by Michelle Kuo
Copyright © 2017 by Michelle Kuo
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
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Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Copper Canyon Press and The Wylie Agency, LLC: “To Paula in Late Spring” from The Shadow of Sirius by W. S. Merwin, copyright © 2009 by W. S. Merwin. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org, and The Wylie Agency, LLC. All rights reserved.
HarperCollins Publishers and Bloodaxe Books: Five haiku of Issa’s, four of Basho’s from The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson & Issa edited with an introduction by Robert Hass, introduction and translation copyright © 1994 by Robert Hass. Unless otherwise noted, all translations copyright © 1994 by Robert Hass. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers and Bloodaxe Books.
W. W. Norton & Company: Nine lines from “Easter Morning” from A Coast of Trees by A. R. Ammons, copyright © 1981 by A. R. Ammons. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company.
The Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency Inc.: “Mysteries, Yes” from Evidence by Mary Oliver (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2009), copyright © 2009 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of The Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Kuo, Michelle author.
Title: Reading with Patrick : a teacher, a student, and a life-changing friendship / Michelle Kuo.
Description: First edition. | New York : Random House, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016036759 | ISBN 9780812997316 | ISBN 9780812997323 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Prisoners—Education—United States. | Alternative schools—United States. | Prisoners—Books and reading—United States. | Race discrimination—United States. | United States—Race relations.
Classification: LCC HV8833 .K86 2017 | DDC 371.826/927092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036759
Ebook ISBN 9780812997323
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Belina Huey
Cover illustration: Shout
v4.1
ep
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Introduction
Part I
Chapter 1: A Raisin in the Sun
Chapter 2: The Free Write
Chapter 3: The Fire Next Time
Part II
Chapter 4: The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Part III
Chapter 5: Crime and Punishment
Chapter 6: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Chapter 7: He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
Chapter 8: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Chapter 9: I Have Read Everything on This Paper (The Guilty Plea)
Chapter 10: To Paula in Late Spring
Part IV
Chapter 11: Easter Morning
Author’s Note
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon’s hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly—once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light….Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
—TONI MORRISON, Nobel Prize Lecture, 1993
INTRODUCTION
* * *
I went to the Mississippi Delta with a specific project: to teach American history through black literature. I imagined teaching literature that had moved me. I envisioned my students galvanized, as I had been in eighth grade, by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and mesmerized, as I had been in high school, by Malcolm X’s autobiography. I wanted my students to read James Baldwin, who wrote about the heroic stoicism of children who walked to school through a jeering mob. Books had taught me to admire a person’s will to confront the world, to evaluate his experience honestly, as Ralph Ellison wrote. Books had changed me, charged me with responsibilities. And I believed books could change the lives of my students. It was unabashedly romantic. I was twenty-two.
My own origins, I believed, were prosaic. I had grown up in western Michigan in the 1980s, the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants. I walked to school, I played piano, I crushed on my brother’s friends. On the first days of snow, my brother and I took our cheap plastic saucers out for a whirl and, during the summer, our parents both at work, we dutifully advanced through booklets of practice SATs, one English and one math, each day.
In certain ways, my parents had acclimated very well to the United States. They stacked foot-high collections of Michael Jackson and Joan Baez records in the living room, voted dutifully, never missing an election, and brought home for dinner the occasional bucket of fried chicken. But in other ways, my parents seemed preoccupied by their status as outsiders. They told me cautionary tales about Asians in America being cowed, killed, and then forgotten. There was Vincent Chin, in Detroit, who in 1982 was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat, a week before his wedding. Chin had worked in an auto industry dominated by anti-Japanese sentiment. “It’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work,” the killers, both white men, had said to him. (Vincent was not Japanese but Chinese American and was born in the States.) The killers served no jail time. “These weren’t the kind of men you send to jail,” the judge stated later. “You don’t make the punishment fit the crime; you make the punishment fit the criminal.”
The other story my parents told me was about a sixteen-year-old kid in the Deep South, somewhere in Louisiana—this time, actually Japanese—whom we referred to as “the Japanese exchange student.” Invited to a Halloween party in the early nineties, he showed up at the wrong house, dressed in a white suit as John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. He rang the doorbell and was shot dead at point-blank range. The shooter was charged with manslaughter. He claimed at court that the kid moved in a strange way; his lawyer told the jury that the killer was protecting his property and that he was an “average Joe,” “one of your neighbors,” someone who liked “sugar in his grits.” He was acquitted.
