappy in Ridgeborough."

Ten years later, Daniel returns to Manhattan. He's left university, in debt, sleeping on Roland's couch. After a decade apart, Michael finds Daniel via email, and suddenly, Deming has links to his past ... including his never-forgotten Mama.

In a revelatory essay on her website, Ko reveals how Polly was inspired by the story of Xiu Ping Jiang, an undocumented immigrant profiled in The New York Times. That Jiang's 8-year-old son was caught by immigration officials while entering the US from Canada and later adopted by a Canadian family resonated sharply. Further research revealed comparable stories of children cleaved from their "unfit" immigrant parents and granted to "fit" American parents. Ko channeled further fury at the heinous conditions of the for-profit detention centers where the undocumented are imprisoned for months, even years.

As the New York-born child of ethnic Chinese parents who were born and raised in from the Philippines and then immigrated to the US from there, Ko grew up "legal" in a mostly-white suburb outside NYC. Her parents often reminded her how "lucky" she was, "but lucky also felt like a warning - how precarious status could be." Ko channels that unsettled anxiety into Deming: a boy who feels "visible and invisible at the same time," he observes, his bewilderment magnified with each of his displacements.

In giving Deming's voice prominence, "I want to decenter the narrative of transracial adoption away from that of the adoptive parents," Ko explains in an interview with Barbara Kingsolver, who established the PEN/Bellwether Prize to "promote fiction that addresses issues of social justice," which "Leavers" most recently won. "Instead," Ko continues, "we need to privilege the voices of adoptees, who are often missing from the conversation or dismissed as being bitter if they're honest or critical about their experiences." Ko doesn't shy away, exposing issues of cultural illiteracy between parent and child, even touching on the high rate of suicide among transracial adoptees.

Although Ko began writing "Leavers" in 2009, headlines regarding immigrants have hardly changed: round-ups, detention, deportation, separated families - especially tragic are recent international adoptees deported as adults to a birth country they left as children because of legal loopholes. Beyond the desensitizing media coverage, Ko gives faces, (multiple) names, and details to create a riveting story of a remarkable family coming, going, leaving ... all in hopes of someday returning to one another.

Terry Hong writes BookDragon, a book blog for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center.

Hoffert, Barbara. "Spotlight / Lisa Ko." Library Journal, 15 May 2017, p. 103. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491284019&it=r&asid=42fc2cd2a0c3dcb2ce8e1ad9243d6d68. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017. Cart, Michael. "The Leavers." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2017, p. 19. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA490998413&it=r. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017. Quan, Shirley. "Ko, Lisa. The Leavers." Library Journal, 1 Mar. 2017, p. 77+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483702091&it=r. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017. "The Leavers." Publishers Weekly, 13 Feb. 2017, p. 46. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482198135&it=r. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017. "Ko, Lisa: THE LEAVERS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479234670&it=r. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017. Hong, Terry. "'The Leavers,' inspired by a real story, confronts transracial adoption." Christian Science Monitor, 2 May 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491025349&it=r&asid=29f8104176d5c82131bcf6e6758d159a. Accessed 8 Oct. 2017.

• The Atlantic
  https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/05/lisa-ko-the-leavers-book-review/526179/
  Word count: 1278

  The Leavers Is a Wrenching Tale of Parenthood
  Lisa Ko’s novel, about the disappearance of an undocumented mother, places an imperfect victim within a cruel system.

  AMY WEISS-MEYER MAY 14, 2017

  “Our immigration system is broken,” Barack Obama said in November 2014. “And everybody knows it.” His administration would henceforth, he announced, focus its enforcement efforts on “felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids.” When the Trump administration triggered a series of raids to round up undocumented immigrants two years and some months later, the “not families” promise was gone.

  For topicality, Lisa Ko’s novel The Leavers, about an undocumented mother who suddenly disappears and the young American-born son she leaves behind, could hardly be better timed. The political resonance of The Leavers is no coincidence; Ko got the idea for her affecting debut from a 2009 New York Times article about an undocumented immigrant from Fuzhou, China, who spent a year and a half in detention (much of it solitary) after being arrested at a Greyhound station in Florida on her way to a new job. That woman’s story inspired the character of Polly Guo, the mother in Ko’s book; her son, also mentioned in the article, yielded Deming, Polly’s 11-year-old.

  These days, it’s difficult to imagine a real-life Deming who is not, by age 11, excruciatingly aware of the perils of having his sole parent be a poor immigrant of ambiguous legal status. But Ko has made the notable choice to render Deming almost totally ignorant of those perils. When Polly fails to come home from work one day, he’s told she’s “visiting friends,” and though he knows “she had no friends to visit,” the possibility of her absence being immigration-related never occurs to him. He worries vaguely that “she’s in danger,” but envisions a scenario in which “she’d been the victim of a crime, like on CSI, and maybe she was dead” rather than wondering if perhaps she’s being punished for a crime instead. Knowing Polly had fantasized about taking a job in Florida, Deming concludes that “she’d left for Florida and left him, too.”

  Readers are, like Deming, propelled forward in search of Polly, the cause of whose vanishing remains a mystery (unless you’ve read the back cover). We pick up clues along the way about her turbulent past, her treacherous emigration from Fuzhou, her hopes for the future, and her hasty and unexplained departure from the life in New York she’d worked so tirelessly to build. Intertwining two familiar narratives—the struggling immigrant saga and the lost-child tale—Ko homes in on the latter. Deming’s perspective is in the foreground as he weathers the trauma of relocating to a small upstate town and rebuilding his life as “Daniel,” the foster son of a well-meaning, if clueless, white couple.

