The healing power of reading

Reading and writing can be acts of courage that bring us closer to others and ourselves. Author Michelle Kuo shares how teaching reading skills to her students in the Mississippi Delta revealed the bridging power of the written word -- as well as the limitations of its power.

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

and about the limits of that change.

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

of powerful human connection.

But also about how that connection
is always partial.

How reading is ultimately
a lonely, idiosyncratic undertaking.

The writer who changed my life

was the great African American
novelist James Baldwin.

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

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

And so I think I turned to James Baldwin

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

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

I also felt challenged
and indicted by his words.

Especially these words:

"There are liberals
who have all the proper attitudes,

but no real convictions.

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

they are somehow not there."

They are somehow not there.

I took those words very literally.

Where should I put myself?

I went to the Mississippi Delta,

one of the poorest regions
in the United States.

This is a place shaped
by a powerful history.

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

to fight for the right to vote.

I wanted to be a part of that change,

to help young teenagers graduate
and go to college.

When I got to the Mississippi Delta,

it was a place that was still poor,

still segregated,

still dramatically in need of change.

My school, where I was placed,

had no library, no guidance counselor,

but it did have a police officer.

Half the teachers were substitutes

and when students got into fights,

the school would send them
to the local county jail.

This is the school where I met Patrick.

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

He was quiet, introspective,

like he was always in deep thought.

And he hated seeing other people fight.

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

and he got himself knocked to the ground.

Patrick had just one problem.

He wouldn't come to school.

He said that sometimes
school was just too depressing

because people were always fighting
and teachers were quitting.

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

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

And because I was crazy and 22
and zealously optimistic,

my strategy was
just to show up at his house

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

And this strategy actually worked,

he started to come to school every day.

And he started to flourish in my class.

He was writing poetry,
he was reading books.

He was coming to school every day.

Around the same time

that I had figured out
how to connect to Patrick,

I got into law school at Harvard.

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

where do I put my body?

And I thought to myself

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

people with opportunity,

those people leave.

And the people who stay behind

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

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

I wanted to be a person who stayed.

On the other hand, I was lonely and tired.

And so I convinced myself
that I could do more change

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

So I left.

Three years later,

when I was about
to graduate from law school,

my friend called me

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

I was devastated.

Part of me didn't believe it,

but part of me also knew that it was true.

I flew down to see Patrick.

I visited him in jail.

And he told me that it was true.

That he had killed someone.

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

I asked him what had happened with school

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

And then he wanted
to tell me something else.

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

who was just born.

And he felt like he had let her down.

That was it, our conversation
was rushed and awkward.

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

"Come back.

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

So I graduated from law school
and I went back.

I went back to see Patrick,

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

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

I thought I had this great idea, I said,

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

so that you can keep her on your mind?"

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

and he started to write.

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

I was shocked.

I didn't recognize his handwriting,

he had made simple spelling mistakes.

And I thought to myself that as a teacher,

I knew that a student
could dramatically improve

in a very quick amount of time,

but I never thought that a student
could dramatically regress.

What even pained me more,

was seeing what he had written
to his daughter.

He had written,

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

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

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

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

I wanted him to feel

that he had something worthwhile
to share with his daughter.

For every day the next seven months,

I visited him and brought books.

My tote bag became a little library.

I brought James Baldwin,

I brought Walt Whitman, C.S. Lewis.

I brought guidebooks to trees, to birds,

and what would become
his favorite book, the dictionary.

On some days,

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

And on other days,

we would read together,
we would read poetry.

We started by reading haikus,
hundreds of haikus,

a deceptively simple masterpiece.

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

And some of them are quite funny.

So there's this by Issa:

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

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

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

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

There's something mysterious and gorgeous

just about the way a poem looks.

The empty space is as important
as the words themselves.

We read this poem by W.S. Merwin,

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

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

"Let me imagine that we will come again

when we want to and it will be spring

We will be no older than we ever were

The worn griefs will have eased
like the early cloud

through which morning
slowly comes to itself"

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

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

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

where time doesn't matter anymore.

