The Leavers

One week later, now in Ridgeborough, Deming feels uncomfortable with the Wilkinsons. His relationship with them is distant. They don’t like him speaking in Chinese, thinking it will affect his fluency in English, and name him “Daniel.” Throughout these new cultural experiences, Deming keeps mementos of his mother, which Vivian has left him. The Wilkinsons enroll Deming in middle school, where he feels “like sleepwalking, murky and addled, as if he’d wake up and be back in the Bronx with a finger snap” (52). Deming hears Kay and Peter talking one night, Kay mentioning her awkwardness as a parent. Kay wants to connect with Deming and muses if the problem isn’t Deming being Chinese, but Peter assures her “issues are colorblind” (57). Deming tries to please them, but he feels “if he could love Peter and Kay, they could leave too” (58). Every night Deming calls what he remembers as his mother’s cell phone. He remembers falling from a swing several months before his mother left and her urging him to “be strong” (66). He passes his first day at school alone and imagines himself being from another planet on a mission. Eventually, he makes friends with Roland, also an outcast for being the son of a white mother and a Hispanic father, and begins to adapt to Ridgeborough.