WEBVTT

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I want to talk today
about how reading can change our lives

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and about the limits of that change.

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I want to talk to you about how reading
can give us a shareable world

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of powerful human connection.

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But also about how that connection
is always partial.

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How reading is ultimately
a lonely, idiosyncratic undertaking.

NOTE Paragraph

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The writer who changed my life

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was the great African American
novelist James Baldwin.

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When I was growing up
in Western Michigan in the 1980s,

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there weren't many Asian American writers
interested in social change.

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And so I think I turned to James Baldwin

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as a way to fill this void,
as a way to feel racially conscious.

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But perhaps because I knew
I wasn't myself African American,

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I also felt challenged
and indicted by his words.

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Especially these words:

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"There are liberals
who have all the proper attitudes,

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but no real convictions.

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When the chips are down
and you somehow expect them to deliver,

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they are somehow not there."

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They are somehow not there.

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I took those words very literally.

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Where should I put myself?

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I went to the Mississippi Delta,

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one of the poorest regions
in the United States.

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This is a place shaped
by a powerful history.

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In the 1960s, African Americans
risked their lives to fight for education,

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to fight for the right to vote.

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I wanted to be a part of that change,

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to help young teenagers graduate
and go to college.

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When I got to the Mississippi Delta,

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it was a place that was still poor,

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still segregated,

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still dramatically in need of change.

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My school, where I was placed,

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had no library, no guidance counselor,

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but it did have a police officer.

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Half the teachers were substitutes

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and when students got into fights,

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the school would send them
to the local county jail.

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This is the school where I met Patrick.

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He was 15 and held back twice,
he was in the eighth grade.

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He was quiet, introspective,

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like he was always in deep thought.

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And he hated seeing other people fight.

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I saw him once jump between two girls
when they got into a fight

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and he got himself knocked to the ground.

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Patrick had just one problem.

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He wouldn't come to school.

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He said that sometimes
school was just too depressing

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because people were always fighting
and teachers were quitting.

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And also, his mother worked two jobs
and was just too tired to make him come.

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So I made it my job
to get him to come to school.

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And because I was crazy and 22
and zealously optimistic,

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my strategy was
just to show up at his house

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and say, "Hey, why don't you
come to school?"

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And this strategy actually worked,

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he started to come to school every day.

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And he started to flourish in my class.

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He was writing poetry,
he was reading books.

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He was coming to school every day.

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Around the same time

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that I had figured out
how to connect to Patrick,

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I got into law school at Harvard.

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I once again faced this question,
where should I put myself,

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where do I put my body?

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And I thought to myself

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that the Mississippi Delta
was a place where people with money,

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people with opportunity,

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those people leave.

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And the people who stay behind

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are the people who don't have
the chance to leave.

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I didn't want to be a person who left.

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I wanted to be a person who stayed.

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On the other hand, I was lonely and tired.

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And so I convinced myself
that I could do more change

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on a larger scale if I had
a prestigious law degree.

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So I left.

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Three years later,

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when I was about
to graduate from law school,

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my friend called me

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and told me that Patrick
had got into a fight and killed someone.

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I was devastated.

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Part of me didn't believe it,

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but part of me also knew that it was true.

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I flew down to see Patrick.

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I visited him in jail.

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And he told me that it was true.

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That he had killed someone.

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And he didn't want to talk more about it.

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I asked him what had happened with school

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and he said that he had dropped out
the year after I left.

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And then he wanted
to tell me something else.

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He looked down and he said
that he had had a baby daughter

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who was just born.

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And he felt like he had let her down.

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That was it, our conversation
was rushed and awkward.

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When I stepped outside the jail,
a voice inside me said,

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"Come back.

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If you don't come back now,
you'll never come back."

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So I graduated from law school
and I went back.

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I went back to see Patrick,

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I went back to see if I could help him
with his legal case.

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And this time,
when I saw him a second time,

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I thought I had this great idea, I said,

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"Hey, Patrick, why don't you
write a letter to your daughter,

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so that you can keep her on your mind?"

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And I handed him a pen
and a piece of paper,

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and he started to write.

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But when I saw the paper
that he handed back to me,

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I was shocked.

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I didn't recognize his handwriting,

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he had made simple spelling mistakes.

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And I thought to myself that as a teacher,

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I knew that a student
could dramatically improve

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in a very quick amount of time,

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but I never thought that a student
could dramatically regress.

