by Michelle Kuo
In my time in the Delta I had often thought about free will and how the question of its existence was central to rural black life. The looming question—the invisible shadow—that worried and confused the kids in Helena was this: Would you rise higher than those around you? So much of anyone’s identity is determined long before birth. But among my classmates at law school, I’d begun to wonder how it had happened that we, the entitled, could not comprehend, could not embrace, how free we really were—or at least how much freer than most.
Most of my classmates at Harvard had accepted their offers to work for law firms. For a few, law school debt—and the need to pay it off—was very real; for others, working at a law firm really was their dream; but most weren’t sure why they’d accepted. A friend told me he’d just gotten an offer from Arnold & Porter. I had never heard of it, but from his tone I understood that this was an important firm.
I asked, “Are you going to take it?”
His lips twitched. “I’m not sure.” He looked trapped by his good fortune.
I tended to treat people like mirrors, as if they carried secrets about myself, and now, searching his face, I wondered: Was this who I was, too? Did I just go about my life half-making decisions to justify my preferences and comforts?
Standing by my car outside the jail, I thought again of Ivan Ilyich. He behaves exactly as he should. From his bench he commands petitioners. He talks to them in a certain way, aware of his power but softening the fact of it. In every way, he tells himself, his life has been correct, decent, and good. But in general Ivan Ilyich’s life went on as he believed life ought to go: easily, pleasantly, and decently….In all this one had to know how to exclude all that was raw, vital—which always disrupts the regular flow of official business.
I thought I’d been brave to move from the East to the West Coast; I’d rejected the law-firm offer, chosen to work at a nonprofit, and was starting afresh. Correct, decent, good, Ivan had thought about his life—had I started thinking this way, too? Ivan, it seemed, had not done anything explicitly wrong. But in his educated social circles, he’d developed an attitude, an orientation toward others. This attitude was one of expectation that his life would be comfortable rather than uncomfortable, that he could be spared an exercised conscience.
Had I turned my back on all that was vital in life? As I thought about Patrick in jail, my conscience started to agitate.
It occurred to [Ivan] that those barely noticeable impulses he had felt to fight against what highly placed people considered good…that they might have been the real thing, and all the rest might have been not right. His work, and his living conditions, and his family, and these social and professional interests—all might have been not right. He tried to defend it all to himself. And he suddenly felt all the weakness of what he was defending. And there was nothing to defend.
Alone on the street, I tried to figure out what had just happened between Patrick and me, no longer teacher and student. What had we talked about, really? Somehow I had thought we would have more to say to each other. There was a cliché about teaching: Once a teacher, always a teacher. But there was truth to it. Your sense of responsibility to your students never leaves you. You wonder about the different paths they might have taken. You wonder if you failed them.
A voice inside said, If you hadn’t left, Patrick might not have ended up in prison. You owe him something. And the voice continued, Stay here. Drop everything and stay a little while.
Don’t be crazy, I argued back. Your job starts in three weeks. What, you’re going to call your future boss and say, Sorry, I can’t come after all? And the funders who interviewed you and gave you money to work there, what will you say? Hey, I need to go to Arkansas to…do what? It’s irresponsible; it’s flaky. You’re an adult now; act like one. And Mom and Dad actually approve of you; they think you’ve gotten your act together; you took your bar exam and probably passed; you have a job and they like California. Mom just helped you move in all your crap, all those dresses and dishes—where are you going to store it all? And a subletter—you’d need to find a subletter for your room. Adina is going to hate you. She had to look at so many apartments before she found this one.
You’re not thinking straight, I told the voice, because you feel bad that you’ve moved on and Patrick’s here in jail. You feel bad that he has a baby daughter and he’s afraid to think about her. You feel bad that writing about Patrick meant so much to you and then turned out to mean nothing to Patrick. You feel bad that you made him read when he didn’t know how to read anymore. You feel bad because the essay was really not about him, it was more about you, about who you used to be. How naïve of you to think that when you let him read on a beanbag in your classroom, when you sat on his porch, that you changed his life. Now you see Patrick in jail, alone, not expecting anything of you or anybody—Patrick blaming himself, Patrick not knowing what he was charged for, Patrick not even knowing how many times he stabbed a person, just knowing he took away a life. Now you know who you aren’t, who you weren’t.
