The Leavers: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

Jumping back in time, Ko narrates an excursion Polly and Deming take when Deming is six years old. Having just returned to America after spending five years in China with his grandfather, Deming finds his mother unfamiliar and is entranced by the many sights and sounds of New York City. Each noise creates a stream of color in his mind, and he revels in what it’s like to move through this hectic soundscape. When they have free time, he and his mother choose a subway line to ride, taking a train to Queens one day and spotting a mother and son who they decide are their lookalikes. When Deming runs up to them, they simply walk away. Turning to his real mother, he asks, “Are you going to leave me again?” “Never,” she replies. “I promise I’ll never leave you.”

Resuming the story of what happens when Polly initially disappears, Ko explains that Deming still doesn’t know what happened to his mother even five months after she leaves. It’s July, and he has settled into a boring—if uneasy—life, waiting for Polly to come back and spending time in the stagnant city heat with Michael. Vivian and Leon do their best to care for him, but neither can replace his mother. Leon, for his part, looks worse and worse by the day, tired from his work at the slaughterhouse and overwhelmed by his new caretaking responsibilities. One night, Deming asks him if they can go to Florida to look for Polly, but he assures him that his mother isn’t in “danger.”

Angry that nobody will tell him what happened to Polly, Deming decides one night to go to Florida himself. Ever a loyal companion, Michael agrees to accompany him, and together they sneak out of the apartment. When they get to the train station, though, neither of them have MetroCards or money, and Deming calls off the plan, dejectedly saying, “Let’s go home.” That night, he watches Leon sleep and thinks about how badly he “need[s]” him. Shortly thereafter, Leon gets injured at work and is unable to go to his shifts. And though the landlord gives him and Vivian more time to come up with rent, Ko notes that “the loan shark’s men [are] less understanding.”

Ko describes Polly’s initial disappearance, explaining that Vivian receives a call from her co-worker Didi, who’s “screaming about the nail salon,” saying that “the boss [is] involved in something shady.” When Leon calls the restaurant in Florida where Polly planned to work, they tell him she never came. Trying to track her down, Didi calls the police and the immigration authorities, but they claim to have “no record of her.” This leads Deming to believe that she’s not in danger, since he thinks she simply “took off on her own.”

One night, Leon doesn’t come home until long after midnight. “You smell like a bar,” Vivian says to her him. “Must be nice to stay out all night doing whatever you want. Wish I could do that.” Only ten days later, Leon leaves for good in dead of night. Vivian tells Michael and Deming that he has taken a job in China. She also says he wanted to say goodbye but didn’t because the boys were sleeping, but Deming knows this is a lie. “He hadn’t said goodbye because he knew he shouldn’t have left,” Ko writes.

Three weeks after Leon leaves, Vivian tells Deming she wants to take him shopping. Michael is sad to be left behind, but Vivian claims she wants to spend one-on-one time with Deming. On the bus, she turns to him and says, “Face it. Your mother isn’t coming back, and you need a good family. I can’t provide for both you and Michael right now. I’m sorry, Deming.” Promising that he can live with Leon when he returns from China, she says they’ll see each other again soon. She then takes him into a building and a clerk brings him into an isolated room before going to talk to Vivian. When the clerk returns, she takes him to a Chinese family in Brooklyn, where he stays for several days before a white couple named Peter and Kay Wilkinson come and take him back to the suburban town of Ridgeborough, New York.