  In focusing on a bewildered young victim, The Leavers follows a convention of the protest novel genre; Ko dramatizes the personal—a family torn apart—in order to draw attention to a structural social problem. And Deming’s utter ignorance of that social problem looks like an inspired way around the sentimentality and thudding moralism that haunt the genre. Deming’s side of the story could easily have been dominated by a heavy-handed sense of despair about the immigration system’s injustices. Instead, in his mind, he’s a child who has lost a parent. Politics aside, Ko implies, that’s all that should matter.

  Polly’s simultaneous guilt and relief reveal her life as one in which choice and necessity tend to blur.
  Somehow, though, Ko’s choice doesn’t quite rescue her young character from the genre’s signature pitfalls. Her evocations of Deming’s plight frequently swerve into freighted cliché: “He couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t right.” “He had lost so much, and he was lost.” Symbols for the lingering pain of Deming’s displacement abound. The twenty-something Daniel spends all his money on a poker game, high on a “savage euphoria” that defies his competitors’ expectations as the losses mount. After a performance with his band, he slips out of the venue. “It felt good,” Ko writes, “being the one making the excuse to get away.” Of course Deming’s pain is profound and real, not least because of his nagging sense that he’s different from other adopted kids—that somewhere along the way, in his conscious memory, he went from being wanted and cared for to utterly cast aside. Yet lacking the context for his own story that readers eventually glean from the portions of the book told from Polly’s perspective, Deming becomes more tragic vehicle than nuanced portrait.

  You might expect the same would be true of Polly, Deming’s ambitious and fiercely loving mother—and the one character in the book who sees the inhumane bowels of the American immigration system firsthand. Instead, it’s Polly who steals the show in this book. Though she’s rarely in control, Polly isn’t helpless either as she navigates an existence that confronts her with impossible choices. And she certainly doesn’t fit the profile of the idealized, nurturing mother, the selfless immigrant woman who doesn’t mind doing backbreaking work if it means a better life for her son. Polly is driven by dreams and demands of her own.

  Deming, Ko makes clear, was never part of Polly’s plan. Her emigration from China was an attempt to flee marriage to his father, and she’d hoped to lose her baby—by miscarriage or abortion—along the way. His birth did not put her ambivalence about motherhood to rest. In one scene, when Deming is a baby, Polly reaches a breaking point. “Fast now,” she recalls,

  before I could change my mind, looking around to make sure no one could see me, I set the bag on the pavement under the bench and lowered you inside. The bag was taller than you, its sides a stiff, insulated plastic. When I got up I was lighter, relieved.

  I ran.
  She returns, of course, and finds Deming still inside the bag. She sends him to live with her father in China, then saves money to bring him back to New York when he’s old enough to go to school. She cares deeply about her son. But Polly’s simultaneous guilt and relief, skillfully portrayed by Ko, reveal her life as one in which choice and necessity tend to blur. In a very real way, Polly is a leaver. She runs. That quality enabled a village girl to “[make] it all the way to New York”; it enables her, later in the book when she has returned to China, to not go back and find a grown-up Deming when she has the chance.

  In the character of Polly, Ko has pushed back against James Baldwin’s famous pronouncement that “the failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power.” This is not a novel about a woman who did everything right, only to be punished at the hands of a cruel system. That system is cruel, and its victim is imperfect.

  Ko’s compelling book is about a woman who has done lots of things wrong, and lots of things right, and has mostly lived as best she could.

• Washington Independent Review of Books
  http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/index.php/bookreview/the-leavers-a-novel
  Word count: 905

  The Leavers: A Novel
  By Lisa Ko Algonquin Books 352 pp.
  Reviewed by Alice Stephens
  May 22, 2017
  In this tale of immigrants and adoptees, a mother and her son are reunited after a decade of living apart.

  Deming Guo has a good life. Though he lives in a crowded apartment — five people crammed into a one-bedroom in the Bronx — and the adults in his life sometimes leave him home without adult supervision while working long shifts at physically taxing low-wage jobs, he is a carefree fifth-grader who has the complete love and support of his Chinese mother, Polly.

  But one day, Polly does not return from work and, within a year, Deming has become Daniel Wilkerson, the adopted son of Peter and Kay, white professors at a liberal arts college in Upstate New York.

  Alternating between the point of view of Peilan/Polly and Deming/Daniel, Lisa Ko’s debut novel and winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize, The Leavers, tells the story of an undocumented immigrant and her American-born son, whose lives are upended by the vagaries of America’s cruel immigration policies.

  After Polly’s disappearance, her roommates try to look after Deming, but with no money and no word from his mother, they eventually give him over to the state, which quickly finds him a “forever home.”

  As one of the very few minorities in his new hometown, Daniel must deal with issues of abandonment, alienation, and subtle racism. In college, he develops a nasty online-gambling habit that causes him to flunk out of school, lose a good friend, and relinquish what little self-confidence he had. Unmoored, he moves to New York City to break into the music business, but his self-loathing keeps on getting in the way.

  Meanwhile, 10 years after disappearing from Deming’s life, Polly resides in Fuzhou, China. Married to a successful businessman, she is a top executive at an English-language school, with a glamorous life of travel, sumptuous banquets, and abundant material comfort. How did she get there? What happened in the decade since Deming last saw her?

  The chapters toggle back and forth between Daniel’s story and Polly’s, which is the more compelling narrative. She tells of her hardscrabble, rural childhood in a China emerging into capitalism, her impregnation by a man she does not wish to marry, her decision to flee to America, and the perils and sacrifices she must endure as an undocumented worker.

  Ko poignantly captures the dual identities inherent in both the immigrant and adoptee experiences. Upon her arrival in America, Peilan becomes Polly. “So it was Polly, not Peilan, who was doing thirteen-hour shifts in a garment factory, the same work Peilan had done in China except for eight times more money, and it was Polly who paid too much rent for a sleeping bag on the floor.”

