My Rating: 5 stars
Reading with Patrick is not a memoir in the traditional sense in that its author Michelle Kuo doesn't really write a whole lot about herself. Rather, she writes about the students she taught while volunteering in the Teach for America program, where she was assigned to a school in the small rural town of Helena, Arkansas – a town located in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, which also happened to be one of the poorest rural areas in the United States. This is a town largely "abandoned" by the government in terms of money and resources and so its residents are pretty much left to fend for themselves and to find ways to "survive" as best as they can; a town where violence is rampant and the justice system is practically nonexistent, where the school system is broken to the point that out of a class of 20 students, you're lucky to have one student who lasts the entire semester. I don't usually like to quote from ARCs, but in this case, I feel it is necessary, as Kuo's description of the town is powerful in conveying the harsh realities that her students – most of whom are merely kids, teenagers – must face on a daily basis:
"…in the Delta, the ghetto was not a corner of the city but an entire region of the country. This ghetto is all the students knew and it occurred to me that if you live in a place 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…."
It is in this desperate, hopeless environment that she meets Patrick Browning, a mild-mannered 15-year old boy in the eighth grade. In a school that the local administration uses as a dumping ground for the supposed "bad kids" (druggies, troublemakers, truants, etc.), Patrick stood out from the rest of the students, as he largely kept to himself, listened more than he spoke, and for the most part, didn't get involved in other people's troubles. Gradually, over the course of 2 years, Kuo introduces Patrick and the rest of her students to books and also encourages them to express their feelings through writing, to allow the paper and pen to "talk" for them in situations where they couldn't – wouldn't – speak up themselves. Through the medium of reading and writing, she uses literature to make an impact on her students' lives – however, just as they are making good progress, Kuo decides to give in to her parents' wishes for her to get her law degree and become a lawyer, so she leaves the Delta and her students behind. Later on, she learns that her once-promising student Patrick is in jail, charged with murder and awaiting trial – feeling guilty that her decision to leave the Delta prematurely played a role in what happened with Patrick, Kuo returns to Helena in the hopes of "fixing" her mistake. She meets up with Patrick again as he sits in jail facing a potentially bleak future and together, they resume the education through literature and writing that had been cut short earlier.
This book turned out to be so much more than what I initially expected. Yes, it is about a love of books, about reading and writing and how education makes a difference in people's lives. On a deeper level though, this is also a study on the destructive power of racism and inequality, society and circumstance, as well as the coming-of-age of a young boy forced to make the best of his surroundings and the teacher who, in helping him, also comes to a better understanding of herself. The writing was simple and straightforward and the story it tells is inspiring, moving. I know that some people don't like to read memoirs because majority of the time they come off as pretentious and self-serving. Well, this one is the complete opposite in that, throughout the book, very rarely did Kuo paint herself in a good light. In fact, the few times she talked about her own life, she would very candidly relay how much she disappointed her parents in choosing to teach rather than putting her Harvard education to good use, how she was initially mean to some of the students and did things that she regretted, how she was a messy person who rarely cleaned her house and constantly left dirty dishes and clothes all over the place. I especially resonated with Kuo's story on a personal level, perhaps because we both share the same ethnic background and culture as Chinese-Americans (Kuo is from Taiwan whereas I'm from Hong Kong). I absolutely understood the pressures Kuo felt in striving to fulfill the role of a filial daughter constantly trying to prove to her parents that the sacrifices they made in immigrating to a foreign country were not in vain and balancing that against doing what she felt called to do versus what she was "expected" to do. When Kuo talked about her relationship with her parents and how deeply she loved them, yet they were a source of constant stress and pressure for her, I nearly cried because she expressed perfectly what I've been struggling with my entire life:
"Few of my friends in the Delta understood the power my parents had over me. 'You're like a little girl around them,' one roommate had admonished. 'How can they tell you what to do? You're an adult.' But one can never overestimate the extent to which many Asian parents make their disappointment unbearable. The caricatures in popular culture are untruthful mainly because they never go far enough. For my family, at least, there was the usual stuff, the yelling and tears, the shaming and guilt trips….Maybe the secret of their effectiveness was what they declined to say. They thought nothing of emptying their savings for my lessons and my books. They did not hope for too much success in their own lives, ours were more important. They did not think to ask my brother and me to do chores – they believed studying was a full-time job. They didn't read to me, because they were afraid I would adopt their accents. They cared so little for their own histories that they didn't make me learn their native tongue. For them, the price of immigration had always been that their children would discount them in these ways."
For me, this book was very powerful and personal. While I definitely understand that this book won't mean the same thing to all people, I still encourage everyone to read this lovely memoir. If anything, read this for the historical aspect, as I believe that even those who may not be able to relate to Kuo's personal story or that of Patrick or her students can probably appreciate the well-researched history about slavery, the Civil Rights movement, the geographical history of the Delta, etc. that Kuo incorporated into her narrative. I definitely learned a lot from it!
Received advance reader's copy from Random House via Penguin First-to-Read program.
No comments:
Post a Comment