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What even pained me more,

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was seeing what he had written
to his daughter.

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He had written,

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"I'm sorry for my mistakes,
I'm sorry for not being there for you."

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And this was all he felt
he had to say to her.

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And I asked myself how can I convince him
that he has more to say,

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parts of himself that
he doesn't need to apologize for.

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I wanted him to feel

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that he had something worthwhile
to share with his daughter.

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For every day the next seven months,

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I visited him and brought books.

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My tote bag became a little library.

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I brought James Baldwin,

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I brought Walt Whitman, C.S. Lewis.

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I brought guidebooks to trees, to birds,

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and what would become
his favorite book, the dictionary.

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On some days,

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we would sit for hours in silence,
both of us reading.

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And on other days,

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we would read together,
we would read poetry.

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We started by reading haikus,
hundreds of haikus,

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a deceptively simple masterpiece.

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And I would ask him,
"Share with me your favorite haikus."

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And some of them are quite funny.

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So there's this by Issa:

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"Don't worry, spiders,
I keep house casually."

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And this: "Napped half the day,
no one punished me!"

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And this gorgeous one, which is
about the first day of snow falling,

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"Deer licking first frost
from each other's coats."

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There's something mysterious and gorgeous

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just about the way a poem looks.

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The empty space is as important
as the words themselves.

NOTE Paragraph

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We read this poem by W.S. Merwin,

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which he wrote after he saw
his wife working in the garden

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and realized that they would spend
the rest of their lives together.

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"Let me imagine that we will come again

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when we want to and it will be spring

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We will be no older than we ever were

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The worn griefs will have eased
like the early cloud

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through which morning
slowly comes to itself"

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I asked Patrick what his favorite
line was, and he said,

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"We will be no older than we ever were."

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He said it reminded him
of a place where time just stops,

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where time doesn't matter anymore.

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And I asked him
if he had a place like that,

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where time lasts forever.

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And he said, "My mother."

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When you read a poem
alongside someone else,

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the poem changes in meaning.

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Because it becomes personal
to that person, becomes personal to you.

NOTE Paragraph

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We then read books, we read so many books,

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we read the memoir of Frederick Douglass,

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an American slave who taught
himself to read and write

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and who escaped to freedom
because of his literacy.

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I had grown up thinking
of Frederick Douglass as a hero

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and I thought of this story
as one of uplift and hope.

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But this book put Patrick
in a kind of panic.

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He fixated on a story Douglass told
of how, over Christmas,

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masters give slaves gin

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as a way to prove to them
that they can't handle freedom.

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Because slaves would be
stumbling on the fields.

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Patrick said he related to this.

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He said that there are people in jail
who, like slaves,

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don't want to think about their condition,

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because it's too painful.

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Too painful to think about the past,

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too painful to think
about how far we have to go.

NOTE Paragraph

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His favorite line was this line:

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"Anything, no matter what,
to get rid of thinking!

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It was this everlasting thinking
of my condition that tormented me."

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Patrick said that Douglass was brave
to write, to keep thinking.

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But Patrick would never know
how much he seemed like Douglass to me.

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How he kept reading,
even though it put him in a panic.

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He finished the book before I did,

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reading it in a concrete
stairway with no light.

NOTE Paragraph

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And then we went on
to read one of my favorite books,

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Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead,"

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which is an extended letter
from a father to his son.

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He loved this line:

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"I'm writing this in part to tell you

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that if you ever wonder
what you've done in your life ...

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you have been God's grace to me,

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a miracle, something more than a miracle."

NOTE Paragraph

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Something about this language,
its love, its longing, its voice,

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rekindled Patrick's desire to write.

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And he would fill notebooks upon notebooks

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with letters to his daughter.

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In these beautiful, intricate letters,

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he would imagine him and his daughter
going canoeing down the Mississippi river.

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He would imagine them
finding a mountain stream

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with perfectly clear water.

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As I watched Patrick write,

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I though to myself,

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and I now ask all of you,

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how many of you have written a letter
to somebody you feel you have let down?

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It is just much easier
to put those people out of your mind.

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But Patrick showed up every day,
facing his daughter,

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holding himself accountable to her,

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word by word with intense concentration.

NOTE Paragraph

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I wanted in my own life

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to put myself at risk in that way.

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Because that risk reveals
the strength of one's heart.