  Daniel wonders where Daniel had been when he was Deming, and where Deming is now that he is Daniel, concluding, “Daniel had lay dormant in Deming until adolescence, and now Deming was a hairball tumor jammed deep in Daniel’s gut.”

  Every adoptee and immigrant imagines the alternative life they could have had if they had been raised by their birth mother or been adopted into another family, or had stayed in their country of origin or immigrated to a different country. One’s fate is not preordained, but ruled by chance and circumstance, and every life story is but one incident away from an alternative narrative.

  Before they are separated, Deming and Polly play a game of doppelgängers, picking out people who look just like them, “another version of us…like a best friend but better; like a brother, a cleaved self.” Daniel goes to the apartment he once lived in with his mother, hoping to catch a glimpse of Deming and Polly going about their old lives.

  Ko’s prose is captivating and vivid, but the story begins to sag under the accretion of minutely observed details and overloaded plot twists, many of which seem contrived and not particularly believable. The plot feels over-workshopped, as if the author’s vision became smudged with the fingerprints of too many well-meaning readers naïve about contemporary immigration (immigrants do not get only one phone call during their entire detention, for example) and adoption (it would take a lot longer than a year for a child to be declared abandoned by his parents and then formally adopted) procedures.

  The crescendo to the climax swells too loud and too long, and the story is unable to sustain the suspense. While Polly’s first-person narrative is compelling, Daniel’s story is told in the third-person and is not as vibrant or convincing, resulting in a portrait of a transracial adoptee that is disappointingly clichéd, right down to the clueless white parents who berate him for his ingratitude.

  Readers, however, are rewarded with a powerful ending that avoids sappy statements about the mystical connection between mothers and children and the meaning of home. Instead, The Leavers makes it refreshingly clear that family is not a matter of biological destiny but of human connection, and home is wherever you are.

  Alice Stephens’ column, Alice in Wordland, appears monthly in the Independent.

• BookPage
  https://bookpage.com/reviews/21291-lisa-ko-leavers
  Word count: 365

  Web Exclusive – May 02, 2017

  THE LEAVERS
  So far from home
  BookPage review by Michael Magras

  In The Leavers, Lisa Ko’s assured debut novel, Deming Guo, an 11-year-old Chinese boy living in New York City, experiences a child’s worst nightmare: His single mother, Polly, an undocumented immigrant, goes to work one day and doesn’t come home. That event is the catalyst for a timely story of immigrant families in America.

  As a teenager, Polly, born in a poor Chinese province, gets pregnant after a fling with a classmate. She goes into debt to a loan shark for the money to travel to America, where she has the baby. She soon discovers she can’t care for the boy while working to pay off the debt, so she sends 1-year-old Deming back to China, where her elderly father cares for him. But when Deming is 6, he returns to the U.S. after his grandfather dies.

  By that time, Polly is living with her boyfriend; his sister, Vivian; and Vivian’s son, Michael. After Polly disappears, Deming spends a brief stint in foster care. He is adopted by a childless white couple, 40ish professors who live upstate and change Deming’s name to Daniel. By age 21, Daniel is an indifferent student, an aspiring rock musician and an inveterate gambler. His adoptive parents encourage him to enroll in classes at their college, but the city and a music career hold greater appeal. All of these plans are upended when Michael, who hasn’t seen Daniel since the adoption, tracks him down with information about Polly.

  Some of the story’s contrasts, especially between Deming’s birth and adoptive families, are too stark, but The Leavers (winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver) is a thoughtful work about undocumented immigrants and the threats they endure. Midway through the novel, Polly recalls a subway ride when Deming was little. The train emerges from underground, “tearing straight into the sunlight, and I couldn’t wait to see your face.” That’s a beautiful expression of love that every family should appreciate.

• BLARB (Los Angeles Review of Books)
  https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/lisa-kos-leavers-devastation-deportation-machine/
  Word count: 1109

  LISA KO’S THE LEAVERS AND THE DEVASTATION OF THE DEPORTATION MACHINE
  MAY 2, 2017
  By Louise McCune

  An interactive map on The GEO Group’s website bears 74 green dots. These represent the 74 for-profit correctional facilities — which house 80,566 incarcerated people — under the company’s purview in the United States. The green dots are spread widely. The shores of Puget Sound on the West coast and those of Chesapeake Bay on the East are comparably adorned. But the green dots do seem subject to some sort of latitudinal gravity; their numbers swell in the southern states, near the border with Mexico and the Gulf.

  This is no coincidence. Those green dots appear magnetized to an increasingly militarized border, and the prison-industrial complex allies itself with a concept of nationhood that would criminalize those in the country without documentation. Carceral capitalism — a logic which sustains The GEO Group and companies like it — is driven by the incentive to hold the most possible inmates for the fewest possible dollars. It is stoked by immigration enforcement; higher rates of deportation mean more detainees. The profit motive that undergirds these facilities spurs a number of human rights abuses, including forced labor, overcrowding, and refusal of medical care. Meanwhile, the industry bankrolls a robust prison lobby which maintains and expands the detention policies that are its bread and butter. Last year, 65% of immigration detainees were held in for-profit prisons. The same year, The GEO Group reported an annual revenue of $2.18 billion.

