The Unwinding of the Miracle

by Julie Yip-Williams

  The day after surgery—the day after we all knew I had Stage IV colon cancer—my sister (who had also made the trip to Los Angeles from New York for the family wedding and reunion) came to visit. She told me how she had not been able to sleep much of the night before, but then suddenly, as she was sitting in the dark, she was overcome by an absolute knowing that I would beat this cancer. She told me she just knew I would. I wished I had her blind faith. The next day she came to see me again, this time suddenly bursting into tears as she entered my room. This sister of mine who never cries hugged me and told me how I was the strong one, that I wasn’t supposed to get sick, and how she had been trying to hold it together constantly around the girls and our parents, and now that they were all outside somewhere, she couldn’t keep it pent up anymore. My sister was my daughters’ surrogate mother during those early days. At my parents’ house, while my mother made sure the girls were fed and bathed and as Josh slept in the hospital with me, Mia and Belle turned to my sister for comfort, cuddling against her every night because she was the closest thing to me that they had. My poor sister bore a heavy burden. I hugged her back, told her that indeed I was very strong, that I had always been and would always be.

  Cousin N came to see me after work. She is notorious in our family for crying at anything and everything, but she’d been oddly stalwart since my diagnosis. I told her how I was astounded that she hadn’t shed a single tear for me, secretly wondering if she didn’t care as much as I thought she did. Oh, no, she said, just that day she’d cried a lot; she’d cried on the phone while talking to Cousin C, she’d cried at her desk afterward and to her co-workers, and she’d cried in her car, all the way to the hospital; but now she was all cried out; she was good for the time being. She flashed a smile that was a little too big, trying to hide the tears that glinted in the corners of her eyes. I think I loved Cousin N more than ever in that moment.

  Even though I had frequent visitors, numerous phone calls, and much love, I spent many hours alone in my hospital room while everyone else was working or playing. Alone with my thoughts, my sadness, my fear, my shock. Fortunately, UCLA was my hospital heaven and angels abounded. I had and have stayed at other hospitals before and since, when I gave birth to my children and then after my HIPEC surgery, but there were no angels then, nothing particularly remarkable or memorable about the nurses who cared for me. There was something extraordinarily special about UCLA for me that I’d never known before and haven’t known since. Perhaps another sign of God’s hand in my life.

  Karen, Noreen, Ray, Roxanne, Costa, Manuel, Ginger, Anita, Damian—names that mean nothing to you, but for me those names bring back memories of comfort and solace, hands, hugs, and words that consoled me in the darkest moments of my life. The people who are represented by those names were my true pillars of strength at a time when no one who loved me seemed to be able to bear the weight of my turbulent emotions, so for the most part I hid those emotions from the people I knew and loved, and instead unleashed them on these angels of mine. Their ability to listen, reassure, smile, and be optimistic in the face of all the horrors they saw every single day astounded and inspired me.

  Costa clutched my hands one afternoon after she’d caught a glimpse of my girls leaving the room and prayed solemnly to God for me in a language I didn’t understand. The fervor of her prayers brought tears to my eyes. Then she went about changing my sheets.

  Karen, the twenty-six-year-old Chinese American woman—a girl, really—who reminded me so of my good friend V, accompanied me on many a walk around the floor, telling me about how when she saw my name, she had been taken aback because Yip had also been the name of her mother, who died at age thirty-eight of colon cancer when Karen was only two years old, leaving behind her overwhelmed father and three grieving older siblings. I could feel that Karen took comfort in me as much as I took comfort in her. I could feel that hand of God again when I looked into her strangely familiar face.

  Then there was the man whose name I never knew, the one who didn’t speak a word of English, whom I might have mistaken for a youthful gangster in any other setting in light of the way his dark brown hair was slicked back into a ponytail at the nape of his neck and the way the rippling muscles in his forearms bespoke an easy violence if he so chose. He silently cleaned me one night after I’d had a humiliating accident. The gentleness of his touch, and the absence of disgust and judgment, which I found shocking and so humbling, destroyed all my unkind preconceived notions of who he was. I doubted that I could do for a stranger what he was doing for me, but I wanted to after being in his presence. I witnessed through him the extent and power of compassion, the love that one human being can express to another through action alone, not because they know one another but because they are simply members of the same human race.

  And then there was David, my colorectal surgeon, whose nimble hands removed sixty-eight lymph nodes, an extraordinary number that was a testament to his exceptional skill and tenacity. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has had sixty-eight lymph nodes removed laparoscopically. As I’ve often been told, the best odds for survival begin with a skilled surgeon, and I had the best surgeon I could possibly have had. He is my age, and he and his wife are Chinese American, and have two children, too, who are about the same ages as Mia and Belle. David spent hours answering our questions, going over the incomprehensible color photos from the surgery with Josh and me, reviewing the results of the pathology and scan reports, punching holes in the troubling studies, and then telling Josh not to “perseverate,” filling my head with stories of patients who had overcome against all odds.

