Finished Sa 5/18/19
The May, 2019 selection for the Contemporary Book Club
An enlightening, yet searing examination of the immigrant experience in modern day America.
Deming Guo and his mother Polly/ Peilan
Daniel Wilkinson
A very poor woman at age nineteen has a baby with a young man she doesn't love- He's a neighbor.
She doesn't want to marry- he does. She flees China to America. She borrows $50,000 from loan sharks to finance the trip.
********On Sunday, 5/19 I could have booked a flight from NYC to Beijing for $1,048.46, and a flight from Spfd to Beijing for $1,369.70
For a few years she lives in squalor in NYC (Deming is barely a toddler), she can't take care of the kid and work sweatshop hours, so she sends the boy back to China.
When he's about six, she brings him back to NYC (He was staying with Polly's father, and he died). When the boy is eleven, she is swept up in an ICE raid at the nail salon where she works.
She disappears and none of her family know where she is. She had told them that there was work in Florida.
Her son at first is living with his mother's sister in law. But, this woman puts him up for adoption with The Wilkinsons- Peter and Kay.
He grows to college age in a white suburb five hours NW of NYC. He never fits in and is obsessed with 'What Happened To Mom'?
Plays in a punk rock band (Psychic Hearts) on guitar with his best friend Roland. They are beginning to break big, but he cannot commit.
His foster/ adoptive parents pressure him to go to their college. He is an economics professor, she is a political science professor.
He freaks and finds his mother and visits her for the first time in China. She has remarried and is teaching English and her new husband owns a factory.
He sees his birth mother's husband, Leon. His wife Vivian had paid Daniel's mother's debt.
Mike was Leon and Vivian's son and Daniel was like a brother, but they were lost since Dan's mother was swept up in the raid.
In the end Mike and Daniel live together. Daniel is trying to get his music to the public and Mike is living on a federal grant and is a professional.
From Amazon-
"Ko is the deserving recipient for the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for this socially engaged novel........ Raised in rural China, bold Peilan realizes she is pregnant and decides she does not care to be a wife. She knows the best opportunities are in the United States, so she pays a loan shark to be smuggled to New York. Years later, Peilan, now "Polly," and her son, Deming, live in a cramped apartment in the Bronx. For Deming, life is good. But the day Polly doesn't come home, 11-year-old Deming must start a new life. Adopted by a white couple from rural New York, Deming Guo becomes Daniel Wilkinson. In a predominantly white town, Daniel's coming-of-age is difficult. At a low point in his college years, he unexpectedly discovers a link to his mother and embarks on a journey to find her—and, thus, himself again. Ko adroitly moves back and forth in time and between New York and China. The two parallel and sometimes overlapping stories come full circle as Peilan becomes Polly, Deming becomes Daniel, and the two return to their original names. Mastering English becomes an important status symbol to Polly, just as reclaiming his childhood language of Fuzhounese becomes vital to Daniel's own identity. VERDICT Ko's characters and their experiences will resonate with most readers. This moving work will particularly appeal to students interested in issues such as undocumented immigrants, poverty, cross-racial adoption, and second-generation Americans."
Link to Lisa Ko's website:
http://lisa-ko.com/about/
Guardian review:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/22/leavers-lisa-ko-review-migrants-debut-chinese-american
"The Wilkinsons’ liberal do-good impulses are not openly mocked, but they are critiqued by Ko. Their hope – well meaning but condescending – is to rehabilitate “Daniel” into middle-class life. “They wanted him to succeed in the ways that were important to them because it would mean they had succeeded, too.”
The Atlantic review:
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/05/lisa-ko-the-leavers-book-review/526179/
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