The Leavers

Polly tells Daniel that Leon was the one who found her. She had looked for Leon’s family during her days off but had been unable to find him. She works long hours to forget about her losses “until [she] was too tired to be overrun by guilt and crushing sadness” (306). Six months after she arrives at Fuzhou, Leon finally finds her and tells her about Deming being adopted since they thought she wasn’t coming back. Polly and Leon stay for five days at the apartment of a friend of Leon’s. Leon finds out about Polly’s nightmares and gets her sleeping pills. After the five days, Leon offers to leave his family for Polly, but she tells him to go back to them.

Polly takes a class to improve her accent in Mandarin, and her boss finds out she can speak English. This leads to Polly being offered a job as an English teacher. At first, she decides to make money to go back to the US and find Deming. She meets Yong almost a year later. Drawn by the stability and companionship she can have with Yong, Polly marries him. Daniel is angry, thinking she could have done more to contact him as her son.