  A detention center figures prominently, if obliquely, in Lisa Ko’s debut novel The Leavers. In this case, the center in question is not a green dot but a black box. Polly Guo, an undocumented Chinese immigrant and one of the novel’s protagonists, disappears after ICE raids the nail salon in New York City where she works. She is incarcerated thousands of miles from anyone she knows and is eventually deported back to China. Her son, Deming, is adopted by a white couple who relocate him to the suburbs and rename him Daniel. Both Polly and her son are dislocated literally and figuratively by her disappearance into the deportation machine. She loses herself because of the outrageous traumas she endures following her arrest, and he because of the subtler traumas of whitewashing. They are adrift, apart from one another and apart from themselves.

  Ko’s exegesis is one of input and output. To demystify the carceral apparatus that is built up when immigration is criminalized, she shows her reader who enters into it and who comes out the other side. Though her narrative never penetrates the walls of the fictionalized facility that haunts it, Ko illuminates the plunder of immigrant lives at the hands of the prison-industrial complex by describing its attendant outcomes. The fallout of her protagonist’s detention and deportation, as narrated in the novel, has already galvanized early audiences; The Leavers is the winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellweather Prize, established by Barbara Kingsolver to promote fiction that addresses issues of social justice.

  Ardsleyville is the name of the detention center that Polly disappears to after ICE storms her workplace. Its centrality to the narrative is indicated by frequent paralipsis; when Polly narrates, numerous overt indications imply that she will not talk about Ardsleyville. Her avoidance of the topic comes from a self-preserving amnesia. To discuss Ardsleyville is to seal its consequence. In Polly’s words, if she speaks of it “then it had been real, not a nightmare I could just write off as my imagination.” So she acknowledges her experience there only in the moments that she vows not to acknowledge it.

  Even without her account, however, the reality of Polly’s detention is evident in what comes before and after. Prior to the raid, Deming and Polly live in the Bronx with Polly’s lover, along with his sister and nephew. Polly is a self-described “free spirit.” She came to the states to escape an inevitable marriage, animated by the green grasses of economic opportunity. Those “Incredible Americans” who have returned to her native Fujian province, enriched after years of chasing American dollars, stir in her a motive that belongs to many migrants. Ko’s account of Polly’s journey and the journeys of others bound for the states is pointed in its message; America has orchestrated many of the the global conditions which would compel someone to risk their life to migrate to it, as global trade agreements and U.S. foreign policy have left many people with scant options for self-determinacy. These are the very same people who, once they arrive, are subject to a deportation machine which strips their dignity and leaves them little option for recourse. These are the people who enter into the black box.

  The GEO Group features on its website a profile for each of its 74 facilities. Click on one of the map’s green dots to see an address and a picture. The pictures, many of them taken from the sky above, suggest the impenetrability of these compounds. The images are unforthcoming. Here are 15 rectangular buildings arranged haphazardly around a central point, panopticon-style, in the chaparral. In another picture two flags in red, white, and blue rise above a concrete wall. We understand these prisons as factories which monetize the lives of the people held in the thrall of the criminal justice system. We understand them as the waypoint for many individuals who are arrested on account of being in the country illegally.

  What Ko seeks to do with The Leavers is illuminate the consequence of these facilities, and of the deportation machine as a whole, on individual lives. After Ardsleyville, family ties are torn apart and identities erased. Languages are left nearly forgotten, and autobiographies are rewritten with a wide perimeter around the trauma of detention. Ko’s novel is self-consciously political in a manner that, at times, verges on ungainly didacticism. In Polly and Deming, however, she has created two memorable characters with the capacity to spark empathy in audiences inured to a dismaying status quo. Right now, with anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy on the rise, stocks are soaring for companies, like The GEO Group, which profit from increased border security and an aggressive deportation agenda. ICE is expanding its machinery by reopening prisons which had been closed, expanding contracts with for-profit prisons, and adding beds to county jails. Ko’s book arrives at a time when it is most needed; its success will be measured in its ability to move its readership along the continuum between complacency and advocacy.

• The Irish Times
  https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-leavers-review-a-riveting-tale-of-immigrants-in-new-york-1.3230751
  Word count: 889

  The Leavers review: A riveting tale of immigrants in New York
  This stunning and fearless debut novel is about adoption and the desire to belong

  Sarah Gilmartin

  First published:
  Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 06:00

  “I want you to know that you were wanted. 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. Deming Guo is an 11-year-old Bronx native whose mother, Polly, disappears one day without a trace. For months he carries on living in a tiny apartment with his mother’s boyfriend, Leon, Leon’s sister Vivian and her son Michael. 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.

  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. 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.

  Ko is similar to Franzen in her fearlessness of presenting protagonists who are far from sympathetic at times. 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. Polly, whose story comes to life in a moving first-person narrative, is an equally complex character. 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. Four measly weeks.”

  Fear and opportunity

  Her subsequent determination to make a life for herself and her son is impressive. 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. Loving and selfish, smart and stupid, brave and afraid, Polly – or Peilan as we later come to know her – is a vibrant character bent on survival. The mystery surrounding her disappearance is subtle and gripping. In present-day Funhou, she takes pills to help her sleep, works hard, keeps the past secret from her husband, Yong, and moves aimlessly around the city: “I walked to lose track of the life that had solidified around me when I hadn’t been paying attention.”

  But it is her story as a pregnant young immigrant in New York that really elevates the novel. From the older immigrants who help her settle in the boarding house, to the string of awful jobs, to the pleasure of seeing Deming learn English, to families dependent on the whims of a cranky judge, a full picture of the lives of the undocumented emerges, with plenty of original insights. There’s “the New York audacity that a bagel could proclaim to be everything, even if it was only topped with sesame seeds and poppy seeds and salt”, or more poignantly, Polly’s realisation that “the ambiguity of our lives was terrifying and enthralling, when each new day was equal parts fear and opportunity”.

