Reading with Patrick

In law school, Kuo often found herself “timid and afraid to speak” during classes (73). Her grades were decent, but she frequently doubted herself, as she wasn’t as quick as her classmates.

During her first semester, she read Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the story of a former lawyer who ascends to being a judge. He convinces himself that he is leading a noble, decent life. Then, he becomes painfully ill. He hallucinates and hears a voice inside of him, which demands to know how he wants to live. When Ivan listens to the voice and replies to it, the pain disappears. Ivan wonders if he has lived properly, though he’s done everything that would constitute a good life.

In her second year of law school, Kuo spent a lot of time at expensively catered events, being wooed by recruiters from firms. Between her second and third years, she had a very well-paid internship at a law firm in Manhattan. She was assigned a lawyer-mentor—a Korean American who seemed very old to her. He had likely gone to law school straight out of college, then began working at the firm. During the four weeks of her internship, Kuo engaged in dull work, which was interrupted only by food and drink. Her parents visited and failed to understand when Kuo told them that “none of the associates seemed happy” (75).

Kuo remained in New York after the internship and worked at a non-profit organization for kids—The Door. Around this time, she received a call saying that she was offered a job. Kuo turned it down and applied instead for a fellowship to work at a non-profit in the Fruitvale section of Oakland, California. The non-profit was Centro Legal de la Raza, which worked with undocumented immigrants, most of them Spanish-speaking. The salary would be small, but it was work Kuo was sure she could be proud of doing.

One day, Kuo’s fellow friend from Teach for America, Danny, called her from Helena with news that Patrick Browning was in the Phillips County Jail after getting into a fight and stabbing someone to death. Kuo went to visit and observed how thin Patrick looked; his prison jumpsuit was too big for him. He explained to her what happened—he had been looking for his underaged sister, Pam, and found her in the company of a man named Marcus, with whom he knew his sister was having a sexual relationship. Marcus was drunk and possibly high. He “started to talk crazy” to Patrick who, scared, picked up a knife to scare Marcus away. Instead, they got into a fight. The next thing Patrick knew, Marcus was limping away and, finally, fell. The police arrived and handcuffed Patrick. He had been in jail for three days.

After visiting Patrick, Kuo started to write about her time teaching. It had been two years since she had left the Delta. She wondered if her leaving had anything to do with Patrick leaving school. She realized that, in her writing, Patrick existed only to serve her and her wish not to forget Helena.

Kuo obtained Patrick’s police report and showed it to a former professor who had once been a public defender. Patrick’s warrant stated that his charge had been reduced from capital murder, which warranted the death penalty, to first-degree murder, which still seemed excessive to Kuo. However, she knew that prosecutors often overcharged clients to get them to take plea deals. It was a way to avoid expensive jury trials. Only when the public might have the defendant’s sympathy does a prosecutor either follow the law more accurately or, even, undercharge for a crime. Kuo’s professor wondered if Patrick had been read his Miranda rights, or if he had a lawyer to represent him when he spoke to the police. When Kuo told her that Patrick confessed, the professor said there was no more that Kuo could do.

Kuo took the bar exam that summer and moved to California. She was to start her fellowship in about 45 days. She and a friend found an apartment in San Francisco, signed a lease, and paid the security deposit. An instructor from her writing workshop put her in touch with New York Times Magazine, which offered to publish the essay in the “Lives” column. Kuo worried about what Patrick would think. Maybe he would feel that she was stealing his life to get published.

In early October, Kuo went to the Phillips County Jail to visit Patrick. She asked him why he dropped out of school and he told her it was because he couldn’t cope with doing trigonometry at his new school. He struggled even to pronounce the word. When Kuo asked if Patrick went to his teacher for help, he said that it was too much pressure to ask for help. Kuo remembered that Patrick never asked for help.

Kuo asked if Patrick had spoken to his lawyer. He had not and didn’t even know him. Kuo then asked if he knew for what he was being charged. Patrick assured her that he knew nothing and Kuo explained the charge of manslaughter. She showed Patrick the essay about him that was published. It took him a while to read the article aloud, and he apologized when he stumbled. He confessed that he didn’t remember much of what she had written about.

Patrick told Kuo that he had a one-year-old daughter named Cherish. He had only been with her for three months before being sent to jail. He said another inmate had told him that he stabbed Marcus 13 or 14 times. Patrick looked at Kuo, as though wanting to know if it were true. She assured him that she had read the police report, which said that Patrick stabbed Marcus “twice in the chest, once in the arm” (99).

When it was time to leave, Kuo promised to write Patrick and then walked outside. It was Saturday morning, but nothing was happening in Helena. Businesses were closed up, stores were empty, and litter lay strewn on the ground. Elsewhere, her former Harvard Law classmates were accepting offers at firms. Kuo thought of Ivan Ilyich in relation to her own decision to take a job with a non-profit instead of the firm that had made her an offer. She thought that this decision, like that of Ilyich’s to be a judge, made her decent and good. Then, a voice told her that, if she hadn’t left, Patrick might not have ended up in trouble. The voice urged her to stay on in Helena for a bit longer.

Kuo wondered how she would help Patrick if she chose to stay. She couldn’t help with the murder case because he had already confessed. She could write more about the Delta, but not if her only message was that the region was lost. She decided to think about what to do later. The first task was simply to return to Helena.

Kuo drove from Arkansas to Indiana. She stopped in Missouri to place a call, notifying the director of her fellowship that she needed until May. She then called the director of Centro Legal de la Raza and assured her that she would go to California but needed a bit of time. After that, she called her roommate, Adina, to say she wouldn’t be staying in the apartment, though Adina could retain her security deposit. Finally, Kuo notified her parents in-person. Over dinner, she told them, in both Mandarin and English, that she had visited Patrick. She told them how worried she was over Patrick having forgotten everything she had taught him and how she needed to go back to make things right. Her mother “mourned the labor it would take to transport [Kuo’s] clothes from San Francisco to Arkansas” (114). Then, Mrs. Kuo remembered that there were so many old books in the basement that no one read anymore and wondered if perhaps Patrick could use them. Mr. Kuo, initially skeptical of his daughter’s plan, lit up at the idea of someone cleaning out the basement.