Themes
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
“The night you came back into my life I was walking down the same old street in Fuzhou,” Polly narrates. Coming from World Top English (where she works as a teacher), she walks to meet her husband, Yong, for dinner. Yong frequently has dinner with clients and always wants Polly to attend, though she’s exhausted by these boring engagements. This is why she chooses to walk to dinner, relishing the feeling of freedom that comes with winding through the chaos of Fuzhou, though she can’t help but feel somewhat trapped in her life, thinking, “I was forty years old and most of my choices had already been made. Made for me. Not so easy to veer off course now.”
After five chapters of third-person narration, Polly’s voice appears to tell her own side of the story. What’s most notable is that she uses the second-person pronoun, “you,” addressing Deming as a way of explaining why she left. The mere fact that her sections are structured this way suggests that she feels guilty for having abandoned her son, apparently wanting to explain herself. When she complains that the majority of her decisions have been made for her, there are several different ways to interpret what she means. On the one hand, readers might see her discontent as a sign of restlessness, which might suggest that she’s the kind of person who would abandon her son simply to free herself of the duties of parenthood. On the other hand, it’s possible that her unhappiness has to do with the fact that she hasn’t been able to decide for herself how to live her life, meaning that she was forced to leave Deming behind. By presenting these two possibilities, Ko sustains the mystery surrounding Polly’s initial disappearance.
Themes
Polly’s husband doesn’t understand why she likes to walk so much, saying that if he himself wanted an “adventure,” he would travel to Hong Kong, though she notes that he never actually travels. They originally met at World Top English, where Yong was one of her students. When they started dating, she told him she used to live in the United States, and he said, “You must have studied English in university.” She didn’t say anything in response, simply letting him think he wanted. After this, he developed an idea of her as a “brilliant, hardworking, and kind” person, and Polly soon became enamored of this new version of herself. Six months after starting to date, they got married, and Polly never told him about Deming. “The months passed and then it seemed too late and too significant to reveal,” she notes.
Like Deming’s dual identity as both Deming and Daniel, Polly adopts a new personality, embracing a reality in which she’s a university-educated woman who has never had a child. Although this is a lie, she falls into a new life, one built upon this new, alternate version of her identity. Given that readers don’t yet know why she abandoned Deming, the fact that she so eagerly develops this new persona suggests that she originally disappeared in order to create a new life. This, however, doesn’t seem to have brought her pure happiness, as she clearly still yearns for “adventure.”
Themes
At the dinner with Yong and his clients, Polly struggles to keep herself entertained, hating the vapid way these business executives talk about money and labor. At one point, she looks at her phone and realizes she’s received a voicemail, so she excuses herself and listens to it. “Hello? This is a message for Polly Guo,” a voice says in wobbling Fuzhounese. “This is your son, Deming. I am good. New York is where I live. Leon your number gave me. Leon I found, Michael found me. You are good? I would like to talk to you.” Before the message ends, Deming gives Polly his phone number and tells her to call. Rattled, she puts the phone away and feels pain radiating through her arms. When she returns to the table, she says she was on a “business call.”
In the same way that Daniel’s two identities collide when he visits Michael and Vivian after ten years, Polly’s past life comes crashing around her when she listens to Deming’s voicemail. After having worked for an entire decade to build this new life for herself, she can’t help but feel the emotional effects of hearing her son’s voice, which reminds her of all that she left behind.
Themes
“For so long I had wanted to find you,” Polly notes, referring to Deming. She explains that Leon told her Deming was adopted, and she goes out of her way to underline the fact that she would never have parted ways with him in the first place if she’d had a “choice.” Still, “the only way to keep going was to act as if” he were “totally gone,” so she told herself that both she and Deming were “better off” in their separate lives.
Ko still hasn’t revealed why Polly returned to China, but readers learn in this section that she didn’t have a “choice.” Of course, it remains unclear what exactly this means, but the fact that she didn’t voluntarily abandon Deming complicates the idea that she simply left him behind because she’s a restless soul. Regardless of why she left, though, it’s clear that she wants to make herself feel better about not tracking Deming down, ultimately telling herself that he’s “totally gone” in order to make it easier to go on with her new life.
Themes
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That night, Polly and Yong return to their fancy high-rise apartment, which has an ocean view. When she first moved in, she explains, she felt a sense of “relief,” loving that she was able to create a new life for herself. Lying in bed now, though, she tries to wrap her head around telling Yong that she has a 21-year-old son. “You couldn’t omit your own child from the story of your life, like it was no big deal,” she thinks. “If I called [Deming], and if Yong found out I had lied about having a child, he would be so angry, and then he would leave me, and I would have to give up being myself.” Exhausted by these thoughts, she takes a sleeping pill, which she uses every night because it’s the only way she can make sure she won’t have nightmares.
Polly has certainly built a new life, but the remnants of her past continue to haunt her. Although she has succeeded in fashioning a new identity for herself, all it takes is one phone call from Deming to completely unravel her, forcing her to think about how hard it would be to marry her two lives. The fact that she has such a hard time reconciling her separate existences with one another is an indication that although it’s possible for a person to be many things at once, it’s not necessarily possible to sequester certain aspects of one’s life. Rather, the elements of identity and personal history are interlaced with one another, no matter how disparate they might seem.
Themes
