![]() ![]() Ten years later, it is Michael who tracks down a college dropout with a gambling problem named Daniel Wilkinson and sends a message that, if he is Deming Guo, he has information about his mother. After Peilan disappears, Deming is shuffled into foster care-his new parents are a pair of white academics upstate. When Deming is 6, Yi Ba dies, and the boy rejoins his mother, who now has a boyfriend and lives with him his sister, Vivian and her son, Michael. She sends him back to China to be raised by her aging father. After her baby is born she tries to hide him underneath her sewing machine at work, but clearly she cannot care for him and work enough to repay the loan shark. Gradually the picture comes together-Deming was conceived in China and born in America because his unmarried mother, Peilan, decided she would rather borrow the $50,000 to be smuggled to America than live out her life in her rural village. ![]() ![]() From there, the story moves both forward and backward, intercutting between the narrative of his bumpy path to adulthood and his mother’s testimony. We meet Bronx fifth-grader Deming Guo on the day his mother disappears without a trace. A Chinese woman who works in a New York nail salon doesn’t come home one day her young son is raised by well-meaning strangers who cannot heal his broken heart. ![]()
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