No, said the voice. That’s cynical. Why should optimism be a crime? You were a believer. When you woke up each day, you decided that showing up to work mattered. And it did. Remember the kids’ silence as they read? You didn’t have to enforce it. Because everyone understood: For twenty minutes or so they had gone somewhere new, someplace private and safe. It’s in moments like these that we realize how capable we are of quiet and care: The consciousness is filled to the brim. From the outside of the Delta classroom, it can look hokey or insignificant. From the outside, it’s smarter to talk about the Delta with a certain educated tone of fatalism mixed with ambition: “Until there’s a massive redistribution of wealth and a national effort to revitalize this historically neglected region,” you might intone, adjusting your glasses, “there’s very little hope.” But on the inside nothing seemed so sure. On the inside so much could happen in one day, in one hour.
And then you left. You justified your leaving by saying you wanted to learn the law, because it was a powerful language to know. And perhaps you can make some broader change. But maybe you’ve forgotten the language you started to learn in the Delta: the one that allowed you to connect with people from different circumstances. This is a powerful language, too, and maybe you’ve forgotten it. Maybe this is the only language that matters. Sure, yes, you’re going to work for a nonprofit. But in a place like New York or the Bay Area, a nonprofit has plenty of educated do-gooders to choose from. You’re simply more disposable. It’s not wrong to want to come back to the Delta. It’s not shameful to be motivated by the feeling of being needed. Don’t block out your desire to feel a part of what is raw and vital. To embrace what is not part of official business. Just—don’t—think.
My defenses began to soften. I thought about what I could do here, if I decided to come back. Help him with his murder case? But the case was straightforward; my teacher had said so. I could teach again. But where? Stars had shut down. Maybe the Boys & Girls Club: I never got to see the new facility I helped build. I could write more, about the Delta. But writing was pointless if all I had to say was It’s too late.
Don’t write: Writing is part of the problem. Writing requires that you close the door. It’s what sad people do. You were a person who did stuff, stayed close to people: You answered the cellphone when a student called, you were that person people would talk about and say, She was there for me.
Accept this picture of what happened: You left prematurely. You stumbled upon law school, showing up basically by accident. You gave in to your parents. You were weak. You thought that teaching was not prestigious. You thought the Delta was not a place to make a life.
But what can staying do? I wondered. Was staying just a way to make myself feel better, and make up for what I didn’t do before? A way to get back to a time when, for me and Patrick, all paths seemed possible.
Don’t think. Just come back. If you don’t come back now, it’ll be too late for Patrick. If you don’t c
ome back now, it’ll be too late for you: You’ll never come back.
—
THE DRIVE FROM Arkansas to Indiana took eight hours. Somewhere in Missouri, I pulled into a service station to fill my tires with air. I could feel my heart beat in my chest.
First I needed to tell the source of my funding: the director of my fellowship, famed for her exacting speech, ironclad memory, and knockout red suits.
I called her.
“I need to see through Patrick’s case,” I said. She had read the Times piece, so I didn’t have to explain who he had been to me. “I need enough time to run through his options with him. And I just feel like I’ve been running away from the Delta and have unfinished business there.”
“How much time do you need?”
I didn’t know. “Until May,” I tried. I was just guessing. May sounded like enough time for me to reconnect but not so much that she would say no.
She calculated. “Seven months? Is that enough time?”
“Yes. Seven months,” I repeated, as if I had determined this beforehand.
I called the director of Centro, my organization. She asked, “Are you truly planning to come to California? Otherwise, we need to make preparations.”
