In The Leavers, a novel about the mysterious disappearance of Deming Guo’s undocumented mother, Polly, Lisa Ko dissects what it’s like to have a multicultural identity. More specifically, she suggests that a person’s sense of cultural belonging is rarely straightforward or black-and-white, but nuanced and difficult to parse. This is true for Deming, who struggles to maintain his Chinese identity when he’s adopted by a white family in the wake of his mother’s vanishing. Living with Peter and Kay Wilkinson (who rename him Daniel), eleven-year-old Deming is isolated from Chinese culture, but he doesn’t completely leave behind who he was before. Rather than fully entrenching himself in the life of a white American family, he thinks of himself as living two different realities—one as Deming and one as Daniel. This duality means he doesn’t entirely reject his new identity, as he embraces certain aspects of his life with the Wilkinsons while simultaneously remembering his personal history. And though this multicultural existence often leaves him feeling like he doesn’t belong to any group, he eventually realizes he doesn’t need to commit to just one culture or identity. In turn, Ko advocates for a fluid approach to ethnic identification, one that allows people to create their own sense of belonging even when navigating the complex intersection of multiple cultures.
Ko understands that changes to a person’s cultural identity often manifest themselves in language. This is what happens to Deming when Peter and Kay first take him in and change his name to Daniel. After a week of living with them, Deming’s linguistic connection to Chinese culture shifts. “One week later, tucked into a double bed sheathed with red flannel, Deming Guo awoke with the crumbs of dialect on his tongue, smudges and smears of dissolving syllables, nouns and verbs washed out to sea,” Ko writes, suggesting that even just one week in this new environment has already had an effect on Deming, who’s forced to experience the slow dissolution of everything he’s known. “One language had outseeped another,” Ko adds, emphasizing the influence of cultural isolation on children like Deming. Without a linguistic connection to Chinese culture, Deming is adrift in a wash of unfamiliarity, challenged to make himself anew in a foreign context.
As Deming’s memory of Fuzhounese and his mother slip away, his new guardians act as if they want him to forget his Chinese identity. They change his name to Daniel, claiming that he’ll find school “easier with an American name.” When Deming does occasionally speak Fuzhounese, Peter chides him, insisting that he use English. Rather than focusing on how to help Deming preserve his original sense of self, Peter and Kay obsess about getting him to “adapt” to his new environment. And though Deming does acclimate to this white suburban-American lifestyle, he doesn’t forget his Chinese identity. “Ridgeborough had made Daniel an expert at juggling selves,” Ko writes, explaining what Deming is like ten years after moving to the suburbs. “[H]e used to see Deming and think himself into Daniel, a slideshow perpetually alternating between the same two slides.” In this moment, readers see that transitioning into a new cultural identity doesn’t necessarily mean erasing one’s original persona. Though Daniel “adapts” to the predominantly white culture of Ridgeborough, he maintains a connection to his Chinese roots, ultimately suggesting that assimilating into different cultures doesn’t necessarily mean giving up one’s foundational sense of self, though it’s worth noting that Deming hasn’t yet found a way to integrate his Chinese identity into his American identity (and vice versa).
Charting Deming’s experience in a white-majority suburb allows Ko to highlight the idea that identity is “formed as a function of family and culture,” an idea she expresses in the extra materials included in the 2017 Algonquin Paperback edition of the novel. Because Deming lives for ten years with a white American family, he develops an identity that has very little to do with his Chinese heritage. At the same time, he lived with his Chinese mother for eleven years before moving to Ridgeborough, meaning that his identity has been shaped by both Chinese and American cultural forces. This duality is something he struggles with throughout the novel, since he feels out of place amongst the white people in Ridgeborough but is also disconcerted when he visits China and can hardly hold a conversation without someone sneering at his accent. “There was a comfort in belonging that he’d never felt before, yet somehow, he still stood out,” Ko writes, explaining what it feels like for Deming to travel in China as a young man. This kind of isolation from both cultures is why he’s become an “expert at juggling [his] selves,” which is something his mother—who goes by both Polly and Peilan—also does, since she too sees herself as leading two “parallel” existences: one as the Chinese woman Polly, and one as the immigrant Polly. Given that both Deming and Polly have segmented views of themselves suggests that this is simply part of what it means to have a multicultural identity.
Although developing a multifaceted identity can be complicated, Ko doesn’t see this divide as inherently problematic. When Deming is unsure at the end of the novel where he should live—whether he should stay in China or return to the United States—he has the liberating realization that his two cultural identities can coexist. He doesn’t have to choose between them. As such, he moves to New York City and lives with Michael, another Chinese-American. “For now, this was where his life would be,” Ko writes. “This city. His best home.” The fact that Ko refers to New York—a multicultural center—as Deming’s “best” home indicates that a person can belong to many different cultures. Furthermore, Ko says that this is the life Deming has chosen to lead “for now,” implying that he can always move to China in the future. As such, she frames Deming’s multicultural identity not as a hindrance to his happiness, but as an advantage, one that enables him to be whomever he wants. By spotlighting Deming’s eventual acceptance of both the Chinese and American elements of who he is, then, Ko celebrates the flexible nature of identity.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Cultural Identity and Belonging ThemeTracker
Cultural Identity and Belonging Quotes in The Leavers
Being surrounded by other Chinese people had become so strange. In high school, kids said they never thought of him as Asian or Roland as Mexican, like it was a compliment.
