“Ask for whatever you want, and if you are respectful and honor the gods and our ancestors, they will listen to you,” my mother taught me. Following her lead, I would stand behind the offering table, holding one or three or five sticks of smoking incense (never an even number, for that was bad luck), close my eyes tight, thank the gods and my ancestors for the goodness they had shown us, and then ask them for things big and small—health for everyone in my family, lots of money next Chinese New Year, straight A’s on the next report card, normal vision…and most of the time, I got what I asked for.
The gods and our ancestors were constants in our home. We felt and were comforted by the eyes of the Buddha statues and of our ancestors, whose images were memorialized forever in dusty, framed black-and-white photos, some of which had been brought over from the old country. They followed us from their perches atop the family altar, situated on the fireplace mantel or a mounted platform, where red, pointy bulbs, which were supposed to imitate real candles, always shone and incense always burned, browning the ceiling above. After my grandmother died, we could feel her in every creak of the house in the night, every movement of a door not caused by a human touch, every flickering of a light. “There goes Grandma,” we would say. For six months after my grandmother died, as her spirit made its gradual way to the next world and before she found her place on the family altar, we left an empty seat at the dinner table so she could eat with us. In front of the seemingly vacant chair would be a bowl full of rice, with a pair of chopsticks standing straight up in the middle of the rounded mound of white. When the grief was so fresh right after her death, we remembered not to sit in her seat, but as the months passed and as the other world called to her more and more, we began to forget and someone would sit in her chair at dinner, I or Lyna or Mau or one of the cousins. “Don’t sit on Grandma!” someone would yell, and the offender would guiltily jump out of her seat.
Even though I felt we tried so hard to make our ancestors happy and to speak to them so that they would hear us, they never seemed to speak to us or guide us in the way I wanted, in the way the Grandfather Spirit had guided my grandmother and mother years ago. Where was his equivalent for me? I needed my questions answered, too.
My confusion and frustrations with the gods, saints, and spirits of my childhood only grew with age, and especially after I left home for college. Still, in the beginning of my college years, I missed them, those unseen and unresponsive Beings with whom I had lived for seventeen years. I felt at times bereft in my new Waspy environment, three thousand miles away from ever-warm Southern California, longing for the comforts of home, which included the rituals of offering and prayer I had always known and taken for granted. In that idyllic college town in the mountains of western Massachusetts—where a Congregational church housed in a two-hundred-year-old white colonial building and an Episcopal church housed in an even older Gothic edifice sat in the middle of campus against the spectacular reds, oranges, and yellows of my first fall foliage and then the blinding white of my first New England snow—I felt a little out of place. There was not one pair of chopsticks or a single Buddha statue to be found, except, in the case of the Buddha statue, maybe buried in a photo in one of the books stored in the East Asian section of the 10-million-volume college library.
At first, I tried to perform the rituals of home in my dorm room, but on a much more modest and inconspicuous scale. I placed a little can filled with grains of uncooked rice on my windowsill, overlooking a brick building with ivy climbing up its walls. The can was positioned right next to a Gregorian-lunar desk calendar that reminded me in Chinese characters which were the days for me to speak to the gods and my ancestors. And on those days, when my roommate wasn’t around, I went through the motions of lighting one or three or five sticks of incense and praying and then standing the incense in the can of rice, just like we did at home. I realized then that my mother had never taught me how to carry on the rituals myself, to establish the lines of communication without her there. What was I supposed to say to call the Beings to me? How was I supposed to address them? I felt like a fraud, playing pathetically at being a Buddhist, ancestor worshipper, practitioner of popular religion, and whatever else I was supposed to be.
I had never thought to ask my mother about the philosophy behind all this, why we bothered to do all this offering and praying, where the source of her faith in these invisible gods and spirits lay—probably because I had a feeling she didn’t know the answers to those questions herself. She didn’t know the teachings of the Buddha any more than I did. She performed the rituals because she had seen her mother do it, and her mother had seen her mother do the same; these were unquestioned family traditions that had been passed from one generation to the next in the old country, where every family did the same. My following of those same traditions seemed empty, even on this modest scale, on this liberal arts college campus that had felt at first so alien but was growing more familiar every day, where I was being encouraged to think, to question, and if I was so moved, to reject. I stopped performing my prayer rituals regularly after the first semester, although I did not stop presenting my list of unanswered questions to any Being that might be listening.