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Let me take a step back
and just ask an uncomfortable question.

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Who am I to tell this story,
as in this Patrick story?

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Patrick's the one who lived with this pain

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and I have never been hungry
a day in my life.

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I thought about this question a lot,

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but what I want to say is that this story
is not just about Patrick.

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It's about us,

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it's about the inequality between us.

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The world of plenty

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that Patrick and his parents
and his grandparents

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have been shut out of.

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In this story, I represent
that world of plenty.

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And in telling this story,
I didn't want to hide myself.

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Hide the power that I do have.

NOTE Paragraph

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In telling this story,
I wanted to expose that power

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and then to ask,

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how do we diminish
the distance between us?

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Reading is one way to close that distance.

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It gives us a quiet universe
that we can share together,

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that we can share in equally.

NOTE Paragraph

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You're probably wondering now
what happened to Patrick.

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Did reading save his life?

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It did and it didn't.

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When Patrick got out of prison,

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his journey was excruciating.

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Employers turned him away
because of his record,

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his best friend, his mother,
died at age 43

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from heart disease and diabetes.

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He's been homeless, he's been hungry.

NOTE Paragraph

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So people say a lot of things
about reading that feel exaggerated to me.

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Being literate didn't stop him
form being discriminated against.

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It didn't stop his mother from dying.

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So what can reading do?

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I have a few answers to end with today.

NOTE Paragraph

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Reading charged his inner life

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with mystery, with imagination,

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with beauty.

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Reading gave him images that gave him joy:

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mountain, ocean, deer, frost.

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Words that taste of a free, natural world.

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Reading gave him a language
for what he had lost.

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How precious are these lines
from the poet Derek Walcott?

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Patrick memorized this poem.

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"Days that I have held,

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days that I have lost,

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days that outgrow, like daughters,

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my harboring arms."

NOTE Paragraph

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Reading taught him his own courage.

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Remember that he kept reading
Frederick Douglass,

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even though it was painful.

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He kept being conscious,
even though being conscious hurts.

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Reading is a form of thinking,

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that's why it's difficult to read
because we have to think.

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And Patrick chose to think,
rather than to not think.

00:16:16.000 --> 00:16:19.958
And last, reading gave him a language
to speak to his daughter.

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Reading inspired him to want to write.

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The link between reading
and writing is so powerful.

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When we begin to read,

00:16:30.875 --> 00:16:32.958
we begin to find the words.

00:16:33.958 --> 00:16:38.601
And he found the words
to imagine the two of them together.

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He found the words

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to tell her how much he loved her.

NOTE Paragraph

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Reading also changed
our relationship with each other.

00:16:50.000 --> 00:16:52.059
It gave us an occasion for intimacy,

00:16:52.083 --> 00:16:54.976
to see beyond our points of view.

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And reading took an unequal relationship

00:16:57.708 --> 00:17:00.375
and gave us a momentary equality.

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When you meet somebody as a reader,

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you meet him for the first time,

00:17:07.083 --> 00:17:08.791
newly, freshly.

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There is no way you can know
what his favorite line will be.

00:17:14.458 --> 00:17:17.666
What memories and private griefs he has.

00:17:18.833 --> 00:17:22.833
And you face the ultimate privacy
of his inner life.

00:17:23.666 --> 00:17:27.101
And then you start to wonder,
"Well, what is my inner life made of?

00:17:27.125 --> 00:17:30.375
What do I have that's worthwhile
to share with another?"

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00:17:33.000 --> 00:17:34.333
I want to close

00:17:36.208 --> 00:17:40.500
on some of my favorite lines
from Patrick's letters to his daughter.

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"The river is shadowy in some places

00:17:44.125 --> 00:17:47.393
but the light shines
through the cracks of trees ...

00:17:47.417 --> 00:17:50.976
On some branches
hang plenty of mulberries.

00:17:51.000 --> 00:17:54.458
You stretch your arm
straight out to grab some."

00:17:56.042 --> 00:17:58.476
And this lovely letter, where he writes,

00:17:58.500 --> 00:18:02.851
"Close your eyes and listen
to the sounds of the words.

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I know this poem by heart

00:18:05.083 --> 00:18:07.917
and I would like you to know it, too."

NOTE Paragraph

00:18:09.375 --> 00:18:11.184
Thank you so much everyone.

NOTE Paragraph

00:18:11.208 --> 00:18:14.500
(Applause)