Identity, Family & Lisa Ko's 'The Leavers'
Lisa Ko's 'The Leavers' is a necessary, soul-tugging novel.
On Books…
With Lisa Ko’s debut novel, The Leavers, there are myriad places to begin. We could talk about naming, and the power baked into giving and taking away a name. We could talk about immigration, and how ICE destroys families. We could talk about the shape of family—whiteness and capitalism demanding one image—and how Ko remolds family over and over. We could talk about abandonment and motive, and how individualized fears overtake our greater sight. We could talk about well-meaning white folx, and the very real damage they inflict without realizing—perhaps the most insidious of the damages. Thematically, this novel is rich and widespread.
Of course, we could talk about Ko’s prose. Reading Ko is like coming home. Her characters come to an impressive life from the first page. It reads as if Ko pulled her cast from the our personal recesses—for good reason. We believe in Ko’s characters, we strain when they struggle, and we celebrate when they make strides towards themselves. Ko is a secret technician, how each sentence is constructed with just enough polish—nothing of her writing suggest sterility. There is pulse and grit to her work. Her writing tugs and tenses. Writhing language, we melt into each of Ko’s literary and thematic demands. We are not passengers of The Leavers. Ko turns us into agents, how moments of rage and heartbreak enliven us.
To sell anyone on The Leavers, I need only bring up one scene. Our protagonist, Deming Guo—who is renamed by his adoptive family to be Daniel Wilkinson—is seated at an “off-the-beaten-path” Chinese establishment, eating poorly cooked food with his white family and their white friends. His family believes they are doing right by him, bringing him here to “his culture.” Deming brims with resentment. His birth mother—who his adoptive family believes to have abandoned him—would never cook a meal so mushy and tasteless. At once, almost every character of the book is present: Daniel, Deming, the white gaze, Deming’s mother, and the looming and lumbering question of identity.
We experience Deming’s frustration with his adoptive family, we reject the name Daniel as Deming does in that moment. We reject the food. We reject everything having to do with the scene, and we turn the pages furiously, looking for reprieve for ourselves and our protagonist. Ko proves herself to be a master of lacing discomfort into her narration and plot structures. Complicating relationships is best part of The Leavers. Who we are, who we love, and how we love, percolate as questions throughout the novel. Better yet, Lisa Ko makes great work of penning a novel driven by bleeding questions: Where did Mama go? Why did she leave? When will she come back? Was it my fault (in the voice of Deming)? And so on.
For a majority of the work, one question begets another, and when the answers do come, we are satisfied as readers and torn up as empathetic beings. The story of Deming’s mother, which blooms across the last two thirds of the novel, is crushing and necessary. We need books like The Leavers. We need complex immigrant narratives that ignore tropes of bootstraps and happy endings. We need the reality of The Leavers’ climax. We need own voices. The cover of The Leavers calls it ambitious, which is true. But if it were up to me, I would plaster the word “Necessary” in gorgeous script across the top of the book. Lisa Ko’s writing is superb, affecting, winding, personable, catching, and necessary.
The Leavers spans the Bronx, upstate New York, and across cities in China. Cultural wires cross; space is called into question. Where does Deming—Daniel? Is it even right to consider him Daniel?—genuinely belong? We wonder at Deming’s happiness, and we wonder if he has been given the freedom to make his own choices. We conclude The Leavers on a note of agency and resolve, sure, but for a majority of the novel, we worry Deming has not been given the tools to orchestrate his own existence.
Therein lies the success of this novel: Ko’s ability to conceive messy lives. Deming is a breathing being, he is. His mother even more so by the novel’s end. Ko gives the issues of immigration the human touch they deserve. More than headlines, more than statistics, Lisa Ko seems to suggest, these are people attempting to live as anyone else is attempting to live. The Leavers is equal parts delicate and shattering, nicely unnerving at times, and heartily constructed. I am thankful for this novel, and for Lisa Ko’s voice.
On Craft…
This week, I want to talk about the importance of community. To be a writer is, naturally, to isolate. You cannot write—at least I can’t—without locking yourself away with your books, and your tea, and your tools of the trade (A laptop with clicky keys and a speaker for the tunes). You cannot write without shutting out the world after experiencing the world, cannot write without taking the time to process all you’ve lived through and coalescing it into a single piece. The demands on a writer are many, and are best executed alone.
But writing can get lonely. At some point, as we are simply human, we wish to come out of our writer caves and our writer shells. After all, we want to share the work, don’t we? Sure, it’s best to write for yourself and worry about eyeballs and analytics later. But, still, days away from social interaction can take a toll. For some writers, isolation is as important to process as interaction is important to process, and that is where community comes in. It helps to have a pair of trusted eyes to look at drafts. More than eyes, though, it helps to have someone who understands writing, your writing, and can talk you off the proverbial ledge as the draft comes together.
It is imperative to find someone who speaks the language of the first draft. Anyone can look at your work, pat you on the back, and tell you to press on. Few people know what a draft means to a writer, and how to tenderly and thoughtfully maneuver that space.
Example: Many a times, I have felt like a piece is gaming me somehow. I have hit walls and I have burnt out. During all of these instances, I call on DJBooth’s Yoh—literally. I call this man for hours, sometimes daily, to talk through pieces and ideas. I call Yoh to talk, period. It helps to have someone hear you and see you fully, to have someone who loves you and your work, and has the best interests of the work at heart. Yoh can see things when I am bogged down. Yoh can hear what I mean to say at the onset of my emotional spirals. I am very invested in my work—some might say I am too invested—and Yoh helps me work through the feelings to get back to the page. Always, he guides me to the page. Never has he led me astray.
Your writing community can be one person, or it can be a network of people you trust. These folx must be able to sniff out your meanings, soothe you in times of crisis, and help you return to the work feeling balanced. These are the people to which you are comfortable presenting your most vulnerable and unfinished self. A draft is a mighty and heavy thing; not everyone can be trusted to glance at in-progress work. When you do find your confidant(s), you feel a lightness. The walls stop closing in. The piece stops taunting you. You know you have this sterling entity capable of helping you. For all our isolation tactics, our writing communities help us add the human touch to our work.
There’s no easy way to find your people. But when you do find them, you feel it. You cannot mistake the feeling of being seen and understood for any other. Mac Miller has a famous line: “I got brothers, I don’t need no friends.” That’s how it feels to find your writing community. Your bonds transcend basic principles of relationships. Your bonds are rooted in something more ephemeral and hearty than common interests and passing time. You are comrades, in a way. People in arms, working towards the goal of producing art. When you find your people, treasure them. And send them your rough drafts. Your writing will be better for it.