Transnational Negotiations: Transracial Adoption and Narratives of Return in Lisa Ko's The *Leavers

The first Chinese arrived in New York in 1847 and founded Manhattan's Chinatown. New York later saw a significant influx of Chinese in the late 1870s when anti-Chinese violence was mounting in the American West; thus began the extended history of the Chinese American community in the Big Apple. While there are differences and similarities among the different generations of Chinese immigrants, new immigrant writing is marked by a special interest in metropolitan New York. This Atlantic turn away from the predominantly transpacific narrative of Chinese America may have been influenced by the fact that in the 1970s New York City replaced San Francisco as the largest gathering place of Chinese Americans in North America. This ethnogeographical shift is faithfully reflected in the immigrant writing of the new millennium, such as Lisa Ko's The Leavers (2017). In The Leavers, Ko reveals her strong racial and social consciousness by writing about the precarious lives of undocumented Chinese workers and the affective cost of transracial adoption in her debut novel. Peilan, the immigrant mother from Fuzhou, goes into debt to be smuggled into New York only to find herself entrapped in another sweatshop. Her American-born son Deming is adopted by a white family when she is imprisoned in a camp for undocumented immigrants. This paper analyzes the struggles of transnational negotiations in The Leavers, emphasizing particularly on the son's perspective regarding issues of transracial adoption and narratives of return, to explore the complex and changing ethnic historiography of Chinese America.