The Leavers: Chapter 17 Summary & Analysis

Polly narrates the events that take place after she’s taken by the immigration authorities. Shoved into a windowless van, she’s driven to a small room with a phone, where she’s allowed to make a single phone call. Because she can’t remember anybody’s number, she ends up calling a stranger’s voicemail. At this point, she’s taken to Ardsleyville, a camp in Texas, though she doesn’t know where it is at the time. For fourteen months, she lives under a large tent with other undocumented immigrants, often waking up when the guards come around to do “bed checks.” The living conditions in the camp are terrible, and the guards refuse to let her speak to a lawyer or to immigration authorities.

In the camp, Polly worries that Deming will forget her face. She itches her arms so much that her skin tears, but still she only thinks about what she’s missing, wondering if Leon has taken another lover. One day, Polly and a group of detainees decide to protest by going outside and holding up a sign that says HELP, hoping the news helicopters that often circle the camp will glimpse their message. However, the only plane that goes by flies away after a moment, and the guards spray them with teargas and hit them with police batons. Afterwards, Polly is placed in solitary confinement, where she fantasizes about wrenching open the walls with her hands so she can rejoin the world. “Because I wasn’t really here,” she narrates, saying that she’s living out the life of “another person.” “I pushed at the walls with my head,” she notes.

After Polly bangs her head against the walls of her cell, the guards take her out and bandage her wounds, at which point she finds herself sitting in front of a man in a suit who says the word “lawyer” in Mandarin, though she can’t understand anything else he says. Not long after this, she’s taken to court, and when she tries to answer questions on her own, the judge reprimands her for not waiting for her translator to translate. When she asks why she’s in court, the judge gets fed up and dismisses the case, ordering her to be deported because she “spoke out of turn.”

When Polly lands in Fuzhou again, she makes her way back to her childhood village, where she finds Haifeng’s mother living in Polly’s father’s old house. “We’ve been using it,” Haifeng’s mother explains, saying that she didn’t know how to get in touch with Polly. Annoyed, Polly walks past the woman and spends the night. The next day, Haifeng’s mother gives her 5,000 yuan for the house, and Polly goes to Fuzhou and calls the loan shark, only to discover that the entirety of her debt has been paid. That night, she finds a job at a nail salon and rents a room populated by other out-of-town laborers.