  I’m sure David felt sorry for us—a young family much like his own coming out to Los Angeles for vacation and then being blindsided by an advanced cancer diagnosis. I would have felt sorry for me, too. But even so, he did more than a typical compassionate doctor would have done. He befriended us (or as much as he could, given the doctor-patient dynamics of our relationship). When he heard that we were looking for a short-term rental nearby so I could recuperate, he offered us an unused part of his house. We didn’t think he was actually serious, so we just ignored the offer.

  At the end of our monthlong stay in L.A., on the evening before we were to fly back to New York, he invited us to his rambling house perched on the side of a canyon, for a playdate with the kids and dinner. It was then that we realized he’d actually been sincere in his offer of a place to stay. Our kids played with ladybugs and puzzles that focused on the different parts of the human body while the adults drank and ate cheese, mussels, pasta, and ice cream. It was a lovely evening, reinforcing my belief that under different circumstances, we would have been true friends. At the end of the evening, as we said our goodbyes, I stood there facing an uncertain and terrifying future and facing David, this man who had seen and removed the raging, murderous tumor in me. I tried to find the words to express my gratitude. How do you say thank you to the person who has seen your insides and saved your life? Is it even possible? No words came. I made a helpless gesture with my hand that was supposed to mean “thank you,” and then I broke down in tears. We hugged, and he cried, too. And then he looked at me and told me, “You’re going to be fine, just fine.”

  My Chinese last name means leaf. The Chinese love their idiomatic sayings, where four syllables can carry deep and profound meaning. There is one in particular that I associate with my time in Los Angeles, both while at UCLA and in the weeks after, and that is “A fallen leaf always returns to its roots.” I was undeniably a fallen leaf then, and I had returned to the place where I grew up, where so much of my family and so many friends remain, and where new friends gathered, where they encircled me, Josh, and our girls in love and protection, where I started the process of rebirth into a new life. My parents would go back and forth between their home and the hospital and then later the rental, toting food and our laundered clothes, chargers, toiletries, and anything else we needed. Cousin N and her husband offered a bed and s
hower at her nearby apartment so Josh could freshen up in a place more comfortable than my hospital bathroom.

  Family and friends offered playdates and other fun and distracting activities for my girls. Third Aunt and Uncle came to visit in the hospital, donning hazard masks and gowns before they entered my room (for this was when I was still being tested for C. difficile, and precautions had to be taken to prevent the spread of any bacteria). Fifth Aunt and Uncle made the long drive after work from the east side to visit me. Other aunts and uncles whom I hadn’t spoken to in years showed up to tell me they loved me. Yes, Chinese people telling me they loved me; that was nearly as shocking as being told I had cancer. In a true gesture of love, they cooked me feast after feast to try to fatten me up. My family and friends threw a big party to celebrate Belle’s second birthday and as a celebration of life for me, to which family and friends from different walks of my life came, some of them traveling thousands of miles to be there.

  While in some respects the story of my diagnosis was a nightmare, I think it is ultimately a story of love between me and all those who came to support me. In my moments of elusive faith, I believed the hand of God had brought me to Los Angeles then so that I could know that kind of magical and singular love, a love that I had never experienced before and, I daresay, that even many of those who have lived many more years than I have never experienced and will never experience. Sadly, it’s the type of love that is shown only when life is threatened, when for a few minutes, hours, days, or weeks, everyone agrees on and understands what really matters. And yet, as transient as that love can be, its magic, intensity, and power can sustain the most cynical among us, as long as we allow ourselves to linger in the glow of its memory. This disease may bring me to the final days of my life on this earth, but the story of how cancer came into my life reminds me every day that while it has taken from me the innocence and happiness of my old life, it has also given me the gift of human love, which has now become part of my soul and which I will take with me forever.

  19

  Fate and Fortune

  When I learned that my parents and grandparents tried to kill me, it didn’t just make me feel a thousand different volatile emotions; it also made me think those grand thoughts and pose those mind-numbing questions that theologians and philosophers have been pondering and raising for millennia. But fortunately, unlike the raw emotions running through my body, these thoughts and questions were, for the most part, comfortingly familiar and calming in their intellectual nature, as I’d been pondering and raising the same ones in some form or fashion since I was a little girl.

  From the moment I was capable of somewhat advanced thinking and realized that I was different, and not necessarily in a good way, I began compiling a list of questions that grew in length and sophistication as I grew, a list of questions for the Buddhist gods and local Chinese saints I had known in my childhood, my ancestors who might as well have been gods, the Christian God that all Americans believed in it seemed, at least based on what the television was telling me, and any other Being who might be out there. I must have been six or seven when I began the list. Through the years, I would stare up at the ceiling on sleepless, frustrated nights and present my list.

  Buddha, Goddess of the Sea, Great-Great-Grandfather, God, All Powerful and Knowing Being, if any of you has the time to listen to me, can you please answer some questions for me? I need to understand.

  Why was I born blind?

  Why couldn’t I have been born in this country, where the doctors could have fixed me with a snap of their fingers?

  Why didn’t we make it to America sooner, because sooner would have meant more vision?

  Of all the bodies in this world I could have been born into, why this body with the fucked-up eyes?

