72 pages • 2 hours read
Lisa KoThe Leavers
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
During Reading
Reading Questions & Paired Texts
Reading Check and Short Answer Questions on key points are designed for guided reading assignments, in-class review, formative assessment, quizzes, and more.
CHAPTERS 1-3
Reading Check
1. What language do Deming and his mother speak?
2. Where did Deming live before New York City?
3. What would a successful gig provide Daniel a chance at?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. What is Deming’s reaction to his mother’s disappearance?
2. How does Daniel view his Chinese identity?
3. How does his relationship with Leon and Mama, as well as Kay and Peter, impact Daniel’s sense of himself?
CHAPTERS 4-5
Reading Check
1. What item does Daniel keep of his mother’s?
2. What celebration for Angel fills him with revulsion?
3. What paradoxical social experience does Daniel feel in the mostly white Ridgeborough?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. How does Ko expose the white supremacy lurking behind well-meaning educated white people like Peter and Kay?
2. Why does the “Gotcha Day” concept feel different to both Angel and Daniel, and what might this expose about foreign adoption?
3. How does Daniel’s view of his adoption differ from Vivian’s?
Paired Resource
- This Seattle Times reprint of a Washington Post article explores the impact of adoption across races from the perspective of adoptees.
- Relates to the themes Hybrid Cultural, Racial, and Class Identities and The Trauma of Abandonment.
- How do the adoptees’ experiences in the article help corroborate Ko’s portrayal of Daniel’s experiences? What do both the article and novel reveal about the ways well-meaning white parents are unprepared to navigate issues of race, culture, and ethnicity with their adopted children?
CHAPTERS 6-8
Reading Check
1. Where has Polly been?
2. What was Peilan/Polly’s first job?
3. What has Daniel’s gambling cost Angel?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. What similarities are there in the different lives Daniel and Polly are living?
2. How does Yi Ba’s attitude toward women shape Peilan into Polly?
3. How is Daniel’s gambling addiction similar to his mother’s choice to move abroad despite the debts?
Paired Resource
- This poem by Richard Blanco personifies the Rio Grande, which issues a complaint about how its identity has been coopted by issues related to borders and immigration.
- Relates to the theme Hybrid Cultural, Racial, and Class Identities and the motif of bodies of water.
- Compare both Peilan/Polly and El Río Grande as characters impacted by emigration/immigration. How does immigration result in a shift in their identities?
CHAPTERS 9-11
Reading Check
1. What does Daniel’s and Roland’s gig success signal to Daniel?
2. Why did Deming’s mother disappear?
3. What does Polly read into Leon’s lack of interest in English and in making changes in his working life?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. In what way is Daniel’s conflict with his identity externalized in his matriculating at Carlough and his musical collaboration with Roland?
2. How does Polly feel about her friends’ advice to enter a marriage of convenience?
3. How does Polly view Kay, and what does this show about the complexities of adoption for the child?
CHAPTERS 12-14
Reading Check
1. What does Vivian tell Daniel his mother assumed he would do as an adult?
2. What promise does Daniel make to Angel?
3. What does Daniel work on over the summer besides his schoolwork?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. Why is cooking with Vivian a pivotal moment for Daniel?
2. Why is making music so important to Daniel?
3. What is the significance of Daniel sharing his tape with Cody?
Paired Resource
“The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica”
- This poem by Judith Ortiz Cofer captures the immigrant experiences through both language and images of comfort and domesticity.
- Relates to Language as a Marker of Identity.
- Consider how language and images of comfort and domesticity function both in the novel and in the poem. How might this connection between language and familiar domestic objects relate to immigrant identity, and how does this connection help explain why cooking with Vivian is a pivotal experience for Daniel?
CHAPTERS 15-17
Reading Check
1. Where does Daniel go after the Wilkinsons find out about his gambling and his debt to Angel?
2. How long was Daniel’s mother imprisoned in Ardsleyville, Texas?
3. Why does Daniel’s mother fear people will find out she was detained and deported when she is left in Fuzhou?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. Why does Daniel go to Fuzhou?
