Michelle Kuo’s Reading with Patrick

I came to the book Reading with Patrick by searching TED Talks for the keyword “reading”. What I found and watched was the talk
The healing power of reading, by Michelle Kuo. It is non-fiction, but Michelle tells it in language so supple and so full of rhythm that it reads like a novel.

The title of the talk had me expecting an ideal story with a happy ending — but no. The story of Michelle and her student is a demonstration of what reading can change in a person, and of what it cannot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCKfvxnljYY

Michelle Kuo is a Taiwanese American. She graduated from Harvard and decided to go to a hard-pressed part of Arkansas through the Teach For America programme, where she met Patrick Browning — a fifteen-year-old student who was often absent from her class but who always carried a gentle energy, a great deal of sensitivity and a love of literature. Out of her own love of literature, she also opened up for Patrick the idea that literature is not “artificial” — that it is as real as everyday life itself.

Some years later, when Kuo had left Arkansas for law school, she got word that Patrick had been arrested for killing someone. Rather than leave him to it, she went back, and for seven months the two of them met every single day at the jail to read Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Walt Whitman and many other writers together. Through the pages they read together in those months, Patrick found the courage to write letters to his small daughter.

And although the reading they did in those months had the power to transform, real life is still made of questions with no easy answers: racism and poverty had shaped Patrick’s fate; the search for work after he came out; what difference a teacher can really make to a society that is multi-ethnic and unjust.

Michelle came to see that education is not a magic wand that can solve every social problem at once. But it gave Patrick a priceless weapon of the spirit: the ability to reflect on himself, and ownership of the story of his own life.

Today a small cousin of mine had an operation. Ever since they were tiny they have been a child I love very much, and the presents I give them are always books. Yesterday it struck me that, before the operation and after it, the only thing I want to do with them is this: read together.