Michelle Kuo (2)

This page-turner about race, class, educational opportunity and the legacies of American slavery and Jim Crow still playing out in our public schools is exciting as a personal story and engaging as a study of American public education. Michelle Kuo's memoir, James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, and Eula Biss's essay on teaching in a Harlem public school (including on the morning of September 11, 2001) in her collection Notes from No Man's Land all talk about the pivotal role a teacher is show more expected to have, did have, and/or could have had in their students' lives. Michelle Kuo's nuanced writing about her student's awakening--which he reaches because she patiently even doggedly provided him the mentoring and the voices he needed to read, well beyond the time of her employment in Teach For America--evokes a spectrum of responses in me: anger, admiration, grief, recognition and shame. It's a plus that she is a writer honest and skilled enough to delineate her own misgivings and bouts of egotism. She doesn't display her young student's trauma for the sake of spectacle. show less

I entered the drawing for this book because I thought my friend would like it; I didn't expect to like it. However, as I began skimming for the purposes of review, I quickly became engrossed by Kuo's clear, expressive writing and insightful empathy (on why Christianity has taken hold in the small Arkansas town where she teaches for two years, she says, "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 show more emptiness does not contradict your own ambitions - that in fact you were born linked to beauty, to the joyous power of resurrection").

I LOVED this book. I was afraid, reading the description, that it would contribute to the cliché of the well-to-do and well-meaning outsider "saving" someone from a different race and a lower class (think Dangerous Minds). But Kuo is aware of that stereotype, and avoids putting her book in this category through rigorously honest self-reflection and a willingness to share times of failure, misunderstanding, and just plain awkwardness - she's not the hero of this story, and neither, really, is her student Patrick Browning. He's messy and human just like everyone else. There's no hero because the story is really about society's failure to take care of its citizens, about missed opportunities, and about literature's ability to make our human frailty bearable.

Yes, Kuo is aware of the cliché, but she writes that during times of self-laceration for thinking she could be important in Patrick's life and maybe even alter its outcome, she nevertheless asks herself, "But then what is a human for? A person must matter to another, it must mean something for two people to have passed time together, to have put work into each other and into becoming more fully themselves. So even if I am wrong, if my dreaming is wrong, the alternative, to not dream at all, seems wrong too." show less

This is a lovely memoir about a mutually transforming friendship between a teacher and a pupil, but also an indictment of the state of education, the justice system, the health system, and the social support system in the largely forgotten impoverished areas of the black South.

Michelle Kuo, a volunteer for Teach for America at age 22 in 2004, was assigned to Helena, Arkansas, a poor, mostly black city in the Mississippi Delta. Her original goal was to teach American history through black show more literature. She had the romantic notion, as she herself characterized it, that she could change the lives of her students through books. She was sent to a school named Stars, where the local administration placed the so-called bad kids: “These were the truants and the druggies, the troublemakers and the fighters who had been expelled from the mainstream schools.”

Moreover, this area of the Delta was:

" . . . 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….”

This is definitely part of forgotten America. This subset of the American population bears an unequal burden of hardships. Helena specifically is the seat of one of the poorest counties in the country. During the time Kuo was there, there were few jobs and many of the residents had no skills in any event. In the schools, the feeling of having given up, shared by both by students and administrators, resulted in a lack of education or interest in learning.

In addition, Helena not only ranked last in the state in public health, but its teenage birthrate was higher than that of ninety-four developing countries. Many residents had disabilities or emotional or mental disorders. And if someone got in trouble, the police were the last people they would call: as Patrick put it:

“Naw, naw, ain’t no one call the police. The police here ain’t no police.. They out smoking weed and dealing drugs. How they gonna come to your house?”

Kuo astutely observes that while a lot of attention is given to blacks who left the South in the “Great Migration,” not so much is devoted to those who stayed, often not having had the means to leave. They had no money, or no connections up north. Or they could not read or write. Or they were afraid of reprisals against family who did not leave. And naturally there was a fear of places unknown and unfamiliar; how would they support themselves? What if they couldn’t? The ones who stayed, Kuo points out, were likely among the most destitute, the ones most accustomed to defeat.

