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Chapter 3
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Leavers, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Cultural Identity and Belonging
Migration, Change, and Happiness
Racism, Cultural Insensitivity, and Implicit Bias
Self-Deception and Rationalization
Parenthood, Support, and Expectations
Summary
Analysis
A week after arriving in Ridgeborough, Deming wakes one morning “with the crumbs of dialect on his tongue,” quickly losing the feeling of speaking Fuzhounese. “One language had outseeped another,” Ko writes. “I am Daniel Wilkinson,” he says to himself, thinking how strange it is to have been given a new name by his foster parents. At first, he doesn’t know what to call Peter and Kay, feeling uncomfortable using “Mom” and “Dad.” Kay, for her part, has taken Mandarin classes, but whenever she tries to speak to Deming, he can hardly understand what she says, so he responds by saying, “I don’t know who you are,” in Fuzhounese. When he speaks Fuzhounese in other circumstances, Peter chides him, saying, “English.”
In this chapter, readers witness the abrupt transformation Deming undergoes when he’s taken in by Peter and Kay. Not only does he find himself living with strangers, but he’s taken away from everything he knows and given a new name. Suddenly, he’s supposed to think of himself as an entirely different person, someone whose name won’t stand out in an American suburb. Needless to say, this stands in stark contrast to his life in New York City, where he mainly spoke Fuzhounese and the majority of people he saw looked like him. As his grip on Fuzhounese diminishes, Ko illustrates just how much a person’s sense of cultural belonging and identity depends upon his or her environment.
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In a meeting with Deming and Kay, the principal of Ridgeborough Middle School suggests that Deming should redo fifth grade because of his bad grades. When he asks Deming questions, he does so condescendingly, eventually turning to Kay and asking, “Where is he from? Originally?” Kay reminds him that she’s already told him that Deming is from New York City, but he says, “But originally?” He then suggests that Deming’s English needs work, though Kay thinks it’s “perfectly fine.” Circling back to his main point, the principal says that Deming should be put in the fifth grade so he doesn’t lose heart. “We don’t want to get him started off in his new country on the wrong foot,” he says. At this point, Kay loses her patience and talks about educational theory, dumbfounding the principal and successfully convincing him to place Deming in the sixth grade.
The principal of Deming’s new school is a prime example of somebody who makes lazy assumptions about a person based on the color of their skin. Knowing that Deming is Chinese-American, he automatically thinks that he’s bad at English and that he’s not originally from the United States. When Kay stands up for him, it is the first time since Polly disappeared that an adult actually advocates for Deming, and though Kay later clings to her own unexamined stereotypes, in this moment she proves her desire to support her new son.
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Kay takes Deming shopping for school clothes, and he sees how willing she is to spend large amounts of money on him. “Why am I here?” he asks while they’re eating lunch in a mall food court. “Because—we have room for a child in our family. And you needed a family to stay with.” That night, he hears Peter and Kay talking in their bedroom. Listening from his own room, he hears them worry about having taken him in. “I can’t figure out how to act around him sometimes,” Kay admits. She also asks Peter if he can spend more time at home, since he’s been at the university so much recently. Defensively, he reminds her that this is an “important semester” for him because he’s trying to become the chair of his department.
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Peter complains that there’s no “work-life balance” in academia. “You of all people should know that,” he says to Kay. “But it could be different for women. There aren’t the same expectations, the same drive.” This upsets Kay, but she goes back to talking about her concerns regarding Daniel, admitting that she’s afraid of getting “too attached,” since one of his real family members could return any day and collect him. She also asks Peter if they’re “crazy” to try raising a young Asian boy in Ridgeborough, where there aren’t any other Asian families. “[These] issues are colorblind,” Peter says, insisting that “kids of all races have struggles with belonging.”
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The night before the beginning of school, Deming sneaks downstairs and tries to call Polly’s cellphone. “This call cannot be completed at this time,” an automated voice tells him. The next day, his teacher takes attendance and is surprised to see an Asian boy when she says “Daniel Wilkinson.” While eating alone at lunch, he can’t help but notice that everybody is white. The next day, he decides to think of himself as an alien who’s been sent to Ridgeborough to collect information. What he realizes is that nobody around him thinks about “the way they look to other people, because there [are] no other people present.” He, on the other hand, is simultaneously “too visible” and “invisible.” During lunch on his third day, a girl asks him where he’s from. When he asks her the same question, she says, “I’m from here.”
On his fourth day of school, Deming watches as a large boy named Cody picks on a smaller kid, calling him a “fag” and pushing him over in the locker room. Cody then pushes Deming and calls him a “Chinese retard,” so Deming tackles him. In the commotion, he realizes that the small boy who Cody originally bullied has jumped on him, attacking him instead of Cody. “Chinese retard,” Cody repeats as he gets up and walks away.
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On the way home from school that day, a boy named Roland Fuentes catches up to Deming and introduces himself. Roland—who’s Mexican—is the only other person of color Deming has encountered in Ridgeborough. As they walk home, the two boys talk about their parents, and Roland says his dad died a long time ago. “Did your mom die, too? Your real mom,” Roland asks, and before he can stop himself, Deming says, “Yeah.” As the weeks pass, Deming and Roland become good friends, playing videogames and writing their initials on the virtual scoreboards. Though at first he writes DGUO, Deming starts to record his name as DWLK. Within several weeks, he stops finding it strange when people call him Daniel.
