Lisa Ko: The Leavers

Big love to the VONA/Voices diaspora. I’m especially grateful for the wisdom of Elmaz Abinader, David Mura, and Junot Díaz. Thanks to Emily Raboteau, Linsey Abrams, Judy Sternlight, and my novel workshop-mates for seeing the possibility in the early days, and to the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, where I first found community.

This novel wouldn’t be what it is without Sunita Dhurandhar, Serena Lin, and Melissa Rivero, who read drafts, wrote with me, and shared their generosity and brilliance. Thank you to Lorelei Russ, Amelia Blanquera, Zohra Saed, Melissa Hung, Glendaliz Camacho, Grace Lee, and all my friends who encouraged, listened, and laughed with me while I was writing this book, as well as everyone who tolerated my many questions in the name of research, including Vin Ferraro, Howard Myint, Brendan Crosby, Michael Maffei, Retha Powers, and Linlin Liang.

To my parents, Alfonso and Lilian Ko, my original entourage: thank you for so many things, including your grind, heart, exuberance, love of music and dancing, and teaching me how to see life as narrative and the importance of asking tough questions.

To Julman Tolentino, whose love and understanding changed everything: thank you for a building a home with me, and for long talks about Daniel and Polly.

I never could have written this book without the support of and the fellow artists I’ve met through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency (which finally saw me over the finish line), Hawthornden Castle, the MacDowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, Writers Omi at Ledig House, the I-Park Foundation, the Anderson Center, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Paden Institute, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, the Van Lier Fund, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Xiu Ping Jiang, Cirila Baltazar Cruz, Encarnación Bail Romero: I am in your debt. Nina Bernstein’s 2009 New York Times article “Mentally Ill and in Immigration Limbo” provided the spark. Numerous other sources offered guidance in shaping this novel, including Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, edited by Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin; Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang; Smuggled Chinese by Ko-lin Chin; Golden Venture, directed by Peter Cohn; Last Train Home, directed by Lixin Fan; Wo Ai Ni Mommy, directed by Stephanie Wang-Breal; the Transracial Abductees website; and articles by Patrick Radden Keefe, Ginger Thompson, and Kai Chang. I’ve taken fictional liberties with the material, and any inaccuracies in the novel are purely mine.

LISA KO’s fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2016, Narrative, Copper Nickel, the Asian Pacific American Journal, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Writers OMI at Ledig House, the Jerome Foundation, and Blue Mountain Center, among others. A founding coeditor of Hyphen and a fiction editor at Drunken Boat, Ko was born in Queens and lives in Brooklyn.