This TED Talk features author Michelle Quo recorded live at TEDx Taipei 2018.

I want to talk today about how reading can change our lives and about the limits of that change.

I want to talk to you about how reading can give us a shareable world of powerful human connection,

but also about how that connection is always partial, how reading is ultimately a lonely,

idiosyncratic undertaking. The writer who changed my life

was the great African-American novelist James Baldwin.

When I was growing up in western Michigan in the 1980s,

there weren't many Asian-American writers interested in social change.

And so I think I turned to James Baldwin as a way to fill this void,

as a way to feel racially conscious.

But perhaps because I knew I wasn't myself African American,

I also felt challenged and indicted by his words,

especially these words.

There are liberals who have all the proper attitudes, but no real convictions.

When the chips are down and you somehow expect them to deliver, they are somehow not there.

They're somehow not there. I took those words very literally.

Where should I put myself?

I went to the Mississippi Delta,

one of the poorest regions in the United States.

This is a place shaped by a powerful history

in the 1960s African Americans risk risk their lives to fight for education,

to fight for their right to vote.

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