Daniel’s muscles contracted. So Angel hadn’t gone to Nepal. If they were still friends, if she was still talking to him, he would tell her about Michael’s e-mail, about Peter’s accusation of ingratitude, how torn he felt between anger and indebtedness. If only Peter and Kay knew how much he wanted their approval, how he feared disappointing them like he’d disappointed his mother. Angel had once told him that she felt like she owed her parents. “But we can’t make ourselves miserable because we think it’ll make them happy,” she had said. “That’s a screwed up way to live.”
One week later, tucked into a double bed sheathed with red flannel, Deming Guo awoke with the crumbs of dialect on his tongue, smudges and smears of dissolving syllables, nouns and verbs washed out to sea. One language had outseeped another […].
“I’m not going to say it’ll be easy,” said Peter. “But white, black, purple, green, kids of all races have struggles with belonging. They’re fat, or their parents don’t have a lot of money.”
“That’s true,” Kay said. “I was a bookworm with glasses. I never belonged in my hometown.”
“Issues are colorblind.”
[…] but they were different, had never noticed the way they looked to other people, because there were no other people present. Here, they paid too much attention to him (at first) and later, they would pay no attention to him. It was that kind of mindfuck: to be too visible and invisible at the same time, in the ways it mattered the most. Too obvious to the boys who wanted to mock him, yet girls would only notice him when he was walking around with his fly down.
Daniel Wilkinson was two and a half feet taller, one hundred-fifty pounds heavier than Deming Guo had once been, with better English and shittier Chinese. Ridgeborough had made Daniel an expert at juggling selves; he used to see Deming and think himself into Daniel, a slideshow perpetually alternating between the same two slides.
My life felt like a confection, something I had once yearned for, but sometimes I still wanted to torch it all over again, change my name again, move to another city again, rent a room in a building where nobody knew me.
He felt a savage euphoria. The night had confirmed his failures, and he’d freed himself from having to fight his inability to live up to Peter and Kay’s hopes. He didn’t want to go to Carlough, wasn’t ever going to be the kind of guy Angel respected, some law-school-applying moral citizen. God, it was great to be himself again.
“We were so afraid of doing something wrong. We thought it would be better if you changed your name so you would feel like you belonged with us, with our family. That you had a family.”
Daniel never knew if Kay wanted him to apologize or reassure her. Either way, he always felt implicated, like there was some expectation he wasn’t meeting.
“Mom.” He didn’t want to see her cry, especially if it was on his behalf. “It’s okay.”
“Your great-great-grandfather owned that land once. He grew vegetables, he had horses. He was an enterprising man. Jacob Wilkinson.”
Daniel pressed his spoon into his soup again. There was a quiet sorrow about the weighted silver cutlery, the paintings of bygone people and places. He was the last of the Wilkinsons, the only grandchild. His only cousins were on Kay’s side of the family, and they had his Uncle Gary’s last name. The way Peter spoke about it, being the last of the line was a great responsibility; he had to do something special to live up to Jacob Wilkinson’s legacy. This man he looked nothing like, whom, if he had been alive, would probably never accept Daniel as a true Wilkinson.
In the end, he hadn’t been able to do what Peter and Kay wanted. Three more semesters of classes, followed by graduate school. Staying upstate. He hadn’t been able to do what Roland wanted either, play the music Roland wanted him to play.
There was a comfort in belonging that he’d never felt before, yet somehow, he still stood out. The bus driver eyed him for a beat too long when he bought the ticket, as did the woman in the seat across the aisle, a bag of groceries on her lap. Yong and his mother assured him his Chinese sounded close to normal now and not as freakish as it had when he first arrived, but Daniel figured it was his clothes, his bearing, or the way he looked or walked or held himself, something that revealed he wasn’t from here.
At the ferry terminal I bought a ticket, then found a place on the upper deck. The boat rocked in the waves, and as I saw the lights of Kowloon come through the fog, I held the railing, breathless with laughter. How wrong I had been to assume this feeling had been lost forever. This lightheaded uncertainty, all my fear and joy—I could return here, punching the sky. Because I had found her: Polly Guo. Wherever I went next, I would never let her go again.
She wasn’t listening to him. He recalled how she and Peter had insisted on English, his new name, the right education. How better and more hinged on their ideas of success, their plans. Mama, Chinese, the Bronx, Deming: they had never been enough. He shivered, and for a brief, horrible moment, he could see himself the way he realized they saw him—as someone who needed to be saved.
