Conflicts With Established Norms In The Leavers By Lisa Ko

Many different conflicts arise in The Leavers by Lisa Ko. The characters have conflicts with established norms as they navigate through their lives. Polly and Daniel, two of the major characters in The Leavers, both experience a similar conflict with a similar solution. As a young girl, Polly feels uncomfortable in her town, and she sets out to find a more comfortable home. Daniel similarly feels confined in his new life after he was adopted, and after a while he realizes he needs to set up a free home for himself. Feelings of detachment while attempting to fit into a new environment leads to characters trying to develop a supportive home because it allows them to feel safe and connected to their surroundings. Characters experience feelings …show more content…

His new school isn’t diverse at all, and he feels uncomfortable, like he is a sore thumb in a school full of kids that look the same. He feels secluded from the rest of the kids, and they don’t approach him either, making him feel even more left out and unconnected to society. Another example exists with Polly, who as a younger girl back in China with her father recognizes, “...that leaving in order to make money was less suspect than leaving to become a new person” (127). As a young adult, Polly wasn’t very happy with her life in China, but she stayed because it was uncommon for a girl to leave town so early, and she didn’t want to just abandon her father. She didn’t feel very safe and at home in her hometown, so when the opportunity came for her to move to the big city to form a new home, to feel safer, she started considering it, because she didn’t fit into all of the cultural expectations her little town had for her. Both Daniel and Polly didn’t fit into their current homes, and they knew that they were being confined. Insecurity in one's community leads characters to try to establish new, more supportive …show more content…

Despite having some difficulty, Daniel eventually establishes himself a comfortable home, where he can be himself. Daniel establishes himself a new home in New York with Michael, a very close friend from his past, and his life is a little rough and he has his problems, but his new home encourages him to be true to who he is, and he no longer feels forced to be someone else just to be safe and fit in. After feeling like he didn’t belong in his Ridgeborough community, he set out to establish a new, more secure home, finally finding one in New York, with Michael and his music. Around the same time as Daniel, Polly leaves her life and moves to Hong Kong, and when she arrives, she thinks, “How wrong I had been to assume this feeling had been lost forever” (325). Polly experiences some difficulties in trying to establish a new home, but eventually she finds a place where she can be herself without fear. After Daniel visited her in her new life in China after she was deported, she realized that she still didn’t feel at home, leading to her moving to Hong