Lisa Ko: The Leavers

“We drank so much beer! No wonder the neighbors were telling us to keep it quiet.”

“Sit down. Let me do it.”

“You threw me a party.”

“Because I wanted to. You don’t have to repay me.”

She took an orange from one of the plates of leftovers and brought it to the kitchen table. He put the sponge down and watched her peel it, rubbing the rind away with her fingernail, separating the wedges onto a plate, half for her, half for him. He stood over her shoulder and hugged her from behind. Surprised, she held his arms in her hands. Over the years, he had thought about what his life would have been like if Mama and Leon hadn’t left, if Vivian hadn’t taken him to the foster care agency. It was like watching water spread across dry pavement, lines going in all directions. Peter and Kay might have adopted another boy. He could be living in Sunset Park, or in the Bronx or Florida or some other place he’d never heard of. He had imagined his doppelgängers living the lives he hadn’t, in different apartments and houses and cities and towns, with different sets of parents, different languages, but today he could only see himself where he was right now, the particular set of circumstances that had trickled down to this particular life, that would keep trickling in new directions.

He sat down. His mother passed him the visa form and a pen. “I’m going to send it out tomorrow.”

He took an orange slice. All this time, he’d been waiting for his real life to begin: Once he was accepted by Roland’s friends and the band made it big. Once he found his mother. Then, things would change. But his life had been happening all along, in the jolt of the orange juice on his tongue or how he dreamt in two languages, how his students’ faces looked when they figured out the meaning of a new word, the wisp of smoke as he blew out his birthday candles. The surge and turn and crunch of a perfect melody.

“You’re going to New York for Christmas?” his mother said. “To your adoptive family?”

“No, of course not.”

“They call you all the time?”

“I haven’t spoken to them since I came here. This was the first time.”

“They want you to come home, though.”

He was like Tammy, unable to meet his mother’s eyes.

“This is my home.”

“So you’re going to stay? With me?”

It was a funny thing, forgiveness. You could spend years being angry with someone and then realize you no longer felt the same, that your usual mode of thinking had slipped away when you weren’t noticing. He could see, in the flash of worry in his mother’s face as she waited for his reply, like he had heard in Kay and Peter’s shaking voices when they said good-bye to him earlier, that in the past few months, his fear of being unwanted had dissipated. Because Mama — and Kay, and Peter — were trying to convince him that they were deserving of his love, not the other way around.

He ate the bite of orange, took the visa form and uncapped the pen, scanning the paper for where he was supposed to sign.

In the spring, four months after you left, I left, too. Not just Fuzhou, but my life — Yong, my job, our apartment, everyone I knew. I decided to move to Hong Kong. While you were staying with me I had pretended we had never been apart, that Ardsleyville had never happened. But when you left Fuzhou, I understood that I could also leave, and maybe it wasn’t too late.

It was a short flight to Hong Kong, less than two hours, and by the time I had gotten used to being up in the air, the flight attendants were already preparing to land. At the airport I rolled my suitcase, a small one containing all I had packed, through Immigration, then onto a train that took me into the center of the city. I exited onto a street outside a mall, where the cars drove on the left side of the road, not the right. It took me several tries to cross. Even at night, there were still crowds out, people talking in Cantonese, signs flashing in Chinese and English. I had the address of the one-room apartment I’d rented, sight unseen; and tomorrow morning I would start my new job at a school in Kowloon.

At the ferry terminal I bought a ticket, then found a place on the upper deck. The boat rocked in the waves, and as I saw the lights of Kowloon come through the fog, I held the railing, breathless with laughter. How wrong I had been to assume this feeling had been lost forever. This lightheaded uncertainty, all my fear and joy — I could return here, punching the sky. Because I had found her: Polly Guo. Wherever I went next, I would never let her go again.

The breeze my hair blew back, then forward. The water was Minjiang, New York, Fuzhou, but most of all it was you. I thought of the last time you and I had gone to the water together in New York, the summer before I was taken to Ardsleyville. Late August, afternoon edging into evening, the heat lessening its grip, we had walked to a bridge over the Harlem River, spanning the Bronx and Manhattan. The air was soft and thick, and the walkway swayed as cars drove past. The river below was brown and muddy.

We’d stood in the middle of the bridge. You were ten, almost eleven; already you preferred your friends’ company to mine. I’d had to bribe you with a candy bar to get you away from the TV.

I pointed to a building on the Manhattan side. “Can you see who lives there?” I asked, remembering one of our old games.

You shook your head and rolled your eyes.

“Maybe it’s a mother and son,” I said.

Finally, you said, “No, a baseball team.”

“The whole team? Or just a few of them.”

“Everyone lives together in the same apartment. It’s a big apartment.”

“They play at night,” I said. “They sleep during the day.”

You broke into a smile. “They eat french fries. Play catch on the roof.”

“But they never fall off.”

Far below us, the water moved, revealing an umbrella, a mass of plastic bags. The river looked tough, decisive, but it always gave up its secrets.

Now the ferry engine slowed as it approached the dock. A man tossed a rope overboard. “This is Kowloon,” I heard a woman say. We floated to a stop, and I lifted the handle of my suitcase, letting myself be pushed along with the crowd. Soon I would be walking onshore to a new place. The beginning, I knew, was always the best part.

On the bridge above the Harlem River, an ice cream truck had tinkled its song, followed by the snort and stop of a bus. A car had rolled down its window, music pouring out, a woman singing, Some people want it all.

We had stood and listened on the verge of a summer night. Then you’d cupped your hands around your mouth and leaned over the railing, shouted your name into the air. I joined you, shouting mine, and we let our voices rise, leaping and echoing, flying over the city. My heart unclenched. You were growing fast, and soon you would be taller than me, but there was always this game, this song.

We started toward home, the sun coming over the rooftops, and when you began to run I followed, feet pounding the sidewalk, only a moment behind.

The third time he played was on a Tuesday night. The opening act out of four, he sat onstage with his acoustic guitar and looper station, which had the back-up tracks he’d recorded at home in his room. Outside, what seemed like the twentieth snowstorm of the season was grinding up to its chorus, and inside, only one of the tables was occupied, and by members of the next band. A couple had wandered in from the main bar in search of the bathroom and left ten seconds into Daniel’s first song. He’d heard them talking during his short introduction (his name, a hello; he nixed the obligatory quip about the weather), and when they walked out he had wanted to run off stage after them.