Lisa Ko - The Leavers

“But how can it be bragging if I say I grew up poor?”

“That’s the thing. You didn’t.”

“Sure I did. We lived in an apartment. One bedroom for three people.”

“But you always had enough to eat. You were a city person and you could go to school wherever you wanted.”

“This is the Fuzhou Business Leaders Forum awards. Everyone makes speeches about being from humble beginnings.”

Seeing him there in his underpants made me want to shower him with clothes. “I guess it just seems dishonest.”

“I don’t even want to give this speech. I’m no good at speeches.”

“Take a deep breath before you talk. I do that when I’m teaching a class. Or you can pretend you’re speaking to your friends, like you’re telling me and Zhao a story.”

He tried again. “I come from humble beginnings.”

“You have to project, talk louder.”

He took it from the top, louder this time, his words forced and exaggerated. “I come.” He swept his arm in front of him. “From humble. Beginnings!”

My cell phone buzzed and I grabbed it, saw a string of numbers, the kind I’d been hoping to see every time it had rung over the past month. Five weeks had passed since you called me and I hadn’t called you back. I was scared of what you would say to me, that you’d be angry. I was scared of a lot of things I hadn’t been scared of before.

“Hold on,” I told Yong. “I have to take this. It’s a business call. Keep practicing, I’ll be back in a bit.”

I took the phone and walked down the hall to our guest room, which we used as an office. Shut the door, locked it, and sat on the floor by the window, against the one wall that wasn’t shared with the living room.

“Hello?” I tried to even out the nervousness in my voice.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Deming. I’m glad you called again.”

“Hello, Mama,” you said.

“It’s you,” I whispered, delighted and anxious.

From the living room I could hear Yong repeating the first lines of his speech, varying the intonations of the words. I-come-from-humble-beginnings. I come, from humble. beginnings. I come from humble beginnings?

You told me you were in school, that you had a job and played guitar. Your adoptive parents had insisted on changing your name, not only your first name, but also your last, so there was no longer any trace of me. What the hell kind of name was Daniel Wilkinson? I could never call you that. You told me Vivian had gone to court so that you could get taken in by a white family, but I already knew.

“Deming,” I said, and each time I said your name I felt a tiny thrill, “remember the times we used to ride the subway together? That was fun.”

“We went to Queens and met the other mother and son and pretended they looked like us.”

“They did look like us, didn’t they?”

“Sure.” You paused. “Do you remember what you told me that day?”

My little Deming, freshly returned from China, both of us still without English. Your stubby legs and fat cheeks and oversized winter jacket. Gripping my hand as we crossed the street, afraid of all those fast cars.

“No.” I couldn’t remember; it was so long ago.

There was a knock. The doorknob jiggled, and I heard Yong say, “Polly?”

“I have to go,” I whispered, then said, loudly, “Thank you for your phone call. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

I opened the door. Yong was in the hallway. “Can I run the speech by you again? I think I’ve got it now.”

I nodded, wiping my sweaty palms on my thighs. My smile was taped onto my face.

“Why’d you lock the door?”

Yong was so unsuspecting, it pained me. “A phone call from a client. Aren’t you cold? Let me get you some clothes.” I took a pair of his pants out of the closet, tucking a note into the pocket. On it, I had written: The award for best speech goes to you .

IN CLASS THE NEXT morning, I wished I’d followed my own advice to take a deep breath before speaking when I stopped in the middle of a sentence and couldn’t remember what I wanted to say next. My students stared as I glanced at the screen behind me. The word toward glowed in English. My mind churned; the word meant nothing to me.

On my way to work, I had noticed boys your age, young men scurrying with briefcases to office buildings, or dressed in jeans, balanced on construction scaffolding. You could be one of my students. Instead, you had been raised by strangers. You called an American woman Mom, someone who had never had any indecision about motherhood, who wanted it so badly she had taken another woman’s son as her own. When I thought about this I wanted to scream; I wanted to kill someone. I was afraid that if I let myself cry, I would never stop.

A student in the front row raised her hand. “Teacher, you were talking about prepositions.”

“ Toward is a preposition,” I said, in hope that it would spark the next sentence. “Can anyone tell me what a preposition is?”

The same student raised her hand. “Prepositions work in phrases to give additional information.” She flipped through her notes. “Common English prepositions include under and after and to .”

“Thank you, Mindy.” I pressed a button on the projector and advanced to the next slide. “Let’s review more vocabulary words.”

According to the clock on the wall, it was ten thirty in the morning. In New York, it was nine thirty the night before. New York, and all of America, was taking place in the past.

As the vocabulary words flashed on the screen, I took my phone out and scrolled down to the number I had saved in my contacts list, under your name: DEMING. Your Chinese name, your real name, not this Daniel Wilkinson . The name I gave you. My chest squeezed. I stepped into the hallway, called you, and left a message.

That evening, I bought a pack of cigarettes for the first time in years and chain-smoked on a bench in the park until I was dizzy. I thought of your new voice, your new name, and wanted to talk to you more. A lump remained in my chest, a raw, welling feeling that I needed to kill. I smoked more; then hurried home to shower, brush my teeth, and wash the smell of cigarettes out of my hair before Yong got there.

Later that week we arranged a time to talk, an early evening when I was home alone, and I took the phone out to the balcony to wait for your call. When I had first moved in, Yong and I would sit here on humid nights and make up nicknames for the towers busting up across the city. Silvertop. Boxyred. Uglygray. Week after week, these buildings grew upwards until their construction scaffolding was removed like post-surgery bandages, followed by a buffing and a filing and a final layer of paint. These days, I could no longer recognize Silvertop and Uglygray from the balcony, as they’d long been absorbed into a mass of other buildings, the skyline so cluttered I couldn’t tell which buildings were new and which were less new. But it was comforting to know that nothing stayed the same for too long, that each day was a new opportunity for reinvention. A person could be transformed by a fresh wardrobe or a different nickname, like the ones I gave my Speed English Now students — Kang, a sour-faced boy with orange-streaked hair, became Ken; Mei, the girl with glitter eyeliner, was Mindy.

I waited. At 6:35, the phone rang, and I answered before the first ring was finished.

“I called a little late,” you said.

“I’m always a little late, too.”

“Is this a good time?”

I looked through the sliding glass door, into the apartment. Yong wouldn’t be home for another hour, but I’d have to dress quickly for the awards banquet.

“Yes, my husband is out. I’m on our balcony right now.”