  No villains

  Ko was born in New York. Her fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2016, Copper Nickel and the Asian Pacific American Journal. Published last year in the US, The Leavers won the 2016 Pen/Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver for a novel that addresses issues of social justice. The plight of undocumented immigrants is brilliantly realised through Deming and his mother’s relationship, the loss of which leaves a young boy reeling. There are overtones of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, which deals with similar terrain, though the lack of finality for Daniel over his mother’s disappearance proves more riveting.
  He remembers her in glimpses: “Her voice was a trumpet, her words sharp triangles.” As he struggles to understand what happened, Daniel grows up, coming to the realisation that “you could try to do all the right things and still feel wrong inside”.

  His journey to self-awareness and ultimately forgiveness makes for an engrossing read. No one is made a villain in the novel, not Polly and her desperate decisions, not Daniel’s adoptive parents and their overbearing ways, not even Daniel himself, a boy-man “unable to do anything but pursue this singular impulse toward ruin”. Ko makes sure the reader knows that the real villain is outside the realm of character – an unjust society that can rip apart the lives of its undocumented citizens.

• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2017/06/the-leavers-by-lisa-ko/
  Word count: 939

  YOU’RE MY HOME NOW: LISA KO’S THE LEAVERS
  REVIEWED BY JASON ROBERTS
  June 27th, 2017
  If you come away from reading The Leavers with a sense of disconnect, that’s no surprise—disconnectedness is its central theme, its structural and stylistic touchpoint, and the emotional engine driving its main characters. First-time novelist Lisa Ko impressively employs a fractured narrative to portray the plight of fractured people, but don’t expect conventional satisfactions.

  The Leavers begins in the aftermath of a reunion. In New York City, eleven-year-old Deming and his mother Pelian “Polly” Guo have carved out a marginal yet seemingly stable existence, sharing a Bronx apartment as part of an informally blended family that includes Polly’s boyfriend Leon, his sister Vivian and her son Michael, who’s close to Deming’s age. It’s a comfortable life for Deming, who finds a father figure in Leon, forges a brother-like bond with Michael, and benefits from Vivian’s auxiliary maternal presence. The only strained relationship is with his mother, burdened as it is by the fact of an earlier abandonment.

  Deming is both a native of New York and a relative newcomer. His childhood memories are of Minjian, a rural village in China’s Fujian province, where his mother had sent him to be raised not long after his birth. Only the death of his grandfather-caregiver lands him back in the States, where an apologetic Polly makes a habit of telling him, incongruously, “You’re my home now,” and promising never to abandon him again. Yet she does. One morning she leaves for Hello Gorgeous, the nail salon where she works as a manicurist, and never returns.

  Deming’s life begins to disassemble. Powerless to answer the mystery of Polly’s disappearance, an unmoored Leon departs abruptly for China. Vivian, unable to care for both her son and Deming, makes the wrenchingly difficult decision to find “people to look after you.” The people, of course, are social workers.

  Ten years later, Deming Guo is only a memory. In his place is Daniel Wilkinson, the adopted son of Kay and Peter Wilkinson, raised in Ridgeborough (population 6,525) in upstate New York. After an adolescence furnished with well-meaning parents, rewarding friendships and a closet full of Abercrombie & Fitch, Daniel has returned to New York City—ostensibly to pursue a music career, but more prosaically to work in a burrito shop, run up gambling debts, and distance himself from his now-exasperated adoptive parents. There’s a disconnectedness to his life, a psychic slip of the clutch that compels him to drop out of college, to play music he doesn’t want to play, to squander love. When Michael, his long-ago Bronx pseudo-sibling, attempts to track him down, it takes him months to reply. At last he takes up the threads of the mystery surrounding his birth mother’s disappearance, but it seems fueled not by a need for closure so much as a desire to follow her into oblivion.

  It’s no spoiler to note that Polly is still alive. She soon assumes the role of the book’s intermittent narrator, interspersing a first-person account with Deming/Daniel’s third-person trials and travels. And it’s here that The Leavers seams begin to show: her thoughts range freely across continents and decades, yet she manages to maintain a near-coy core of silence about the reason for her disappearance. She has multiple opportunities to convey the truth to her son (and the reader), but repeatedly fails to do so, for no real reason other than to service the plot and save the big reveal for the book’s latter pages. Since she “didn’t want to think about” the facts behind her absence, she simply doesn’t communicate them, even when a few terse words would alleviate her son’s obvious suffering.

  When the truth is revealed, it comes freighted with a general lack of agency that strains credulity. Polly, previously portrayed as a relentlessly resourceful soul striving her way illegally from Minjian to New York, decides a few forgotten and disconnected phone numbers are enough to conclude “my family was lost.” Other central figures maintain inexplicable silences. When Deming/Daniel shows up on the doorstep of his mother’s old boyfriend, Leon readily admits to knowing Polly’s fate, and even provides her current whereabouts and general address. But when it comes to telling the young man the truth about her disappearance, he remains cryptic. “Your mother, she’s complicated,” is all he explains, seemingly because the story has a few more chapters to go.

  Ko isn’t the first gifted writer to over-rely on a creaky plot point—Shakespeare had some frothy business about teenage death potions—and The Leavers burnishes over its seams with strikingly original language. Snow falls in clumps “like wet laundry.” The round black sliver of a vinyl record is “what alien trees might be like if you sliced their trunks open.” The Staten Island Ferry brays ”a hippopotamus honk.” There are also genuine surprises in store: Deming/Daniel’s personal arc doesn’t end on a predictable note, nor is the mother/son relationship patly resolved. For all the challenges of the book, the real takeaway is Ko’s bristling talent. Her characters are constitutionally adverse to action, her scenes overburdened with exposition, yet a sense of engagement pervades, a soulful sincerity that pulls the reader through. Already awarded the PEN/Bellwether Prize for “socially-engaged fiction,” The Leavers stands firmly as Lisa Ko’s act of arrival.

