Reading with Patrick

“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 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 […] I never learned about Asian Americans, alive or dead, in any class, from any teacher […] When we did well, people would vaguely point to us as evidence of the American dream, but when were killed for being Asian, the media wasn’t interested.”

Kuo continues to contemplate the lesson that her parents were trying to teach her by narrating the stories of Vincent Chin’s murder and that of the Japanese exchange student killed by a man who later used the “castle doctrine,” or protection of his home, as a defense. Kuo considers the precariousness of life as an Asian American. On the one hand, White America would occasionally use the community as a “model minority”—pointing to them as an example of what other communities could achieve if they developed more discipline. On the other hand, they were just as vulnerable to the forms of discrimination that blighted other non-White groups.

“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.” 

Kuo decided in college that she would not be like so many liberals, particularly White liberals, who paid lip service to social progress but had no interest in facilitating it. In this regard, she exposes many White liberals for being complicit in White supremacy through their complacence.

“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.” 

Kuo upends the traditional notion of education, which is typically associated with refinement, and connects it instead to personal revolution. Additionally, the educated are always supposed to be open to learning more, to accept that there is so much that they still don’t know.

“This ghetto is all my students knew, and it occurred to me that if you live in a place that you cannot leave, where you can’t travel or work if you can’t afford a car, where land is endless space that’s been denied you, where people burn down their houses because the insurance money is worth more than the sale price, where the yards of shuttered homes are dumping grounds for pedestrian litter, where water is possibly polluted by a fertilizer company that skipped town, you want to believe that you do not at all resemble what you see. You want to believe that your town’s decay is not a mirror of your own prospects, that its dirtiness cannot dirty your inner life, that its emptiness does not contradict your own ambitions—that in fact you were born linked to beauty, to the joyous power of resurrection.” 

Kuo describes how the neglect that exists in Helena is a consequence of systemic racism. Despite the blight in which they live, Kuo notes that Helena’s Black inhabitants have maintained a resilience and optimism that exist in protest to the circumstances in which they live. 

“I began to speculate that the modern Delta did not exist in the American consciousness because it disturbed the mind. It crushed part of our American mythology. What had the Civil Rights Movement been for—the violence, the martyrs, the passionate actions—if its birthplace was still poor, still segregated, still in need of dramatic social change?” 

Kuo wonders why the Delta was no longer a topic of conversation and came to this conclusion. The American mythology claimed that anyone could succeed through hard work and ambition, but this myth was upended by the Delta, whose Black residents still struggled with cyclical poverty and de facto segregation.

“I was beginning to grasp that the Great Migration of the early twentieth century—like the Civil Rights Movement, like the emancipation of slaves—offered its own parable of salvation. In this story, black people made a choice to gain freedom by breaking out and merging into the teeming melting pot of the North. In this story, escape was heroic: You got out, you fled north, you did it for your children, you did it for your dignity, you did it to survive. In this story, what matters is not so much where you left but that you did. In this story, where you left—the Delta, the Black Belt, the whole Deep South—hardly existed. Eventually, like a bad memory, like the past itself, it would disintegrate.” 

The Great Migration was connected to other American narratives of migration in which people set out to new regions to make their lives anew. The story of migration is also connected to immigrant stories, particularly that of Kuo’s parents. 

“‘You’re not normal. Your cousins, they’re normal. They get married, study science, become happy […] They listen to their parents. Why can’t you be normal?” 

Mr. and Mrs. Kuo worry about their daughter being single and dedicating her life to social justice. By mentioning her cousins’ study of science as “normal” they seem to be reverting to stereotypes about Asians gravitating toward STEM fields. They worry, like many parents, that, without a husband, Kuo will be lonely, which connects to broader sexist tropes about women being incomplete or abnormal without male partners. 

“My person, and specifically my English, was at once a peace offering, a riposte, a battle cry. Listen to her, my parents seemed to say; she has no accent, she is one of you. To my parents my brother and I were American—not Asian American, not Chinese American, just American. Maybe it was the times. But it was also a sign of what they were willing to give up.” 

