![]() ![]() ![]() Their failure to acknowledge the catastrophic event that brought them their son, coupled with Deming’s forced assimilation into an ethnically monochromatic community and his loss of fluency in Fuzhounese, compounds his trauma. ![]() Polly’s boyfriend, Leon, and Leon’s sister Vivian attempt to track Polly down, but their efforts prove fruitless.Ī few months later, well-meaning white college professors Kay and Peter Wilkinson adopt Deming, whisk him away to their small town in upstate New York and rename him Daniel. When Deming Guo is 11, his mother, Polly Guo, an undocumented Chinese immigrant, leaves for her job at the nail salon in the Bronx and doesn’t come home. In her debut novel, “The Leavers,” winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for socially engaged fiction, Lisa Ko examines the tensions and complexities of these binaries with scintillating depth, sensitivity and skill. ![]() Binaries lie at the heart of any adoption: two families, two cultures, two sets of fantasies of what might have been, or of what may still be. ![]()
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