But the real smoking gun for my mother’s charges lay in my conversations with my only single friend, Vivian. We talked about the Delta as being like a remote island: If you were single, you’d stay that way. There wasn’t anyone our age. We whined about how much weight we gained from stress and all the fried food we ate. We noted pointedly that nearly all of our friends who had decided to stay for the long haul were coupled.
I had to admit that I was lonely. The unattractive truth was that I was nearly twenty-five years old and had never had a boyfriend. The year before I came to the Delta, I had gone to England on a scholarship. It was there that I really drank for the first time, had my ears pierced, and suffered the humiliation of a relationship that went unrecognized. I left England a bit sorry for myself, but by the time I got to the Delta that summer, I pretended none of it had happened, reverting to my high ideals from college, where I had decided dating was what other women did and behaved as if this showcased the intensity of my commitments and my disinterest in triviality. I had been proud, very proud, of contradicting the stereotype of Asian women as feminine and exotic. I had joked to people that I was a feminist celibate; I wore overalls and mismatched colors; I spoke passionately about the superiority of female friendships over bourgeois heterosexual romance. But now I felt embarrassed. My proclamations seemed too loud. A significant way to interact with the world eluded me.
And Vivian was leaving. She had gotten into graduate school for public policy at the University of Michigan and had stopped by for dinner earlier that week. “Today Mr. Cooper”— her principal at Miller—“chased a kid down the hallway with his paddle. I think the kid started a fight or something.” She raised her arm to demonstrate the gesture: fist gripped, ready to strike. “Anyways, the kid got away.” Vivian laughed ruefully, and for a moment I didn’t recognize her. Her laughter at the school’s dysfunction felt like permission to leave.
In a functional school, like the ones I’d gone to growing up, the staff acts as a basic unit, and a troublesome student is handed off between adults like team members handing off a baton. The principal sets up a parent-teacher conference, the counselor organizes regular sessions, adults convene and design a plan for the child. But central to the experience of a dysfunctional school is the feeling of giving up. To give up is to send a disruptive student out of one’s classroom, excluding him from the lesson you hoped would change him. To give up is to banish her to the whims from which the school ought to be a protection. When our principal was absent, students who were sent out of a room as punishment had nowhere to go. They wandered around Stars, banging on doors, trying to get into any classroom. “Lock your door,” Ms. Riley had advised. “They’ll bang and bang but they’ll go away.”
Were my parents so wrong? Most parents, immigrant or not, don’t want their kids to move to the Delta. My parents wanted me to get married, have kids, a good job, money. Their idea of happiness was very American. It seemed to me that just about all the people in my life had already given me permission to leave. Why would I stay? It was an outrageous idea. I was an Asian American woman from Michigan—what ties could I have to this place? Now I saw only the absurdity of my whole attempt to live here. Who did I think I was?
By the time I pulled into my house, in the near dark, I had decided to leave. I took a long, hot shower. When I got out, I happened to catch myself in the mirror. For the first time since I got to the Delta, I saw that I looked pretty, and I felt startled.
—
TWO WEEKS AFTER I’d made my decision, the district announced that there was not enough money to keep Stars going. All of its students and teachers would be sent back to Central, the main high school. So the district’s experiment, if it could be called that, with alternative learning had lasted seven years. Stars would disappear from Helena with scarcely a conversation. The only murmur of reflection came from white families who lived in the wealthy neighborhood hundreds of feet from Central; they voiced concerns about the “danger” of bad kids being so close to their homes. You couldn’t blame them, really; were they any more objectionable than the majority of middle-and upper-class families, of all races, who chose to live in suburbs because of safety—because of their distance from “danger”? In other neighborhoods in this tiny city, bricks were lobbed randomly at the front windows of homes, the elderly were beaten and burglarized, and people were held up at gunpoint in their driveways.
Students turned to me and asked, “You gonna be at Central, too?”
I shook my head.
Patrick put down his pen. The class got very quiet. The computer made a dull buzzing sound.
“I’m going to law school,” I said. “I won’t be here next year.”
There was a long silence. Finally Monica, one of my most sweet-tempered students, broke it.
“Ms. Kuo, you’re not gonna be a good lawyer.”
“Why?” I threw my hands on my hips, mock-offended.
“Because you’re too nice.”
I looked at everyone.
I said, “I am going to miss you.” I said, “You are the strongest people I know.” Patrick looked at me, not blinking. He seemed to drink my words in. Aaron did, too. Gina. Monica. Kayla. They all believed me. That they believed me—that they didn’t think I was just being nice, or trying to get paid, or trying to get them to do something—struck me. In the grand scheme of things, a year isn’t long. But we’d spent every day together, and had come to trust each other.
On the last day of school we had a “field day,” of eating burgers and playing outside.
“Stay, Ms. Kuo,” Monica said. I didn’t think I detected any judgment in her expression.
—
I DID STAY until the very last day of summer. I played Ping-Pong at the temporary space for the new Boys & Girls Club. I sat on my porch reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. To be useful, she wrote, was the best thing people hoped for themselves; to be aimless was their worst fear. It took a long time to pack up my classroom; I didn’t want to throw anything away. I kept my stickers, which, it turned out, had been a hit with the fifteen-year-old boys. I kept their free writes. I kept their pictures. I kept a drawing from Patrick that said, Caring Teachers, which included a picture of me.
—
ON THE NIGHT before I left, I went to see Danny and Lucy. We talked all night. I told them about the homeless shelter where I had worked. You get the man toothpaste; he tells you the police are harassing him at the airport, where he usually sleeps. You talk for hours. You give him a subway token in case you have no beds the next night. After your shift, you move on with your life; you spend money on things you don’t need; you worry about things that don’t matter. Did this make any sense? When you see somebody who has been absolutely abandoned—in tatters, freezing, foul-smelling, with alcohol on his breath and speech slurred—and you look him in the eye, shouldn’t you be transformed permanently, shouldn’t your life change permanently? It was obvious to them what I was really asking.