For Mr. and Mrs. Kuo, their daughter’s dexterity with the English language was not about any talent she may have had but, instead, proof that she had earned the right to be regarded as an equal citizen. It was evidence that she was a part of the mainstream that White Americans took for granted and did not, by default, associate with people who looked like the Kuos. What the Kuos were willing to give up for this acceptance was their insistence that their children declare a connection to the old country.

“In Helena, one immigrant group after another had disappeared: the Delta Jews, the Delta Lebanese, the Delta Chinese, all once significant parts of Helena, all gone. They were immigrants: This is what made them who they were. They moved. It was an oddly clear moment. How my parents saw the Delta was closer to how my students saw it, as a dead end, a place to escape.” 

Kuo relates that there were other communities who existed in the region, not only blacks and Whites, not only the descendants of slaves and slave owners. Facing discrimination and a lack of opportunity, like the Black inhabitants, the other groups benefited from having the means to leave, from not being tormented by a legacy of defeatism.

“The cliché, that I’d gotten out of it more than I’d given, was true. What I had now was a metric for judging what a meaningful day might look like. The metric was this: Could you form a live, difficult connection with a person from entirely different circumstances? A connection so genuine that you forgot that you were even attempting to make one? So urgent that you wanted to show up the next day and that person believed you would? If you could do this, then you had a shot at not being full of crap, at making your liberal ideals substantial, a part of your bone and flesh.” 

In returning to her worry about having false convictions, Kuo poses a series of rhetorical questions meant to address her own sincerity. This metric foreshadows her urge to connect more with Patrick and to foster his burgeoning literary sensibility. 

“People in my workshop told me that my writing about Patrick was good enough to get published. I felt guilty considering this. Then I tried to comfort myself: The writing was not triumphalist, it did not downplay my moral failure; I had tried to depict Patrick and my students warmly, humanely. Did that effort mitigate the exertion of power, the betrayal of intimacy, that was intrinsic to telling someone else’s story?” 

Kuo feels guilty about using Patrick’s life to promote her own writing. Moreover, she wonders if she has betrayed their confidences by revealing possibly embarrassing details about their lives for personal gain and public recognition, especially after leaving them behind in the Delta to pursue other opportunities that they might never have the means to reap.

“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.”

Despite the apparent hopelessness of their lives, the young people in Helena still had dreams and ambitions, though they quietly wondered if they had the talent to propel them out of town and toward better lives. So much about their lives had already been predetermined by poverty, racism, and the endless temptations of drugs and crime. 

“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.” 

Kuo realizes that, to forge her own path, she has to cast off the obligations that her parents foist on to her, which are really their own ambitions. While they seek to continue to impose their authority, she struggles to declare her independence from them and from their ideas of what constitutes a worthwhile life.

“‘Time,’ he said. ‘You can’t go back in time. Everything that happen is about cause and effect. One day lead to another. And now I’m here.’” 

Patrick talks, with an air of defeatism, about how he feels in response to his murdering Marcus Williamson. When Kuo first starts visiting him in jail, Patrick is depressed and afraid that he will be transformed into the worst possible version of himself by the inhumane conditions of the jail. Kuo preserves the grammatical incorrectness of his spoken English, though it doesn’t take away from Patrick’s ability to articulate his frustration.

“A book: Of course this was what came first. Not just any book but a magical book, where the heroes were children, and children on the side of good. In the damp cold jail a book could be a fantasy, a refuge, a separate place.” 

Kuo introduces Patrick to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Though she initially fears that he’ll be turned off and insulted by her asking him to read a children’s book, she insists on using fantasy as a conduit to think about a new world. The trick is to help Patrick alter his sense of reality so that the idea of life beyond his jail cell, and even beyond Helena, won’t seem so far-fetched. 

“I had thought I was choosing a fantasy into which Patrick could retreat. But Narnia was real to him. What made the story fantastical for Patrick was that Edmund was able to change.” 

