by Lisa Ko
First published 2017
Deming Guo wakes up one morning expecting his mother Polly to return from her shift at the nail salon. She never comes back. No one knows where the undocumented Chinese immigrant has gone. Deming waits and searches, but Polly has vanished without a trace. At eleven years old, he faces life without the only family he has ever known. White professors from upstate adopt him and rename him Daniel Wilkinson. They move him from his Bronx neighborhood to a small college town where everything feels foreign. His new parents want him to fit in and forget his past. Daniel cannot reconcile their expectations with his memories of Polly and the community that raised him. As he grows into an aimless young man, he struggles with questions about identity and belonging. The story also follows Polly's journey, revealing a woman caught between love and survival. She makes impossible choices while living in fear. Ko moves between New York and China to show how immigration tears families apart and how both mother and son learn to carry their losses.
Genres: literary-fiction, contemporary, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, found-family
Setting: Bronx, China, New York
Period: 21st-century
352 pages · Kindle Edition · Algonquin Books
Content warnings: racism