• The Kansas City Star
  http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/books/article148413709.html
  Word count: 778

  Restless immigrant mother-son journey makes ‘The Leavers’ a timely, touching story
  Special to The Star
  MAY 05, 2017 7:01 AM

  In an interview in the online journal Drunken Boat, when she was named fiction editor, Lisa Ko said that for her, “fiction is always political.” Fittingly, her debut novel won the most recent PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, an award established in 2000 by Barbara Kingsolver.

  “The Leavers” is as politically topical as it is sensitive. It is also uneven, but when good, it is excellent: compelling, well-realized, gritty and complicated. This mother-son novel is a story of the trickiness of transracial adoption, of being immigrants and of finding one’s own way.

  Deming Guo is the son of Polly, a plucky, fast-talking, fast-walking, profane character who defies stereotypes about mothers. “There was a restlessness to her, an inability to be still or settled,” Ko writes.

  When the novel opens, Polly and Deming are living in a Bronx apartment with Polly’s boyfriend, Leon, and his sister, Vivian, and her son, Michael, a year younger than Deming.

  Although the apartment is cramped, Deming is happy there. The bustling building is noisy, but Deming finds the cacophony of languages and chatter comforting.

  The apartment is anchored by a big couch that Polly thinks is gaudy, but Deming likes, seeing “worlds in its patterns.” Polly works as a manicurist in a nail salon called Hello Gorgeous, and she dreams of bigger things.

  About the couch, Polly says: “When I manage my own salon, the first thing I’m going to do is get rid of that thing. … You come home one day, it’ll be gone.”

  But eventually Deming’s mother is the one who goes missing. Because the restless Polly has been talking about taking a waitressing job in Florida, Deming assumes she has decamped for the Sunshine State.

  Six months after Polly disappears, Vivian, strapped for funds, takes Deming to a social services agency. This isn’t the first time Deming has been separated from his mother.

  Before Polly was Polly, she was Peilan from Minjiang, China, the daughter of a fisherman. Her father raised Deming from age 1 to almost 6, while Peilan (dubbed Polly by a roommate) worked as a seamstress in a New York City factory. After her father’s sudden death in rural China, mother and son were reunited and moved into the crowded Bronx apartment.

  This time, Deming is taken in as a foster child by Peter and Kay, academics at a small college in upstate New York, and it is with this well-meaning couple that the novel breaks down.

  Ko does a good job of contrasting the difference between noisy New York City and the sleepy small town where Deming finds himself in a white house five times larger than the Bronx apartment. But Kay and Peter are cardboard characters, speaking in strained, clichéd dialogue that matches the author’s arm’s-length relationship to them, veering between academic jargon like “essentialist” and crude colloquialisms like “bad elements.”

  Deming becomes Daniel Wilkinson when he moves in with Peter and Kay. But he never quells the feeling of not belonging and of being both “too visible and invisible,” yearning for his lively mother. Still, Kay and Peter adopt Daniel.

  Living in a big house, in his own room with a shelf of Condensed Classics that includes “Oliver Twist,” he grows into an adolescent. With his friend Roland Fuentes — the only other kid of color in his school — he forms a pop punk band. Daniel then becomes a college dropout with a gambling addiction.

  On the outside he is Daniel, on the inside, Deming. He returns to New York City, where he was once a happy child.

  Polly also has a dual existence. Unknown to her son, she was arrested in a raid at the nail salon. After 14 grueling months in a Texas detention center, she was deported to China. Polly, however, never stopped yearning for her son.

  Daniel flails about as a would-be musician, a disappointment to himself and his adoptive parents, until he stays briefly with Polly in China and learns her story of reinvention. Their reunion is freeing for both.

  Told through third person in the Deming/Daniel sections, and in first person in the Peilan/Polly parts, “The Leavers” is a layered story of leaving, by choice and by force, and of returning to a place that one can find only for oneself: home.

• Foreword Reviews
  https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/the-leavers/
  Word count: 426

  THE LEAVERS
  Lisa Ko
  Algonquin Books (May 2, 2017)
  Hardcover $25.95 (352pp)
  978-1-61620-688-8

  The story’s most heartbreaking disclosures are powerful in their indictment of the unrealistic expectations placed upon struggling families.

  In Lisa Ko’s The Leavers, departure is sometimes a matter of fleeing, and sometimes a matter of being pushed, and it is often the opening that enables better understandings of our origins.

  Deming—known as Daniel, after his preteen adoption by staid New York academics—is lost at twenty-one. He wants to be a rock star, but finds himself as dissatisfied in his band as he was in academia. He is also recovering from a gambling addiction and grappling with his expulsion from college. Underlying all of these troubles is the trauma that no one truly lets him talk about: the mysterious departure of his mother from his life ten years previous.

  Ko lets Daniel’s pain take center stage before shifting focus to his mother, Polly; the result is a story that unfolds with ever-surprising emotional blows. Daniel’s feelings of desertion come to fit imperfectly with his mother’s truth: that choices for Chinese immigrants are never easy.

  Polly finds herself alone in New York as a pregnant teen, hoping for a better life. But expenses pile on top of the toils of single motherhood; family troubles pervade; and the cruelty of a system that is happy to exploit undocumented workers, but that finds little sympathy for them in their toughest times, comes to be the wedge that no one properly names. The story’s most heartbreaking disclosures are powerful in their indictment of the unrealistic expectations placed upon struggling families.