Armed with that new sense of freedom and possibility that comes with college life, not to mention hard-earned work-study money and a credit card, I began unconsciously searching for my Grandfather Spirit equivalent one autumn night during my sophomore year. Bored in a college town with not much to do on a Saturday night except drink, my friend Sue and I fell victim to the persuasive power of years of late-night commercials—we called the Psychic Hotline. “Come on, Sue. It’ll be fun,” I urged my wary friend. Sue and I both knew there was an incredibly high likelihood that it would be bogus, although I was secretly hoping against reason that we might actually encounter the real thing, and I guess so was Sue, since she agreed.
I dialed the 976 number, punching the little white buttons of my bright blue plastic phone, which looked more like a toy with which my baby cousins might play than something that could serve as a bridge to the psychic forces of the universe. A machine asked me to punch in my credit card number. I punched. Then a click.
“Thank you for calling the Psychic Hotline, where all the secrets of your future will be revealed,” said the guy on the other end of the line. He sounded like he was either half asleep or stoned out of his mind. I could tell then that this was not going to go well. When he told me that based on my aura I was going to be pregnant within the year, if I wasn’t already, I rolled my eyes and wordlessly handed the phone over to Sue. She hung up on the guy after he told her she had a tilted uterus, which was why she suffered severe cramps every month. Today we still laugh and cringe at that idiotic waste of twenty dollars.
Still, the Psychic Hotline experience did not deter us. During spring break of that year, which we spent in L.A., Sue and I were lured into a tiny store on Melrose Avenue, its window adorned with the pink flashing neon message PALM READING $5. The gypsy woman inside—at least that was how she was dressed—with the Transylvanian accent foretold over a crystal ball that I would find my true love in six months (which I did not) and that Sue would find much professional success in some way that the woman could not specify. Sue stopped seeing alleged psychics with me after that experience, and I went on alone in my search.
After the Psychic Hotline and the Melrose Avenue palm reader was the Tibetan Buddhist palm-reading monk, whom I encountered during my junior year abroad in western China; he declared that I was incredibly intelligent. After him came the palm-reading fisherman I found along the Yangzi River, who predicted that I would have a long, successful life. Next was the Chinese astrologer of Taipei, who said nothing memorable. Then there was the Turkish tea-leaves reader of Sierra Madre, California, who said I would have a great time on my next vacation. And of course, there was Clairvoyant Mark of New York City, the aura and palm reader at the drunken company holiday party at the Rainbow Room, w
ho also said I was smart.
Yet among this parade of unremarkable, if not altogether bad, readings and observations, there was one woman who was quite unforgettable, not because she could predict my future but because she could see into my past.
She was a palm reader. I met her five years before my mother told me about what she and the rest of them had tried to do to me. After I learned that, this woman’s words would come back to me with greater impact; it was almost like she knew before I knew.
We had met in her high-rise apartment on the east side of midtown Manhattan. Daylight streamed into the giant windows that overlooked Third Avenue. The apartment was not what I had come to expect. There were no candles, no chairs or sofas covered in red velour, no plastic beads hanging in the doorway between her living room and her inner sanctum, no gold-tasseled tablecloths and cushions, no crystal ball. Instead, the apartment was decorated in muted tans and browns with carefully coordinated splashes of color in the throw pillows on the sofa and in the lush rugs. I wouldn’t have minded living in such a space. The woman herself was an extension of the apartment. Dressed in cream-colored pants and a white sweater with a clean, barely made-up face, this middle-aged woman did not look to me like someone able to see what the rest of us could not.
I had really come to her apartment to hire her services for a big bash my roommates and I were throwing that coming weekend. As part of our commitment to live fully our never-again-to-be-experienced carefree postcollege years in New York City, we had decided to invite everyone we could think of to invade our seven-hundred-square-foot, three-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side for an unforgettable party. A fortune-teller would help to make it unforgettable, I had suggested. The roommates enthusiastically embraced my suggestion, so I had been assigned the task of finding the fortune-teller. In the end, I liked the price this woman had given me over the phone. I had come to her apartment to meet her face-to-face and to make sure that she was legitimate, or at least that she wasn’t going to murder us all. And just maybe, I thought, I would allow myself to be the guinea pig to see if she was—on the off chance—the real thing.
