Cultural Identity and Belonging Theme Analysis

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.