  So, too, are New York City’s less postcard scenes captured, including the cramped apartments and hot workspaces still occupied by those with few choices; the stark conditions of ICE camps, even in ostensibly kinder eras, are a brutal reveal. China’s villages, and the implications of its single-child policies for young women, are drawn with similarly harsh and vivid colors. Deming’s adoptive parents, the Wilkinsons, serve as a blunt denunciation of forced multiculturalism that lacks understanding.

  As Polly and Daniel go back and forth—between China and New York; to and from each other; in and out of spaces that look like they could offer something new—questions of true belonging emerge, with implications that are emotionally staggering.

  Reviewed by Michelle Anne Schingler
  May/June 2017

• Portland Book Review
  http://portlandbookreview.com/2017/08/the-leavers/
  Word count: 639

  The Leavers by Lisa Ko
  by Ashley McCall on August 4, 2017

  When Lisa Ko’s debut novel The Leavers opens, we’re introduced to Deming Guo, a young Chinese immigrant (technically born in the U.S. but raised for a handful of years by his grandfather in rural China) living in New York City with his mother, Polly. They live with Polly’s boyfriend, his sister, and his nephew in a one-bedroom apartment. The adults work long hours to put food on the table and raise their children in a mixed culture, at once very Chinese and American. One day, Polly leaves for her job at a nail salon and doesn’t return home, leaving her son with people who haven’t the resources to raise him. Adopted by the Wilkersons, upper-middle class white college professors who live upstate, Deming is renamed Daniel and thrown into a culture which, to him, is completely foreign – and is expected to conform and thrive.

  Cut ahead a few years. Now in his early twenties and seemingly focused on self-destruction, Deming is facing down a developing alcohol problem and gambling addiction. He’s isolating friends from his youth and disappointing his adoptive parents. After burning every bridge there is to burn, Deming runs into Michael, the nephew of his mother’s former boyfriend, and begins a journey to find out the truth of what happened the fateful day his mother left.

  The Leavers is really two novels: Deming’s story and that of his mother. While his chapters are told in third person, hers are in first; we gain a sense of intimacy with this imperfect woman, bogged down by a variety of things – her desire to live in the city, an unplanned pregnancy, outstanding debts for her trip to America, her immigration status. The characters in The Leavers are all fantastically flawed human beings. At points, nearly all of them make cringe-worthy decisions and risk becoming unlikable. It is a true testament to Ko’s talent as an author that Deming, Polly, and the rest of her cast end up being shown in such a sympathetic and relatable light. The characters who don’t fare so well in the compassion arena are Deming/Daniel’s well-meaning but borderline stereotypically white adoptive parents, Kay and Peter, who seem to assume that their attempts at cultural sensitivity make them superior judges. There is a scene in which they take the newly adopted Deming out for Chinese food with some friends, a white couple with an adopted Chinese daughter; the discussion of the food’s authenticity and quality, which Deming knows is subpar, is painful to read. Whether or not this commentary was intentional on Ko’s part is a question I cannot answer, but it, like so much of the book, rang so true and cut so deep and decisively to the core of this beautiful, brilliant novel’s message that it begs us ask questions about our own assumptions of culture and community and what truly makes for a good childhood.

  Perhaps most powerful, however, is the way in which Ko is able to give us a peek into the world of the undocumented immigrant, from day-to-day anxiety and hardship to deplorable conditions in detention centers to the ludicrous practice of separating American-born children from their parents without compunction. As clichéd as it is to say, there is something incredibly timely about this book, and something invaluable in Ko’s ability to fully humanize people who are far too often relegated to the position of symbols and far too rarely seen as fully realized beings. The Leavers is more than just a gorgeously written and perfectly constructed novel; it’s a book that means something – maybe even more than its author intended.

• Your Impossible Voice
  http://www.yourimpossiblevoice.com/review-leavers-lisa-ko/
  Word count: 379

  Review: The Leavers by Lisa Ko
  By Abeer Hoque

  “His beauty was that his beauty was behind him, his appeal reflecting what he had already survived.”

  Lisa Ko’s debut novel The Leavers is a sprawling multi-generational story of working-class undocumented Chinese immigrants in New York City. The book starts off with Deming, a boy whose mother, a nail salon worker, vanishes suddenly. Deming gets whisked away via child services from a cramped multi-family situation in the Bronx to an academic family in a leafy suburb in upstate New York. The trials of racism, class, and ambition prove heavy burdens for Deming (re-named Daniel by his white parents) as he grows up, no model minority in the making. This last was a refreshing realistic departure from much of the immigrant literature out there. It was however frustrating to watch this character crash and burn. Daniel’s synesthetic affects as per his growing music obsession felt a bit sudden and forced although they were quite lovely to read: “His eyes ached. His mouth filled with noise.”

  The most powerful parts of The Leavers for me were about New York, a city I presume to know about. But the novel depicts aspects of the city I am ignorant of, except when reading the occasional investigative report about the plight of undocumented Asian workers. It made me realize, yet again, how important literature’s role is in our education, understanding and compassion when it comes to politics and history. I also loved how the NYC subway system is a geography in itself. It reminded me a little of John Wray’s brilliant characterization of the MTA in his novel Low Boy.

  Ko’s language is often beautiful and surprising: “Deming dug his fingernails into his arm, ten sharp half-moons sparking pain.” Her characters are deeply and complexly realized, even when they’re not the main focus of the story. The Leavers is an important addition to the American canon, filling out a perspective we see far too little of, the story of those who don’t or can’t write books to tell us about their lives, their very bodies supporting the ugly and unstable foundation of our capitalist consumerist society.