2. Where does Daniel’s mother take him first in Beijing, and why?
3. What does Daniel’s mother’s experience in the detention camp and court reveal about the American immigration system?
Paired Resource
“Mentally Ill and in Immigration Limbo”
- This New York Times article about a Chinese immigrant detained while traveling to Florida for a job is part of Ko’s inspiration for The Leavers.
- Relates to the theme The Vulnerability of Immigrant Families.
- To what extent is Ko’s fictional account of Polly’s experience in detention grounded in fact? What advantages does Ko have in writing Polly’s story over the nonfiction New York Times report in terms of exploring immigrant detention?
CHAPTERS 18-21
Reading Check
1. What does Polly tell her son she did when he accuses her of forgetting him?
2. What does Daniel do while he stays in China?
3. Where does Daniel end up?
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. Why is his reconciliation with his mother not as easy as Daniel thought it would be?
2. What does both mother and son moving on in their lives indicate?
3. Why is Daniel’s decision to leave Fuzhou in some ways more important than his decision to go there in the first place?
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- Blending poetic prose, tiger mythology, and a story fragmented through multiple points of view, Zhang unravels the consequences of what each member of a Chinese immigrant family does to survive during the waning California Gold Rush.
- Shared themes include Hybrid Cultural, Racial, and Class Identities, The Trauma of Abandonment, The Vulnerability of Immigrant Families, and Language as a Marker of Identity.
- Shared topics include the search for identity, complicated family relationships, and the complexity of immigrant experiences.
- How Much of These Hills is Gold on SuperSummary
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- Shared themes include Hybrid Cultural, Racial, and Class Identities, The Vulnerability of Immigrant Families, and Language as a Marker of Identity.
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Reading Questions Answer Key
CHAPTERS 1-3
Reading Check
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. At first Daniel needs reassurance that his mother is okay, but later he internalizes her disappearance as a sign he has been unworthy. He tries to correct his faults by trying harder in school and apologizing to the bully he humiliated, and when this does not work, he tries to make himself as miserable as possible by avoiding food. (Chapter 1)
2. Daniel’s complex attitude toward his Chinese identity is most apparent in his rejection of his birth name, Deming, for Daniel, which he believes fits the person he has become. Though he internalizes his adoptive parents’ attitude of white superiority and tries to ignore his roots, he cannot forget his childhood experiences or accept the various Asian stereotypes everyone places on him as his identity. (Chapter 2)
3. Leon’s and Mama’s disappearances have instilled in Deming/Daniel a deep feeling of unworthiness, which manifests as an inability to trust that Kay and Peter will accept him. This feeling is worsened by their emphatic negation of his interests and early life experiences and the high but narrow upper-middle-class white ideals of success they project on him. This results in patterns of people pleasing and self-sabotage for Daniel. (Chapters 2-3)
CHAPTERS 4-5
Reading Check
1. A blue button (Chapter 4)
2. The Gotcha Day party (Chapter 4)
3. Invisibility and overexposure (Chapter 4)
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. Believing their lifestyle and values to be proof of their greatness and success, the Wilkinsons have already decided that they have rescued Daniel from a bad situation, and they try to erase his past. They insist that he be called Daniel, take no interest in his life before them, and constantly undercut and gaslight him about his origins and identity. (Chapters 4-5)
2. Angel is excited about the celebration because she has no memory of a life before Jim and Elaine, but Daniel is horrified at the idea of being expected to celebrate new adoptive parents while he still feels the loss of his mother and former life. The connotation of “Gotcha” as something one says after trapping or catching someone exposes the exploitative attitudes of parents like Jim and Elaine, who talk about the adoption process as if it’s both shopping and charity. (Chapter 4)
3. To Daniel, everyone he loved and cared about abandoned him one by one without explanation, including Vivian. To Vivian, she was trying to ensure he had a chance at a better life, a life she could not provide to two young boys on her own in the city. (Chapter 5)