Kuo found she had to modify her grandiose dreams. The students she encountered in her eighth grade class had limited vocabularies and a circumscribed grasp of history. She reports that “they hadn’t known, for instance, when slavery ended or recognized the vocabulary word emancipation..” They were only vaguely aware of the legacy of violence against blacks, and only knew that Martin Luther King, Jr. was dead, not so much who he was or why he was important. In any event, she found, they didn’t want to think about all those painful things; they wanted school to be a refuge.

Kuo began to bond with Patrick Browning, who was 15 when she first met him. He seemed kind and mild-mannered, and when he stopped attending school, she went to his house to talk to him. She promised him to work hard for him, if he would work hard too.

Thus began a relationship that lasted not only until Kuo left for law school, but afterwards. She visited him intermittently, but then a couple of years after she had stopped teaching in Helena, she found out Patrick was in jail for murder. She felt bad for him:

“Now you see Patrick in jail, Patrick alone, Patrick not expecting anything of you or anybody - Patrick blaming himself, Patrick not knowing what he was charged for, Patrick not even knowing how many times he stabbed a person, just knowing he took away a life.”

Kuo decided the only way she could live with herself was to return to Helena and help Patrick. She also contacted a public defender on his behalf - there were only two in Helena, and both had to do other work on the side because of low pay. Not only were their salaries inadequate, but they had to buy many supplies out of their own pockets. They also had zero funds for investigating cases, and over a hundred clients each.

Kuo bemoans the state of criminal justice in the South, excoriating the long sentences for drug-related crimes, lack of legal aid, and resulting mass incarceration. She contends that measures targeting the black poor were part of a massive backlash against the Civil Rights Movement. She cites historian Elizabeth Hinton who pointed out that as overt racism became less palatable, “crime” became the politically acceptable way for politicians to make statements about race. Money was allocated to combat crime, but not to improve the education, employment opportunities, or housing, the lack of which helped contribute to that crime rate.

Back in Helena, Kuo visited Patrick almost every day in jail, bringing him books that they reviewed and discussed together. They read everything from Derek Walcott to Richard Wright to Emily Dickinson. Kuo was heartened that Patrick noticed things and made connections, and that his own writing improved so much. He was especially moved by James Baldwin’s A Letter to My Nephew, saying to her, “It’s real.”

After seven months, Kuo had to leave to take a job to which she had previously committed. She noted how far Patrick had come: ". . . 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." But she thought it was time for her to go. Did she change his life, she wondered? Could she? She mused:

“I met Patrick when he was fifteen. He’d watched dope deals at age five, accidentally set himself on fire at eleven, and seen a lot that I can’t know. It may seem crazy to believe that I, or any educator, could have decisively reversed his fate. In the complex portrait of a person’s life, it’s possible that a teacher is just a speck.”

And yet, it’s clear she did change him, perhaps in ways which she isn’t aware of herself. I know in my own life, I was deeply influenced by a teacher. Yes, the teacher couldn’t change the basic trajectory of my life that came from other factors, but my internal world - my capacity to see and hear and appreciate, was radically altered thereafter.

Evaluation: This excellent book is so thought-provoking; it would make a great choice for book clubs. It sheds a great deal of light on “forgotten America”; follows a woman’s journey to realize her own identity; and interrogates the efficacy of trying to make a difference in someone’s life through the beauty and power of words, and the career path of teaching. show less

Michelle Kuo's immigrant parents sent her to Harvard to become a doctor, but she felt driven to fight for social justice. She compromised on law school, but first she spent two years teaching high-school English to poor students in the Arkansas Delta. After law school, she returned to the Delta for almost a year to read with Patrick, a former student had dropped out of school and was in jail awaiting trial for an accidental murder. Kuo can't explain, to herself or to the reader, why she felt show more compelled to commit so much time to salvage one student's life, but her commitment to keeping Patrick's mind and spirit alive in the face of terrible circumstances pay off for him in small but essential ways: in not returning to prison, in being hired for small but honest jobs, in retaining a love of poetry and staying in touch with his teacher, in being a loving and expressive father to his daughter. "This was what reading could do: It could make you, however fleetingly, unpredictable. You were not someone about whom another person could say, You are this kind of person, but rather a person for whom nothing is predetermined." show less