  Is there a reason, a greater purpose, for me being born into this body, in a poor country, and at a turbulent time? Because, you know, if there were, that would make my fucked-up vision and the hurt so much easier to deal with.

  What is that greater purpose?

  And what is to come next in my life? What lies in my future? What am I supposed to do?

  After my mother told me what she’d done, I reasked all those questions and added another question to the top of the list:

  Why did I live when I could have so easily died?

  After each question, I would pause, listening carefully for an answer and looking for a sign that might be an answer. No answers ever came, not when I was eight, not when I was eighteen, and not when I was twenty-eight. Without any answers, the questions became inner musings, evolving over the years into metaphysical discussions that took place entirely inside my head. Instead of answers, they produced more questions.

  Well, maybe it was all an accident. Maybe there’s no reason for any of it and I should be happy and grateful that things just happened to work out the way they did.

  But how can all of this, this whole world, our convoluted, complicated lives, be a gigantic accident? How can people suffer from disabling diseases and die for no reason? How can suffering and death be matters of sheer bad luck?

  No, there must be a point to it all. There must be a plan for me, for everyone, put in motion by a god or the gods, our ancestors, the universe, Someone or Something. And maybe in the end, all we can do is live and make the best choices we can, and everything will just work out…

  But that’s unacceptable! Am I, are we all, supposed to just flail around hoping that there’s some plan out there and that no matter what we do, it’ll all be okay in the end? I mean, how do I know what choices are best? How do I know what the plan is? And if there really is a plan and a reason for every horrible thing that happens to us in this world and everything has been predetermined, what is the point of doing anything at all, because self-will and free choice would be utterly meaningless. Why should we do anything to make the horrible things not so horrible?

  I started looking elsewhere for my answers. I must have been about twelve when we got a free copy of one of the Mysteries of the Unknown books when my brother or sister subscribed to Time magazine. Mysteries was a series that explored the strange and the unexplained—UFOs, hauntings, witchcraft—but the book we got was about psychic powers. Pages were devoted to the art of palm reading, depicting differently shaped palms with various line patterns. I was captivated and comforted by the idea that a person’s character and future could be discerned from the lines on his hand, because that would mean that there is a set plan and we don’t have to flounder about in this universe with its frighteningly infinite possibilities. I watched with fascination when self-proclaimed psychics appeared on Donahue, Geraldo, The Sally Jessy Raphael Show, and Larry King Live, people who could see the future through reading palms, tarot cards, or tea leaves, read the auras of the living, or talk to the prescient spirits of the dead. Now, these were people who might be able to answer all my questions or connect me to the Beings who could.

  Even though I knew that there were many frauds out there who fueled the skeptics’ arguments, believing that there were true clairvoyants was not a stretch for me since I came from a family culture that embraced a bit of Buddhism and lots of popular religion, which itself consisted of healthy doses of ancestor worship and old-world superstitions. When I was growing up in Southern California, the world of fortune-tellers, of spirits and ghosts, of all those invisible things that move in some supernatural dimension was real, part of my experience through the stories my mother told of the old country and through the rituals of our everyday lives. Ghosts had been known to roam our house in Tam Ky, washing dishes and cleaning floors in the dead of night. The woman who sold tobacco on the streets of Tam Ky (the one married to the Da Nang herbalist) and the spirit of her deceased grandfather, who returned to this world by occupying the body of a teenage boy to give aid to the living, were celebrated characters in my family lore. After all, it was the Grandfather Spirit who had told us that we had to leave Vietnam
when we did. “After your boat leaves, no more boats will leave from here. If you miss this boat, you will have lost your chance for a long time, maybe forever,” he warned my paternal grandmother as his host’s body shook with unearthly tremors. My mother’s parents and all her siblings were supposed to depart on the next boat, due to depart only several weeks after ours, but that boat never left. My maternal grandmother asked the Grandfather Spirit then when they would be able to get out. “Ten years” was his response. I met my mother’s parents and all her siblings at Los Angeles International Airport exactly ten years later.

  My family was not so blessed as to have the spirits of our benevolent ancestors come back to us in human form, but we still sought their help. Our family rituals included frequent offerings and prayers to our ancestors, long-deceased great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents, who in death became godlike in their omniscience and omnipotence. On the first and fifteenth day of every lunar month, Chinese New Year, and Death Day, the day on which the dead are remembered, my mother would set up in the front doorway of our house a candlelit table full of fruits, fish, chicken, pork, rice, tea, and wine. Bundles of incense burned on the table, the fragrant wisps of smoke inviting the Buddhist gods and our ancestors’ spirits to come feast and listen to our prayers. We also tried to fulfill our ancestors’ material desires for riches they did not have on earth. On the death anniversaries of those ancestors who had been closest to us—my great-grandmother and later my grandmother—and on Death Day, we would throw into a flame-spewing metal drum stacks of shiny, gold-colored paper—money in the afterlife—along with red mansions, blue Mercedes, robust-looking servants, and tailored clothes, all made of paper. Within seconds, the flames transformed our offerings into black ash, releasing clouds of dark smoke that lifted toward the heavens, carrying the riches to our beloved.