In The Leavers, Ko illustrates how feelings of obligation and “indebtedness” often hinder relationships between parents and children. For example, Polly feels a crushing sense of responsibility as Deming’s mother, seeing parenthood as a sacrifice and a burden. Because his mother has this attitude, Deming later feels like he’s nothing but an inconvenience. Of course, Polly’s eventual disappearance has nothing to do with her parental discontent, since the only reason she leaves Deming behind is because she’s unexpectedly detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). However, Deming doesn’t know this, so he assumes she has abandoned him. As such, he sees himself as a burden, carrying this self-image into his relationship with his adoptive parents, Peter and Kay, to whom he later feels “indebted” because they give him the support Polly failed to provide. In this regard, then, he views parental care not as something to which he’s naturally entitled, but something he has to earn. By demonstrating the emotional toll this has on his relationships with Polly, Peter, and Kay, Ko implies that the healthiest bonds between parents and children are those built on unconditional love and support, not expectations or indebtedness.
Ko’s portrait of Polly as a conflicted mother conveys her belief that parenthood is both rewarding and emotionally draining. When Deming is still a baby, Polly finds herself in awe of him even as she laments her lack of freedom. While her roommates dote over Deming, she worries about her future as an independent woman: “What if I would always be required to offer myself up, ready and willing, constantly available?” This thought process calls attention to the fact that Polly dislikes that she’s suddenly expected to care for Deming at all times. Instead of focusing on the beauty of parenthood, she fixates on the sacrifices she has to make to be a good mother. Although this might seem rather callous, it’s worth noting that becoming a parent—and especially a single parent living in poverty in a foreign country—is something of a sacrifice, since supporting a child often makes it impossible for a person to do anything else. As such, Polly’s misgivings are somewhat understandable, though they eventually complicate her relationship with her son.
Although it’s reasonable to note the sacrifices that come along with parenthood, Polly’s approach to caretaking takes a dark turn. Having framed motherhood as a burden, she finds herself at odds with the expectation that she’ll always care for Deming, and this outlook causes her to behave irresponsibly. “All I wanted was to be by myself in a silent, dark room,” she notes. Feeling this way, she crouches and puts baby Deming beneath a public bench before slipping away. “When I [stood] up I was lighter, relieved,” she admits. The language she uses in this moment is indicative of her belief that parenthood is a burdensome obligation. And though she only runs several blocks before returning to retrieve Deming, readers see that her habit of framing caretaking as a joyless sacrifice is dangerous, since it instills in her a desire to abandon her child.
When Polly is detained and deported by ICE, Deming thinks she has left to start a new life. As a result, he’s suspicious of Peter and Kay when they adopt him, assuming that they, too, don’t really want him. Even after they’ve supported him for ten years, his insecurities persist in this regard, though in a different manner. Rather than worrying that they’re going to abandon him, he feels beholden to them, thinking that he has to somehow repay them for taking him in. This anxiety stems from the fact that Polly left him, but it also reflects the unfortunate fact that Peter and Kay do expect something of him. When he fails out of college, they go out of their way to get him into Carlough, where they both teach. Without considering what Deming wants, they tell him he has no “choice” but to follow their orders, since they’ve put themselves “on the line” for him. After he insists that he wants to pursue his music career in Manhattan, Peter levels an “accusation of ingratitude” at him, one that makes Deming feel “torn” 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,” Ko writes. This dynamic creates a rift between Deming and his adoptive parents. Instead of presenting their support as something he can depend upon no matter what, they play into his long-held idea that he has to earn their love.
It becomes clear that expectations and “indebtedness” stifle familial relationships when Deming leaves Peter and Kay to go looking for Polly in China, defying their hope that he graduate from Carlough. Once he finds Polly, he settles into life in China, and things begin to shift in his relationship with both his birth mother and his adoptive parents. When Peter and Kay call him on his birthday and ask if he’s going to come home, he realizes that they—along with Polly, who wants him to stay—love him regardless of what he does. “Mama—and Kay, and Peter—were trying to convince him that they were deserving of his love, not the other way around,” Ko writes. By testing Kay and Peter’s commitment to him (and by showing Polly that he might leave shortly after reconnecting), he suddenly sees that all of his parental figures actually do love him unconditionally, even if their various approaches to parenthood complicate this love. In turn, Ko intimates that unqualified love and support ought to be offered to children up front to avoid unnecessarily messy family dynamics.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Parenthood, Support, and Expectations ThemeTracker
Parenthood, Support, and Expectations Quotes in The Leavers
There was a restlessness to her, an inability to be still or settled. She jiggled her legs, bounced her knees, cracked her knuckles, twirled her thumbs. She hated being cooped up in the apartment on a sunny day, paced the rooms from wall to wall to wall, a cigarette dangling from her mouth. “Who wants to go for a walk?” she would say. Her boyfriend Leon would tell her to relax, sit down. “Sit down? We’ve been sitting all day!” Deming would want to stay on the couch with Michael, but he couldn’t say no to her and they’d go out, no family but each other. He would have her to himself, an ambling walk in the park or along the river, making up stories about who lived in the apartments they saw from the outside.
If he hadn’t gotten detention—if he had left school at the usual time—if he hadn’t resisted Florida—if he’d intercepted the fight she had with Leon—she would still be here. Like a detective inspecting the same five seconds of surveillance video, he replayed last Wednesday afternoon, walking the blocks from school to home.
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.”
“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.”
Peter finally said, “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.”
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.
Look how he wants his mama, my roommates would say, and a couple of them also got goo-goo-eyed, and a sliver of fear would present itself: what if I would always be required to offer myself up, ready and willing, constantly available? What had I done? And then: what was wrong with me?
“But you’re okay?” A hopeful note crept into her voice.
Daniel walked back to the living room. To acknowledge his mother’s regret meant he had to think of what her leaving had done to him, the nights he’d woken up in Ridgeborough in such grief it felt like his lungs were seizing. Months, years, had passed like this, until he became adept at convincing himself it didn’t matter.
“That doesn’t excuse you going away,” he said. “You have no idea what happened to me. You can’t pretend you didn’t mess up, that you did nothing wrong.”
Once I might have become this woman, free to move across the country because she heard a city was beautiful. Instead I had become a woman like Vivian, watching TV, cooking for you and Leon, making sure the dumplings were fried and not steamed, unsure if I should marry my boyfriend but not wanting to lose him either. An uneasiness settled into me. This October would be followed by another winter, another spring, until it was time for October 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 wasn’t anything I could do,” I said. “I couldn’t go back to America after being deported. I couldn’t go anywhere. If I thought about you too much I wouldn’t be able to live.”
I knew how it must sound to you: I hadn’t tried hard enough, I didn’t love you enough. But I could have kept looking forever. I needed you to understand.
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.
