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?”Īnd the strategy actually worked. So I made it my job to get him to come to school. And also his mother worked two jobs and was just too tired to make him come. He said that sometimes school was just too depressing because people were always fighting and teachers were quitting. Patrick had just one problem: he wouldn’t come to school. I saw him once jumped between two girls when they got into a fight and he got himself knocked to the ground. He was quiet, introspective like he was always in deep thought. And when students got into fights, the school would send them to the local County Jail. My school, where I was placed, had no library, no guidance counselor but it did have a police officer. When I got to the Mississippi Delta, it was a place that was still poor, still segregated, still dramatically in need of change. I wanted to be a part of that change to help young teenagers graduate and go to college. In the 1960s, African Americans risked their lives to fight for education, to fight for their right to vote. This is a place shaped by a powerful history. I went to the Mississippi Delta, one of the poorest regions of the United States. I took those words very literally: Where should I put myself? When the chips are down and you somehow expect them to deliver they’re somehow not there.” “There are liberals who have all the proper attitudes but no real convictions.

And so I think I turned to James Baldwin as a way to fill this void, as a way to feel racially conscious.īut perhaps because I knew I wasn’t myself African American, I also felt challenged and indicted by his words, especially these words. When I was growing up in Western Michigan in the 1980s, there weren’t many Asian American writers interested in social change. The writer who changed my life was the great African American novelist James Baldwin. 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.

I want to talk today about how reading can change our lives and about the limits of that change. Listen to the MP3 Audio here: The Healing Power of Reading by Michelle Kuo This talk was given at a TEDxTaipei event in September 2018. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School and had worked as an immigrants’ rights lawyer in the Fruitvale District of Oakland, California.įollowing is the full transcript of her TED Talk titled “The Healing Power of Reading”.

Michelle Kuo is the author of Reading with Patrick, a memoir of her literary friendship with a student in a small town in the Mississippi Delta.

Reading with patrick by michelle kuo