At the heart of revenge reading, a love story

Iread between 90-110 books a year, plowing through Tolstoy and “Outlander” with the same omnivorous gusto. When I talk about my reading habit, most people assume I read as much as I do because I adore reading. While that may be the case now in adulthood, my need to read didn’t originally start from a place of affection. Instead, I started reading as revenge.

I was born in Japan to a Japanese mother and a white American father. At home, a large green poster hung on the wall with the Japanese alphabet painted in bright red brush strokes. “Sesame Street” (from VHS tapes my father ferried across the Pacific) taught me and my sister about the alphabet. We had favorite picture books in both languages, and by the time I was 6, I was reading in both Japanese and English.

This changed in 2001, when we moved from Japan to rural Illinois. Assuming my Asian heritage meant I wouldn’t speak or read English, teachers from my new school put me in ESL. I didn’t protest. In the shock of our trans-Pacific uprooting, I swallowed what my teachers told me: that I was illiterate. It didn’t matter that I’d been enjoying “The Wind in the Willows” only a few short months before coming to the US. Now, I lurked in the back of the classroom and spied jealously on my classmates as they thumbed through Frog and Toad and other books with short chapters.

The first word I “read” in my US classroom was zoo. I remember crouching on the reading carpet, tracing the Z, followed by the double O in a flimsy phonics book written for 4-year-olds. As I sounded out the word, the shame and jealousy of my “inability” to read was transmuted to something like rage. I’ll show them, I thought. By the next year, I far outpaced my classmates. I begged to be taken to the library. I ignored my little sister’s pleas to play outside in favor of finishing yet another book. I never slowed down, never took a break. It’s been 23 years and I still need one, if not two books with me constantly. Surely enough time has passed for me to put down this anger? But what I realize now is that yes, the voracious pace may have come from a need to prove myself, but the desire to read, to know a book and have it know me, has always been there. Before revenge, there was love. It was the sudden loss of that adored object — the book — that gave way to anger, shame, and sadness. Nowadays, I don’t feel that same flare of obstinate fury when I read. But each book brings me back to the pre-first grade place of soft adoration. Each tome I pick up and put down is healing in some way, bringing me back to that first place of love.