The healing power of reading

This is for all the idealistic kids who have "tiger" parents. If you want to change the world but fear losing your parents' love, read this. It's the complement to my TED Talk. (I didn't mention my parents in my talk because I was afraid they would see it!) Yes, my mother is still sad that I'm not a doctor.

I read this book on the porch of my house in Arkansas and fell in love with the voice — tender, searching and wise. Then I shared it with Patrick in a county jail in Arkansas and later to students at San Quentin Prison. Some students began to write their own letters to loved ones; something about its voice made them want to replicate its warmth and longing. In Reading with Patrick, the exquisite letters that Patrick writes to his daughter are inspired in part by Gilead.

Richard Wright lived in Helena, Arkansas in the 1910s, almost a century before I arrived as a teacher. He gives an intimate picture of towns across the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta, one that we get perhaps nowhere else in literature. And when he escapes the Delta and gets to Chicago, he throws himself into political battles, heeding the "passionate call for the revolutionary." Reading, I felt intense admiration: he was an outsider in so many ways and knew on some level that he would become disenchanted, but he still put his body and soul into social change.

For anybody interested in understanding public education in the United States, this is the book to read. Compassionate and incisive, The Prize tracks the consequences of Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million gift to the Newark school district, where nearly ninety percent of its students live in poverty. I was astonished by all the levels at which this book works; it moves gracefully between portraying the ambitions of high-powered politicians and the struggles of impoverished schools. (In one school, there is a single social worker for 612 students.) In a climate where conversations on education are bitterly polarized, this book resists any easy ideological characterization. Instead, its arguments are generated by humane attention to the central actors themselves: community activists, teachers and students.

In the six decades following slavery, rural black people in the South, newly emancipated, agitated for land; funded their own schools; built churches; trudged miles to organize politically; forged an emigration movement; and battled for wages, safety and dignity. When one visits places in the rural South today, such as the Mississippi Delta, it's tempting to remark on the atmosphere of political despair — and to conclude, fatalistically, that it has always been so. But read this expansive book, and learn of the passionate attempts of rural black people to claim political and economic power. As Hahn writes, "This is a book about extraordinary people who did extraordinary things."

This poignant book asks: How do victims of violent offenders heal? We often assume that punishment — namely, incarceration — is the answer, and that it serves justice because it addresses the wishes of victims. But this book shows how, in some circumstances, victims of violent offenders will choose an alternative to incarceration, if given the option. Written by the director of an inspiring nonprofit, Common Justice, Until We Reckon, this book shows how restorative justice can transform victim and offender alike.

I wish this passionate, searching book had existed when I was writing Reading with Patrick. It would have helped me answer the question: What kind of justice does Patrick "deserve" after taking a life, and what is owed to his victim's family?

When I first read this collection of essays, as a nineteen-year-old, I was gripped by the idea that, as Baldwin writes, it is "innocence which constitutes the crime." He meant that one must learn about the history of racial inequality in America, or else be implicated in it. I learned, and I tried to become less innocent. I planted myself as a teacher in the rural South, where I was one of the only Asians in a majority black area ravaged by a long history of white supremacy. I have re-read Baldwin many times since then. As I grow older, I'm interested as well in his self-consciousness, his passionate belief in the relationship between pursuing authenticity in one's interior life and pursuing justice in external social forces. "One can only face in others what one can face in oneself," he writes. I've come to think he means that we can't recognize the compassion, ambivalence and capacity for evil in others unless we first plumb those depths in ourselves.

As I write in Reading with Patrick, I had the joy of sharing Baldwin with Patrick in a county jail in Arkansas. He was especially moved by Baldwin’s letter to his nephew, which he immediately grasped as a vessel of love between generations. Reading, Patrick thought of his mother's love for him and his own love for his daughter. "And now you must survive," Baldwin writes, "because we love you, and of the sake of your children and your children’s children."