Playing basketball in prison was strangely nostalgic. It brought me back to playing travel-ball tournaments in middle school, checking in beside the portable LED scoreboard that sat atop the foldable table. Back then the air of liveliness came from the half-dozen games running across the warehouse; here it came from the other prisoners in their makeshift stands of foldable chairs, others boxing and running laps in the background. We threw on blue-green jerseys over the all-black clothes we were instructed to wear, while the inmates had on vivid blue Warriors uniforms. Whenever I was on the court, I seemed to forget where I was entirely.
As unexpected as this feeling was, it would be the least remarkable aspect of the experience. I spent the following week thinking about Tommy, who was a father and a husband, who gifted each of us a couple of newspapers he helped contribute to, and whom I would Google afterward to learn why he is in prison for the rest of his life.
It would be a lie to say my expectations of prison were what I saw from the movies. Sam had told me about the sheer positivity and inspiration from his previous visits. Even prepared for this, I was incredibly surprised at how welcome they made us feel. Out in the yard, they thanked us for coming and cracked jokes about how they were going to win against our team. The second we walked inside we were dapping and hugging our way down a row of guys, the way players do after a game, except we'd only just arrived. Guys who had no reason to know us, all of them reaching out like we'd been coming for years.
One guy gave a speech before the game, all of us huddled in close, blue-green mixing with Warriors blue mixing with the lighter inmate blue. He was a big man with a big voice, and the building's echoes that usually made it hard to hear anything only amplified him, as if the noise gave way to him. He'd hit a word and pause, and the pause would ring; you could hear the building going on behind him and him standing in the middle of it, dead still, letting it ring.
He told us how the day before, he and sixty others had sat across the table from sixteen DAs (“the very ones who put us in here, can you believe that?”) to speak for all two thousand inside. One of the DAs had told him, “I'm excited for you to come home.” And here he stops, looks around the huddle, points at his own chest, like me?? He replied, “Do you know the kind of man I was when I came in here?” To that, the DA had said, “That's the man you were when you came in here. I'm excited for the man you are now to come home.”
And then I, along with the other newcomers, gave a quick introduction, and he gave us each a hug to welcome us as family. Shortly after, a prayer shared across the huddle, a whistle, a tipoff, and the game was on.
As I watched the first few possessions, a man took the foldable chair next to me and introduced himself as Tommy, a member of the journalism guild. He had curly, scraggly hair and a beard going white, and glasses with the tinted flip-up lenses raised. He held a notebook with sentences scribbled all throughout it, and he asked my name and age and filed them away neatly before asking how the prison differed from what I'd expected coming in. It was obvious to me what it was: the atmosphere of family, the joy and gratefulness you wouldn't think could live in a place like this.
He was very open with me. He'd been in six years now, he said, and he'd be in for the rest of his life. He had a wife and kids. He'd owned a business, worked a dozen different jobs, and was clearly a thoughtful man. When Mayson asked him what kept him going in here, he said, “To give myself to others. I spend each day finding how I can help and uplift the people around me: giving the incarcerated a voice through journalism, mentoring the younger guys who are scared, because I was scared shitless when I first came in.” Through the quarters, we kept drifting back to him whenever we weren't playing, and more than once we lingered behind to hear him finish a thought even after our own team had huddled up for a timeout.
At one point I asked if he got to see his wife and kids. “Never,” he said. He seemed to almost tear up, staring off somewhere past me. “It's hard to be a father through the phone.” We sat in it a second, and then he finished: “But I'm glad I raised them well before I got locked up.” I found it incredible that a man could have nothing, not even a light at the end of the tunnel, and still fasten himself so genuinely to a purpose. I decided this would be the takeaway: that no external thing can be the source of your meaning, that if you aren't fulfilled without it you won't be fulfilled with it, and that the men in here radiate purpose more strongly than almost anyone I've met. I went home and told Tina about the inspirational morning.
“Thomas [Lastname] is incarcerated for multiple felony counts of child molestation against two young girls, both under the age of 10.”
Jesus.
I read the Google summary, and then I read it again, and I've gone back to it many times since.
Fuck him, I’m never talking to this sick fuck again.
And that’s that.
So why am I still unsure how to feel?
I've always operated, to varying degrees of explicitness, under one rule: that a terrible act is the last true thing you ever need to know about a person. A few months ago I read “The Love of My Life” by Cheryl Strayed, an essay about grief, about her mother dying and the years she spent unable to live afterward. Somewhere inside all of that she cheats on her husband, over and over, when he had been nothing but gentle with her through everything; it destroyed him when he found out. I felt angry that anyone could enjoy this piece. She had betrayed her husband so egregiously, and somehow she had turned that betrayal into a kind of literary shock device, into something people were moved by. But then I was confused, as I had no right to the anger because the piece had evidently helped so many grieving readers. Was I simply angry because the essay was successful? (And if I was, so what?) I certainly felt that such success, if it hurt someone innocent even indirectly, would be permanently undeserved.
I find that this example illustrates the black-and-white world I've implicitly lived in. In this world, people fall into roughly two buckets:
- good people who do good things
- bad people who do bad things.
Stop—what the hell??
Am I seriously about to say that Tommy is a good man who did bad things? To compare his unforgivable, disgusting acts with Strayed’s writing about affairs? No. But here I realize that to even start down any line other than “fuck him” feels immoral, as if the thought itself violates his victims, who were not only those two girls and their families but his own family too, surely. What did his sins do to his kids, to his wife?
The simple thing, perhaps the obviously correct thing, is to reject him outright and decide that a man who does that to two children has forfeited everything else, and to never speak to him again.
But I am struggling to erase my conversations with Tommy in one sweeping stroke, partly because this struggle is not really only about Tommy. At halftime, one of the other prisoners stood up and talked about grief. He'd lost his sister years ago and hadn't known what to do with it, so he turned to drugs, which is what got him locked up. Then, inside, he recently lost his daughter in a car accident. He said he was only getting through it because of the men around him who give him a shoulder to cry on, who teach him how to grieve. If I Google him, do I erase his choice to be vulnerable too? Does that moment go in the bucket with everything else?
While I stand by the fact that no amount of good Tommy does can absolve him of his crimes, I don't think it follows that the reverse is also true: that he should therefore be treated as nothing. To treat someone as nothing is to say the worst thing they did is the whole truth of them, permanently, that it swallows everything else and nothing they do afterward will mean anything.
The truth is I like clean narratives. I think we all do. The rules and the stories we tell ourselves are what keep us sane, after all. We need simplifications and abstractions—shortcuts—to process the ever more complex world. I think that Strayed reminded me of that shortcut, and Tommy shattered it absolutely. He was supposed to be in the bad bucket, and from the bad bucket you do not get to be a purposeful, inspiring person to me.
Yet he was. I know that some of it, maybe even all of it, could have been for show, or that these changes are temporary. Even so, you cannot wipe away the contradictions that people embody because, in doing so, you somehow wipe away the person itself.
I have spent many hours trying to conclude these thoughts, and I am, if anything, less sure. I feel I have lost my convenient rule to live by, and with that the power to erase the morning, the prayer in the huddle, the man learning how to grieve, because one search told me what Tommy did. When I go back next month, in that dim and lively and oddly nostalgic place, he will come up the way he did the first time with his arms already open to bring me in. I do not know yet what I will do with my hands.
Note that Tommy is a pseudonym, out of respect for everyone involved.
Thank you to Annmaria Antony , Sam Beskind , 
Hannah Gao , Tina Mai , Mayson Yu, Jin Kim , Michael Hla , Alex Huang , Agniv Sarkar , and Millie Wang for reading drafts of this.