The Leavers Quotes

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.

“Did you think that when I was growing up, a small girl your age, I thought: hey, one day, I’m going to come all the way to New York so I can pick gao gao out of a stranger’s toe? That was not my plan.”

Always be prepared, she liked to say. Never rely on anyone else to give you things you could get yourself.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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?

On the corner of Grand and Lafayette, the address for the poker club reverberated in his mind. He headed south to where Howard Street crossed over to Hester. It wasn’t too late, he could turn and go right to Roland’s, go right past the building, which was narrow, no doorman, only an intercom. He checked his phone; no messages. He was frightened by how much he was about to fuck up, by his lack of desire to stop himself, the rising anticipation at the prospect of falling down, failing harder, and going straight to tilt; he’d known from the moment he left the bar exactly where he would end up. He pressed the intercom button.

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.

“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.

“What is your name?” the judge asked in English.

“Guo Peilan,” I said. “Polly Guo.”

He slammed his hand down again. The woman in the suit spoke in Mandarin.

“You need to wait for my translation.”

“What is your name?” asked the judge again, and again I answered before the woman had spoken.

“You need to wait for my translation,” the woman repeated. “You can’t answer his question until I translate it.”

“But what am I doing here?”

“They want to deport you, but they need to get the right documents first.”

“They can’t do that. Where’s my lawyer? I have a son here, he’s an American citizen.”

The judge said something I couldn’t hear.

“Dismissed,” the woman said. “You spoke out of turn. He’s going to issue an order of deportation that says you didn’t show up today because you spoke out of turn.”

“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.

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.

Everyone had stories they told themselves to get through the days. Like Vivian’s belief that she had helped [Deming], his mother insisting she had looked for him, that she could forget about him because he was okay.

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.