• Atticus Review
  https://atticusreview.org/doppelgangers-translation-loss-review-leavers-lisa-ko/
  Word count: 937

  Doppelgängers, Translation, and Loss: A Review of The Leavers, by Lisa Ko
  BY ADITYA DESAI ON JUNE 12, 2017

  Lisa Ko’s The Leavers opens with its central mother-son duo, Peilan and Deming Guo, on a tender rip through the streets and subways through New York. They spy on a Chinese mother and son in the New York streets, and adopt them as their doppelgängers. Days later, Peilan, undocumented and working under the table at a nail salon for scraps, is deported by immigration agents, having left her son confused and without even a goodbye.

  It’s an image that haunts both of them throughout the next decade, as Deming is adopted by a white couple and raised as “American” upstate, and Peilan, also called Polly, settles into a comfortable life back in China, both wondering if that lady or that boy across the way could be the other. It’s soon after we catch up with young adult Daniel, a college dropout turning gigging musician in Manhattan, that a chance to reconnect with his mother brings hope for that lost, robbed relationship to return.

  I was pleased to spend the tail end of May, Asian Pacific Islander American Heritage month, reading this highly anticipated debut novel from Chinese-American author Lisa Ko, inspired by a series of news clippings she collected about undocumented immigrant mothers, and the choices they made for and at the cost of their children. The novel won the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver for work that addresses social justice issues. And of these social issues, the book traverses many—immigration, poverty, undocumented workers, deportation, adoption, and globalization.

  Ko, herself calling the novel “a tribute to the sweat, heart, and grind” nevertheless avoids being didactic, and plants each foot firmly in her two central protagonists, and infuses each moment with their relationship. She unspools the “story behind the story,” of Deming and Peilan, Daniel and Polly, in a measured, assured pace, rooting the small and internal against the cityscapes of the modern globalized world. Ko achieves this by intercutting Deming’s third person narrative with Peilan’s first person address, speaking retroactively and apologetically from a safe, comfortable life back in China, trying to make sense of a dark passage she’d rather not revisit, and—much like any mother—giving her a sense of ownership of the novel, while keeping her child’s journey the central arc.

  Consider one exchange: As Deming acclimates to life as Daniel, he remembers how his mother “used to swat his shoulders…when he spoke too much English and not enough Chinese; his weapon of choice had been the language that made her dependent on him.” Later, Peilan then narrates, “I knew the proper words to respond, but didn’t say them, didn’t want to give you the power of making me switch languages, and only talk to you in these terms.”

  The globalized reality of The Leavers is one in constant translation, with Ko vividly setting the stage for a world of multiplicity:

  They lived in a small apartment in a big building, and Deming’s mother wanted a house with more rooms. Wanted Quiet. But Deming didn’t mind the noise, liked hearing their neighbors argue in English and Spanish and other languages he didn’t know, liked the thuds of feet and the scraping backs of chairs, salsa and merengue and hip-hop, football games and Wheel of Fortune spilling from the bottoms of doors and through the ceiling cracks, radiator pipes clinging along to running toilets. He heard other mothers yelling at other kids. The building contained an entire town.
  Peilan, back in China, lives above a packed-house Pizza Hut, thinks about moving from Chinatown to the Bronx: “I looked at the signs in English and Spanish—not a single Chinese character anywhere, not even at the take-out spot down the block—I felt like I’d been in rehearsal all this time and this was the real thing.” Meanwhile Daniel, who spent high school humming Hendrix lyrics in Mandarin, thinks on his arrival to Fuzhou: “There was not one scrap of English, not anywhere…It was trippy, surreal, the swirl of familiar sounds on such unfamiliar streets.”

  At times this central crux does shorthand otherwise compelling moments from the novel’s B-plot hurdles: Daniel’s burgeoning music career with boyhood friend Roland, and the imposed college re-enrollment from his adoptive parents, the sentimental protective Kay and the stern, perpetually disappointed Peter, who come off like detached distractions in the search for Peilan, with circular conversations about record labels and applications. I would have rather seen the tantalizing phantom chapters of those teen years in upstate New York, given as Ko summarizes: “As long as he didn’t think about his mother…Yet there was always this nagging, ice swipe of fear, a reminder he needed to stay alert.”

  But it’s this very chess game of emotion where the novel finds its most wrenching power, and acutely understands the ways immigrants lead double lives, always feeling like a fraud no matter which one they are in. In that way, they do become our own doppelgängers. And once those hurdles fall away in the novel’s back half, with Daniel inevitably steering back toward to his literal “motherland,” Ko brilliantly and powerfully offers the resolution that the many mothers of her news clippings did not get, and for that she is a writer to watch.

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/books/review/the-leavers-by-lisa-ko.html
  Word count: 749

  Migration, a Makeshift Family, and Then a Disappearance
  By GISH JEN
  MAY 16, 2017

  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.

  Yet rather than mine this richly unsettling territory, Ko contrives things such that not all Polly’s actions — including her effective abandonment of Deming — turn out to be her fault. Is hers a cost-free freedom? And why is her penchant for freedom made so much of, if it is without consequence? Where Deming’s story, too, eventually devolves into a conventional narrative of a young person learning to follow his bliss, it’s hard not to see this book as one that takes risks but then hedges its bets.

  Missing as well is the defining sensibility — the heedless enchantment, the uncanny attunement, the magisterial iconoclasm — that finally marks our most worthwhile fiction. Instead, we have info-stuffed passages like this exchange between Kay and Peter:

  “‘You’re at school all day. Are you sure you can’t work here at least part of the time? We have a study, you can write there.’

  “‘Let’s not go through all this again,’ Peter said. ‘You know this is an important semester for me.’

  “‘It’s not like they’re going to decide to not make you department chair because you come home early once in a while. Work-life balance. You’ve been there forever, they know you and your work. That’s not about to change.’”

  Might we not like to see more art, with less matter?

  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.

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