For a moment I tried to imagine ditching California and staying in Helena permanently. Drinking beer on the porch, gardening alongside the kids, and wearing a big hat—I’d be moral and authentic, physically strong, like Tolstoy’s hero Levin in Anna Karenina, pushing a wheelbarrow and singing a tune he picked up from the muzhiks. But then I remembered all my drives to Memphis alone when my coupled friends went on vacation, and the old man who accosted me once in a grocery store, saying he fought the Japs in World War II. I couldn’t tell if he was expressing alliance or enmity; that depended on what kind of Asian he saw.
“No, no, I’m not going to stay,” I said. “I’ve been practicing my Spanish,” I added, hoping she wouldn’t say anything in Spanish. Otherwise, I’d say, Hello, hello? and hang up. But she continued in English: “Good luck, keep us posted.”
Then I had to call Adina about our apartment in San Francisco. She had just helped my mom and me move in, unpacking dishes and lamps. I apologized. I insisted that she keep my security deposit. I said I was flying back to get my stuff.
Last—my parents. Last because I feared them the most. The past couple of years had been rough. I had made the mistake of telling them a first-year associate’s salary at a New York law firm. They had no idea that a lawyer made so much. The idea that I would turn it down seemed crazy to them. A family fight ensued. In its dynamic of expectation and disappointment, it reprised the fight we’d had two years before in the Delta. But this time I had learned: Don’t ask for permission; stand firm. My brother took my side, which helped. By the time graduation rolled around, my mom and dad had altogether forgotten about the fight. “Come home,” they said; they knew I needed a place to study for the bar. “We’ve always supported what you want,” they continued, model revisionist historians.
Home has always been the best place to study. In our house, a person studying is pampered like a king. Nobody interrupts you. I made a hamlet out of their kitchen table, a castle out of books and notes. My dad listened as I recited tedious rules on contracts and torts, occasionally interrupting with, “That’s a stupid law; here’s why.” My mother popped in with fruit and tea. Cutting a mango, she sliced the meatiest parts onto a plate for me and left herself the core to gnaw on.
My best friend was getting married two days before my bar exam, and my parents had looked on dubiously as I packed my suitcase, a dress smashed under a mound of heavy tomes. “I’ve never heard of anybody going to a wedding before a big test,” my dad observed. But he didn’t say anything more.
The night before I left, my mother took me aside to tell me that she, too, had had a momentous exam, back in Taiwan. A talented high school student, she wanted to be a doctor. To do so, she had to take a battery of tests at the end of her senior year. In other words, the fulfillment of her professional dream hinged on a test she took as a teenager. It is a trauma-producing system: As in Japan or Korea or China, shortly before or after the exam, suicides could be counted on. On the day of the physics test, she panicked. She failed. She told me her score and looked away. I saw her face before she turned, and in this moment, especially, I loved her deeply.
My mother cooked alone, cleaned alone, and worked full-time. In her late twenties, her big dream was to get a Ph.D. She enrolled at Michigan State. But it was hard with two kids, not to mention her aging in-laws and sister-in-law, all crowded in our house; she dropped out. Like a lot of women of her generation, especially immigrant women, she got little encouragement. Much later, she read an essay I wrote, a seed of this book. She wrote: I read second time this morning, and I tears, And read again, It is real touched and gave people’s feeling that it is real story. Keep writing, write down all your feeling every day.
When I was growing up, my father had waited outside until my piano lessons finished, but my mother often tried to catch the tail end, captivated by my piano teacher. “How do you make the sound last?” my teacher would ask me, unaware of her question’s existential agitation. She’d strike a key. The sound would soar then fade. We’d be quiet. She’d strike again. We’d wait. The sound would last. “Now you try,” she’d say. “Remember the penny on your wrist.” My mother leaned toward my hand, watching. She was not regulating me, not monitoring my learning—in fact, for a precious moment she had forgotten me. She wished to play herself but thought it would be a luxury. The trope was true: She gave me what she wanted. When I practiced, I could hear her humming along in the kitchen. The clear, bright tones of her voice rose above the vegetables being chopped.