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Alone after school one afternoon, Deming opens Peter’s cabinet of vinyl records and looks at them. When Peter comes home and sees him sitting before the turntable, he tells him to choose a record, so he selects Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced? When Peter puts it on, the room “fill[s]” with “color,” and Deming and Peter bond over their appreciation of Hendrix’s guitar work. From that day on, Deming listens to Peter’s record collection using headphones, immersing himself in Hendrix’s catalogue and letting the chaotic sounds remind him of his life in New York City.
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When Deming goes to Roland’s house after school, they listen to Hendrix. Together, they create fake band names, eventually writing songs using these monikers. In school, they talk about these bands as if they’re real, tricking their peers into believing them. “I heard about the band you’re in. Roland’s band. Necro…mania,” Cody tells Deming one day. “That’s my band, not Roland’s,” Deming says. “I started it.” For his birthday, Deming asks for an electric guitar, but Peter and Kay give him a laptop instead. Still, this makes him happy, and he largely succeeds in his attempt to avoid thinking about Polly. On the way home from his birthday dinner, he asks Peter and Kay if they’ll give him a guitar next year, and Peter says, “Let’s not get carried away. Music is fine to listen to as a hobby, but you need to focus on school.”
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Deming hears Peter and Kay talking about him again in their bedroom one night. “Oh, God, sometimes I look at him and think, what are we doing with this twelve-year-old Chinese boy? In Ridgeborough?” he hears Kay say. “Jim and Elaine, at least they’re in New York City.” She goes on to explain that Deming told her someone said something racist to him in the grocery store the other day. “I was horrified,” she says. “And now, whenever we go out, I’m suspicious.” She wonders aloud if she should take more Mandarin classes or cook Chinese food. After a moment, Peter says, “This might sound callous, but honestly, whatever we do is going to be better than what he experienced before. You remember what the agency said, how the mother and stepfather both went back to China. We’re the first stable home he’s ever had.”
As Deming listens, Peter and Kay talk about starting the adoption process to make their guardianship permanent. Hardly able to keep up, Deming wonders why Peter said that Polly went back to China. Despite his confusion, he keeps trying to listen. He hears Kay saying she can’t stop thinking about Polly, wondering what she looks like. She also says it feels like Deming is scared of her and Peter, and when Peter assures her that this won’t always be the case, she says, “I hope so. We’ll love him so much we’ll make it all better.”
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Shortly after hearing Peter and Kay’s conversation about starting the adoption process, Deming opens a file cabinet one afternoon and finds a folder labeled “ADOPTION/FOSTER.” Inside, he finds pictures of children and letters to social workers, and then he comes upon a report about his own case, which states that his mother abandoned him to return to China. “Foster parents plan to petition for termination of mother’s parental rights on grounds of abandonment,” the file reads. That night over dinner, he asks Peter and Kay if they’ve adopted him, and they explain that they have plans to do so. “But what happened to my real family?” he asks. “We are your real family,” Peter says. All of a sudden, Deming feels sick, so Peter carries him upstairs and puts him to bed.
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Peter, Kay, and Deming drive to New York City several days later to visit the Hennings. It’s the first time Deming has returned to the city since he was taken to Ridgeborough, and he hatches a plan to sneak back to his old apartment in the Bronx so he can reconnect with Vivian and Michael. When they arrive at Jim and Elaine’s house, they settle in, and Deming meets Angel, who is also of Chinese descent, though she has lived in the United States for her entire life and doesn’t know how to respond when Deming addresses her in Chinese.
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For dinner, Jim and Elaine take everyone to a Chinese restaurant they claim is fantastic, but Deming knows the food isn’t very good. Still, it’s nice to hear people speaking Fuzhounese around him. Taking control, he orders for the table in Fuzhounese, and when Elaine marvels at the fact that he’s fluent in Mandarin, he corrects her, saying, “It’s not Mandarin. It’s Fuzhounese.” Peter explains to Jim and Elaine that Fuzhounese is “the local slang,” and when Kay tells Deming not to speak so directly to Elaine, he says, “But she’s wrong. She’s stupid.” He also points out that Fuzhounese isn’t “local slang,” but Jim interjects and says, “It’s all Chinese to us dumb-dumbs.” Elaine, for her part, apologizes to Deming for getting confused, and Kay forces him to apologize.
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When Deming gets up to go to the bathroom after the meal, he tries to slip away, but the group catches up to him just outside the door. “Were you looking for us?” Peter asks, and Deming lies, saying he was in the bathroom and couldn’t find them. Back at the Hennings’ apartment, Deming tells Angel that his birth mother, Polly, might be in the Bronx, and she decides to help him find her. When the adults fall asleep, they sneak out and hail a cab using money Angel has stolen from Jim. When they get to Deming’s old apartment, though, they find strangers living there. Defeated, they return to the Hennings’.
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