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

where time lasts forever.

And he said, "My mother."

When you read a poem
alongside someone else,

the poem changes in meaning.

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

We then read books, we read so many books,

we read the memoir of Frederick Douglass,

an American slave who taught
himself to read and write

and who escaped to freedom
because of his literacy.

I had grown up thinking
of Frederick Douglass as a hero

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

But this book put Patrick
in a kind of panic.

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

masters give slaves gin

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

Because slaves would be
stumbling on the fields.

Patrick said he related to this.

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

don't want to think about their condition,

because it's too painful.

Too painful to think about the past,

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

His favorite line was this line:

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

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

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

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

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

He finished the book before I did,

reading it in a concrete
stairway with no light.

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

Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead,"

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

He loved this line:

"I'm writing this in part to tell you

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

you have been God's grace to me,

a miracle, something more than a miracle."

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

rekindled Patrick's desire to write.

And he would fill notebooks upon notebooks

with letters to his daughter.

In these beautiful, intricate letters,

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

He would imagine them
finding a mountain stream

with perfectly clear water.

As I watched Patrick write,

I thought to myself,

and I now ask all of you,

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

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

But Patrick showed up every day,
facing his daughter,

holding himself accountable to her,

word by word with intense concentration.

I wanted in my own life

to put myself at risk in that way.

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

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

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

Patrick's the one who lived with this pain

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

I thought about this question a lot,

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

It's about us,

it's about the inequality between us.

The world of plenty

that Patrick and his parents
and his grandparents

have been shut out of.

In this story, I represent
that world of plenty.

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

Hide the power that I do have.

In telling this story,
I wanted to expose that power

and then to ask,

how do we diminish
the distance between us?

Reading is one way to close that distance.

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

that we can share in equally.

You're probably wondering now
what happened to Patrick.

Did reading save his life?

It did and it didn't.

When Patrick got out of prison,

his journey was excruciating.

Employers turned him away
because of his record,

his best friend, his mother,
died at age 43

from heart disease and diabetes.

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

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

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

It didn't stop his mother from dying.

So what can reading do?

I have a few answers to end with today.

Reading charged his inner life

with mystery, with imagination,

with beauty.

Reading gave him images that gave him joy:

mountain, ocean, deer, frost.

Words that taste of a free, natural world.

Reading gave him a language
for what he had lost.

How precious are these lines
from the poet Derek Walcott?

Patrick memorized this poem.

"Days that I have held,

days that I have lost,

days that outgrow, like daughters,

my harboring arms."

Reading taught him his own courage.

Remember that he kept reading
Frederick Douglass,

even though it was painful.

He kept being conscious,
even though being conscious hurts.

Reading is a form of thinking,

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

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

And last, reading gave him a language
to speak to his daughter.

Reading inspired him to want to write.

The link between reading
and writing is so powerful.

When we begin to read,

we begin to find the words.

And he found the words
to imagine the two of them together.

He found the words

to tell her how much he loved her.

Reading also changed
our relationship with each other.

It gave us an occasion for intimacy,

to see beyond our points of view.

And reading took an unequal relationship

and gave us a momentary equality.

When you meet somebody as a reader,

you meet him for the first time,

newly, freshly.

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

What memories and private griefs he has.

And you face the ultimate privacy
of his inner life.

And then you start to wonder,
"Well, what is my inner life made of?

What do I have that's worthwhile
to share with another?"

I want to close

on some of my favorite lines
from Patrick's letters to his daughter.

"The river is shadowy in some places

but the light shines
through the cracks of trees ...

On some branches
hang plenty of mulberries.

You stretch your arm
straight out to grab some."

And this lovely letter, where he writes,

"Close your eyes and listen
to the sounds of the words.

I know this poem by heart

and I would like you to know it, too."

Thank you so much everyone.

(Applause)