“Nobody will tell you these stories,” my parents told me. “We tell you because we want you to be careful.”
Be careful: That was the central message. Like many immigrants, my parents were fearful people, and they seemed determined to remind me that tragedy might be right around the corner. It only took one ignorant guy with a gun or a baseball bat. In actual numbers, the likelihood an Asian would be murdered in the 1980s and 1990s was minimal. And yet, in a way, they were telling me something important. They were trying to tell me that we did not figure, at all, in the national imagination. Indeed, until my second year of college, I never learned about Asian Americans, alive or dead, in any class, from any teacher. As an immigrant group, we were convenient on the one hand but also, ultimately, disposable. When we did well, people would
vaguely point to us as evidence of the American dream, but when we were killed for being Asian, the media wasn’t interested. Our dying did not betray any myth or ideal about America. Why? Because we weren’t American. Our faces gave us away.
Like many immigrants, my parents believed education was both a barricade against harm and a ladder to safety and prosperity. Math, in particular, comforted my parents: It was familiar, the same in their little island country of Taiwan as it was in America. You didn’t need to know English. You didn’t need to learn a secret set of social rules to do math. You put in the time, and you learned how to do it. Every single night when my brother and I were in elementary school, our father drilled us with math problems. He yelled when we got answers wrong; we cried; our mother guiltily brought us tea.
I spoke late and was shy. My pursuits were solitary. I could, for instance, play the piano with great feeling—once, in a fit of zeal over a Chopin cadenza, I banged my head against the stand. Like my mother, I disliked indolence, and, in my moderately competitive public schools, this quality got me far. I enjoyed pleasing my parents and, for Christmas in the sixth grade, gift-wrapped my report card. I read copious numbers of books, though in retrospect it couldn’t be said I was particularly good at it. I liked moral absolutes and was poor at grasping parody. I read Don Quixote and thought he was a hero. I read Middlemarch and wanted to be Dorothea, married to a man of knowledge.
But other readings rewarded my earnestness. I felt, for instance, personally summoned when Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote, So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. I read Malcolm X, also from Michigan, whose mother had been committed to a mental hospital in my hometown of Kalamazoo. He warned black readers not to trust white liberals: I don’t care how nice one is to you; the thing you must always remember is that almost never does he really see you as he sees himself, as he sees his own kind. He may stand with you through thin, but not thick. And I heard that same reprimand in James Baldwin, who said that liberals bought all the right books, have all the proper attitudes—but they have no real convictions. And when the chips are down and you expect them to deliver on what you thought they felt, they somehow are not there.
They somehow are not there. I took this allegation literally. Where should I put myself?
In suburban Michigan, in the quiet of my bedroom, these iconic readings of antiracist rhetoric cast a spell over me. They effected a clandestine evangelization of a kid primed to be a good disciple. It was not enough just to learn, just to read. Not enough to admire a black writer. Admiration was nothing. If your passions went unmatched by actions, you were just playing a role, demonstrating that you knew what to praise and what to reject. Education, for me, became laden with a meaning at once specific and spiritual. To be educated meant you read books and entertained ideas that made you feel uncomfortable. It meant looking in the mirror and asking, What have I done that has cost me anything? What authority have I earned to speak? What work have I put in? It meant collapsing your certainties and tearing down your self-fortifications. You should feel unprotected, unarmed, open to attack.
There was a problem, though: Baldwin, King, and Malcolm spoke only of black and white people, and I was neither. What had Asian Americans fought for, died for? What had we cared about? History textbooks and popular culture didn’t tell me. When an Asian-looking man appeared on television (a rare occurrence), my heart beat very fast. The question was never Will this be a joke? but rather What kind of joke will it be? If it turned out I was wrong and he was simply like any other minor character—no accent, no distinguishing characteristics, unmemorable—I felt satisfied and, even, grateful.
I found my role models in books. W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou—each of these people seemed as fearless to me as Asian Americans seemed afraid, as essential to American history as we were irrelevant. I went to Harvard for college and met activists for the first time; the ones I most wanted to emulate had parents who had fought for civil rights and against the Vietnam War in the sixties and seventies. They had been at the March on Washington and heard Martin Luther King, Jr.; they had taken part in the Black Power Movement. I imagined households steeped in conversation. What was it like to inherit a history of passions and resentments? I wondered. Did it make you stronger? Did it embolden you? Was this why I was weak, sweet, obedient?