Tiger mom has become a shorthand to describe parents, usually Asian, with rigorous discipline. For me the term fails absolutely. It mistakes a person’s fragility for her power. My mother was authoritarian about learning because she didn’t know how else to be. It was not a choice among pedagogies; it was desperation. Without the success of her children, who would she be?
While I studied for the bar at home, I read Pnin, Nabokov’s hilarious tale of a Russian émigré in upstate New York. The book opens with bald-headed Pnin on a train, on his way to give a lecture, not knowing that he is on the wrong train. I was thrilled. Pnin! Here was the immigrant of my dreams. Not miserabilist Chinese railroad workers, not the coolies spat upon, not the Japanese unjustly interned. Pnin mastering English phrases—okey-dokey and to make a long story short; Pnin captivated by the American washing machine, stuffing it with shorts and handkerchiefs, just to watch them tumble endlessly like dolphins; Pnin triumphant after an excruciating tooth surgery, showing off his new treasure—a set of false teeth, which smiled back at him, and which he frequently took in and out of his mouth to show colleagues. Pnin was mocked cruelly behind his back and called a freak. Pnin had no idea. Poor Pnin! Heroic Pnin!
So Pnin was nothing like my parents—they weren’t clumsy, had never heard of Pushkin, didn’t pronounce difficulty as dzeefeecooltsee. But weren’t they, after all, more like Pnin? Didn’t they have Pninian moments? My mother: “Do lots of yogurt,” thinking yoga and yogurt were the same word. Talking about her first years in America and her discovery of the hamburger, she sighed with happiness. My father slurped his noodles in large ghastly gulps of saliva and hunger; his glasses fogged up—he took off his glasses to improve his speed.
My parents put on no airs. They had been shocked by the amount a lawyer made because they didn’t know a lawyer. My parents’ lack of advice for college, beyond telling me to become a doctor and not to date, was really evidence of how innocuous they turned out to be. So this, after all, explained their dogmatic style of advice—they suspected they couldn’t help me beyond what they’d already done: given me a childhood filled with opportunity. It turned out that, just as I knew Pnin was on the wrong train, I had the power to situate my parents in the world, to write them down. I was stronger than they were.
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Thoughts of my parents continued to flood my mind as I turned in to their driveway. Pnin was lovable because his trauma was hidden. One never said: Foreign Pnin! Immigrant Pnin! Pnin Burdened by History! Here was the pleasure of Pnin: His failure to comprehend was so consistent, and so stubborn, and so masterful, that you forgot the world that failed him. I thought about my parents, who, like Pnin, were products of forces beyond their control. My dad himself was the child of immigrants: His mother and father had left China for Taiwan in 1949, and, like most in that generation of refugees, never saw their family members again. My parents had grown up under martial law in Taiwan and left before it democratized. Their memories of Taiwan remained frozen in the 1970s, when they left. Perhaps, more than they admitted to themselves, they no longer knew the Taiwan that had reared them. And maybe this was why they often reminded me that they’d lived in America longer than I had. They wanted me to regard them as Americans.
In the garage my parents rushed out to greet me, even though it was chilly, already autumn. My dad reached for my luggage; my mother touched my hair. They hadn’t eaten, they’d waited for me.
What would they think of my decision to return to the Delta? I knew they wanted me to get on with my life. They believed I made decisions selfishly, without consideration of them. And they were right: Learning how to disregard their opinions was essential to my life. I hoped they knew I did think of them tenderly.
Over dinner, I tried to speak more Mandarin than usual, something I do whenever I’m attempting to ingratiate myself. I told myself to speak slowly, in short, patient sentences. I’d always spoken English too fast. Though my father could catch most of it, my mother could not. How had we even communicated all these years? What did we talk about? We had needed grades and awards to mediate our relationship. How did the world view me? Did my teachers like me? Was I smart? The grade had answered these questions. The grade had made me legible.