Edmund is Patrick’s favorite character in the book. Patrick identifies with him because Edmund is initially tempted to align with an evil force but reforms himself. The trajectory of Patrick’s life, and that of so many of his former classmates, was very similar.

“No matter what he did for the rest of his life, Patrick would never escape that question: What happened? The question of his inner life would always be overshadowed by fact.” 

Kuo refers to the questions around Patrick’s murder of Marcus Williamson and the differing accounts from Patrick and the police about where the knife came from. Through the narrative, Kuo explores her own ambivalence about what happened that evening on Patrick’s porch, though she doesn’t address the feeling directly. She also expresses concern that, no matter what else Patrick does with his life, it’ll never take away from the fact that he took someone else’s.

“And quickly he swallowed his sounds, then kept reading. He didn’t look up; he didn’t stop. He did not wish to undo or unlearn the feeling most painful to him. To keep reading was urgent—in fact, not a choice at all.”

Patrick is reading the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and is discovering parallels between Douglass’s story and his own. The knowledge was painful, which explained the sounds that he evinced, but he felt compelled to learn more about Douglass’s life, which was, he knew, inextricably linked to his own.

“Kafka wrote that we must read books that wound, that affect us like disaster, that act as an ax for the frozen sea inside us. For Patrick, Frederick Douglass was that ax, and it broke him apart.” 

Kuo gives further context to Patrick’s feelings in response to reading about Douglass’s early life. She quotes the existentialist Czech author, Franz Kafka, whose own work explored discomfiting aspects of the human psyche and of our social organization. The purpose of literature, Kuo concludes, goes back to her earlier iteration about the meaning of education: one could neither be educated nor literate without being transformed personally. 

“Overt racism was less palatable, but ‘crime’ became the strategic, and politically acceptable, way for politicians to make statements about race: Crime was, as it is today, a code word for what poor black people do.” 

Kuo refers to the various “dog whistles,” or coded language, that racists use to avoid sounding directly racist. By associating places like the Delta with crime, they were implying that there was something pathologically wrong with poor Black communities—not due to dire circumstances, but due to a supposed moral failure among those who lived in places like Helena.

“It took work to build an inner warmth toward yourself; without it, you could not see yourself in others, in heroes […] This was why I loved Baldwin: He talked openly about the struggle to feel warmth toward oneself. He’d written that questions of race operated to hide the graver question of the self […] But, I was learning, you can’t try to fill someone up with stories about the people you think he ought to contain. You first have to work with his sense of himself.” 

Kuo used Baldwin’s work to help Patrick overcome all of the ideas about himself that had been imposed from outside—even Kuo’s own notions about who he was and ought to be. Racism existed to deny disempowered people their human complexity, in favor of accepting themselves as one thing or another, a dangerous trap in which Patrick was nearly caught when he entered the penal system.

“He had come so far, but what struck me then and for many years afterward was how little I had done for him. I don’t mean this in the way of false modesty. I mean that it frightens me that so little was required for him to develop intellectually—a quiet room, a pile of books, and some adult guidance. And yet these things were rarely supplied.”

Kuo marvels at what little it took—only seven months of instruction—to get Patrick from barely literate to a rather adept writer with a keen understanding of literature. If he had had proper instruction throughout his life, he might have achieved intellectual wonders. There is no telling how many geniuses the world has been deprived of due to the inequities of the American educational system, formed as results of systemic racism and classism. 

“And yet to know a person as a student is to know him always as a student: to sense deeply his striving and in his striving to sense your own. It is to watch, and then have difficulty forgetting, a student wrench himself into a shape, like a character from Ovid, his body twisting and contorting, from one creature to another, submitting, finally, to the task of a full transformation. Why? Because he trusts you; because he prefers the feel of his newer self; because he hopes you will help make this change last.” 

Kuo references the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses to allude to Patrick’s development and her instrumental role in it as his instructor. Even after Patrick reached adulthood, his and Kuo’s roles never changed, which underscored his reliance on her to show him the ways in which he could always improve and become a better version of himself.