CHAPTERS 6-8
Reading Check
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. Daniel and his mother struggle against the weight of others’ expectations and their own desires. Both are living with a different name and identity than the one they were given at birth, and both make sacrifices to maintain this identity without being able to fully let go of their past. (Chapter 6)
2. His beliefs that women should not be heard and that women are responsible for their own misfortunes make Peilan want to assert her agency. When she becomes pregnant, however, she worries that she has met his low expectations for her, and this leads to her choice to become Polly. (Chapter 7)
3. Both feel so completely pigeonholed by the expectations of their parents and social circle that they fear a lack of agency. Acting in a self-destructive manner feels to them like the only way to have agency. (Chapter 8)
CHAPTERS 9-11
Reading Check
1. Peak coolness; acceptance (Chapter 9)
2. Immigration detention and deportation (Chapter 10)
3. A lack of ambition (Chapter 10)
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. Daniel can be successful at Carlough or as a guitarist in Psychic Hearts, but the two goals are at odds, and both will require him to drop an essential part of himself to fill the role. Both Roland’s and Daniel’s adoptive parents wish to control his talents for their own benefit. Daniel realizes he doesn’t want either goal. (Chapter 9)
2. She left China to avoid an unwanted marriage with a man she did not love, so while she sees the logic behind marrying to obtain a green card, to do so would undermine her reason for emigrating in the first place. (Chapter 10)
3. Polly cannot help but see Kay as a kind of thief, someone who was so sure of her own motherhood she would take someone else’s child. Just as Kay assumes Daniel’s mother left him in a bad situation, both “mothers” resent the other based on assumptions and fear that Daniel will choose the other. They place Daniel in the awkward position of trying to reassure them both when he, as the child, needs reassurance himself. (Chapter 11)
CHAPTERS 12-14
Reading Check
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. Not only does the opportunity to speak Fuzhounese and prepare childhood foods comfort Daniel and affirm his past, but Vivian’s perspective confirms her love for him and the fact that she would not have left him if something bad had not happened to her. (Chapter 12)
2. Like his mother’s affinity for walking near water, music transports Daniel to a place where he can figure himself out. Creating his own music is finding his true self. (Chapter 14)
3. Sharing music represents sharing his true self. When Cody responds in the vulnerable moment with an inaccurate and racist observation of the English he used when he first came to Ridgeborough, it feels like another rejection, leading him to self-sabotage with gambling. (Chapter 14)
CHAPTERS 15-17
Reading Check
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. He wants to find his mother in person, but on another level, the trip provides him with distance from his problems in New York and a chance to figure out his true identity. (Chapter 14)
2. She takes him to the lake in the Summer Palace, a place she comes to when she feels trapped. (Chapter 16)
3. Ko reveals the many ways in which the American immigration system violates human rights and perpetuates abuses. Details include the way in which government agents caused Polly to disappear without a trace; inhumane conditions in the prison, such as solitary confinement; and a sham deportation hearing. Its harm extends beyond its immediate victims to those left behind. (Chapter 17)
CHAPTERS 18-21
Reading Check
Short Answer
Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. Daniel still worries the relationship will fail because of his abandonment trauma. In addition, he is not sure he wants to become an English teacher, as she wishes. Finally, he left loose ends in New York and misses the city. Staying with her will mean losing part of himself. (Chapters 18-19)
2. Polly and Deming have realized that they can be whole again, on their own terms, and so both mother and son can confidently strike out on their own. They have been able to work through their separate but shared trauma and can move ahead with their lives. (Chapters 20-21)
3. Going to Fuzhou was Daniel’s choice, but it was not one he trusted. By contrast, after reconciling with his mother and trying life in China, he realizes that he is just staying to please her, so he leaves to figure out his own path. This time, he trusts that he is on the right path. (Chapter 21)