I steeled myself. I would start from scratch. I would root out like weeds the effects of my parents, the tendency to choose safe options, to get ahead, to feel secure. I would embrace irrational measures. In college I worked at a homeless shelter, where I slept overnight on Fridays and signed up for extra shifts precisely when I had papers due. I dropped pre-med and majored in social studies and gender studies. I edited a small magazine about race and class and sexuality. And when I met other Asian Americans, those bound for consultant and hedge-fund jobs where they would make six figures, my judgment was harsh. Silently, through my narrowed eyes, I told them, I know you, and there’s not too much to know.
As graduation approached, I wondered what I wanted to do. I considered activism; I admired activists the most. But I wasn’t good at it. I’d tried working at a feminist nonprofit, where I had to lobby congressional staffers, and discovered I had a tendency to apologize for intruding on their time. More broadly, I thought it was too difficult to change the minds of the powerfully self-interested. What I wanted to do was straightforward, immediate work in places that needed people. Then I met a recruiter from Teach for America, an Asian American woman who told me that schools in the Mississippi Delta, among the poorest places in the country, faced a drastic teacher shortage.
This was the first time anyone had described to me the state of the present-day Delta. This land of cotton and extreme poverty had served as the stomping grounds of the early Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Bobby Kennedy had toured the Delta as part of a war against poverty. Stokely Carmichael had coined the term Black Power there. The Delta was a place where heroic people had been maimed, shot, arrested, and killed for their belief in change. King himself was killed in Memphis, the Delta’s northernmost tip, while rallying for sanitation workers; James Meredith commenced a legendary solo walk across Mississippi but was shot by a sniper on his second day; and Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper, had been arrested and beaten for organizing people to vote.
Why hadn’t I heard about how people in the Delta lived now? I wondered. Was it because few progressives and members of the educated middle class—the disappointing liberals of Baldwin’s day—wanted to visit, much less live there? I couldn’t help but wonder if this place had vanished from the national consciousness when the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements ended. Was rural black poverty, unattached to white violence, too unglamorous to attract celebrated leaders willing to speak for its cause?
The fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education was approaching, yet on a recent national reading test for fourth graders, 45 percent of white students had passed, as opposed to 13 percent of black students. Considering the Teach for America job, I began to think I could pick up where the Civil Rights Movement had left off. “This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with,” Martin Luther King had said. “Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our Northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.”
I wanted to touch that heroism or at least work in its shadows. I believed in James Baldwin’s injunction: If we…like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others,…we may be able…to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. And I felt I knew what Baldwin asked from me: reparation that required my whole body, my whole being. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime, Baldwin wrote of whites in 1963. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which
they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. Yes, I told myself, I would prove that I was no innocent—Baldwin’s softer, and more damning, term for ignorance. Teaching in Helena, Arkansas, a rural town located in the heart of the Delta, might help acquit me of Baldwin’s charge.
Nearly a thousand miles from my parents, I easily made the decision to go to the Delta. When I told them, over the phone, they were befuddled, then angry. “You’re going to get killed down there,” my mother said.
At this I chortled loudly. This made my father stern.
“It’s not funny, mei mei,” he said, using the Chinese word for little sister. “It’s dangerous down there.”
Growing up, I’d attributed to my mother and father a particular hysteria, a sad misapprehension of America, where I—unlike them—was born, and belonged. This feeling had persisted through college.
I started to tell them the literacy statistics and, detecting my pious tone, my parents cut me off.
“Are you even going to get paid?”
I replied that the local district gave a salary.
“It won’t be much,” my dad said. “You want to throw away your Harvard degree?”
I was hurt. But within a day I was joking about their disapproval with my friends.
—
TEACH FOR AMERICA assigned me to an alternative school incongruously named “Stars,” which the local administration used as a dumping ground for the so-called bad kids. These were the truants and the druggies, the troublemakers and the fighters who had been expelled from the mainstream schools. Stars was a kid’s last shot at staying in the system before being banished, entirely, from public education.
This is where I met Patrick, who was fifteen and in the eighth grade.
