An Ocean of Becoming: Routed Motherhood in Lisa Ko’s The Leavers

Abstract

In Lisa Ko’s award-winning novel The Leavers (2017), protagonist Polly Guo is a leaver, sometimes by circumstance, sometimes by choice. From the shores of the Minjiang to the bridges of the Harlem River, from the waters of the Atlantic to those of the Pacific, Polly wanders the globe with and without her son but always through and with the water. As such, Polly becomes a rare and pronounced example in Asian American literature of a mother-in-transition—or what we are calling the routed mother. As a routed mother, Polly attempts to use physical movement to escape the containment of heteropatriarchal, capitalist understandings of what it means to be a successful mother. Bringing oceanic studies into conversation with the socioeconomic context of Asian American motherhood, this paper argues that waterways highlight—albeit messily, muddily, shiftingly, much like water itself—the sources and strategies of Polly’s containment as a mother and her resistance to that containment. Simultaneously, water reveals Polly’s failure to do so but recasts that routing in a paradigm beyond the dichotomy of success and failure. Ultimately, this article argues that Polly’s story as a routed mother offers an important oceanic counternarrative of motherly success.