After we finished discussing the logistics for the party, she agreed to read my palm for twenty-five dollars for one half hour—a reasonable price—and without that icky eagerness that would have hinted at a woman desperate for business. I liked that. I was cautiously optimistic.
We sat across from one another at a little smoky glass table. She flipped on the lamp next to us, its light bright enough to uncover the darkest mysteries, I thought. Then she slipped her frameless reading glasses on her nose, snapping shut their case with a quick thwack. She held out her hands toward me.
“Now I have to see both your palms,” she said.
I met her halfway, extending my arms so that my palms rested between us, their countless lines staring up at both of us.
“For a woman, her right palm tells the truth about her life as she now lives it, while her left palm reveals clues into what her life might have been in her alternate fate.”
Well, that was new to me, and a fascinating notion, if true.
Her cool hands were white against mine, her light green veins pronounced, her fingernails neat ovals with clear polish. She grazed the lines of one palm with her fingertips and then bent my fingers on both hands back farther than I thought they could go, lowering her head another couple inches to scrutinize the tiniest lines. Then after what seemed like endless minutes of silence, interrupted only by the sound of my own breathing, she looked up at me.
“Well, your palms are very interesting,” she said quite deliberately.
Yep, just stalling to give yourself more time to make up something grand, I’ll bet. I hope at least you come up with something a little more original or else I’m really going to feel like a moron (yet again) for wasting money.
“There is a big difference between your right and left palms, a very dramatic difference,” she continued. “In the right one, I see a good long life. You see how your life line goes all the way down here and how deep it is?” She traced the line with her right index finger.
Sure, I guess so.
Not waiting for a response, she went on. “But then look at the life line on your left palm. It’s short, and there are so many lines cutting into it. This palm tells me that in your alternate life, you would have suffered much illness, frustration, and unhappiness, and early death.”
Okay, now that’s original.
She looked up again. “There must have been a profound change in your life. Something happened that truly altered the course your life would have taken,” she said, clearly intrigued by the story my palms were telling her.
I had made it a policy to not help these fortune-tellers, to give them minimal information about myself, but sometimes they did need something a little bit more specific and concrete to guide them along.
“Well, I left home a few years ago and decided to live far away from my family,” I offered. That was nice and vague but still somewhat informative.
She gave her head a quick shake. “No, no. That might be part of it, but it’s not that. There’s something else, something that happened when you were little.” The woman seemed genuinely puzzled and bothered. I decided to take some pity on her, to tell her part of what had instantly come to my mind when she mentioned illness and frustration.
“Well, I was born in Vietnam and came here when I was almost four years old. That certainly changed my life very dramatically.”
She was looking at me again, peering intently over the top of her glasses in a way that made me just a little uneasy. “Yes, that makes more sense. But I think there’s more to it…It has to do with your eyes, doesn’t it?” Her voice trailed off, as if she were musing to herself and not aloud to me.
Some people think that I just have thick glasses. Most of the time I can move around with my bad vision pretty well, almost like a normally sighted person. Others, the people who are a little more observant, will notice the never-ending quivering of my pupils and will guess that there’s something more going on than the typical eye afflictions. In any case, almost no one ever has the nerve to mention it to me or, worse yet, ask me directly about it, for fear of offending me. So I was a little startled by this woman’s bluntness. I liked it, though; it was refreshing. And for her to connect my eye problem with what she was seeing in my palms, well, that was kind of brilliant, I had to admit. I answered her question.
“I couldn’t see when I was born in Vietnam, and I didn’t get surgery to fix the problem until I came to America—as much as they could fix at that point, because it was pretty late in the game. I imagine my life would have been very different had I not made it to this country,” I explained.
“Well then, you’re one lucky girl,” the palm reader stated. She said it with the confidence of a well-accepted fact, as simple as two plus two equals four.
“I suppose so. I’ve not always thought of myself that way, to be honest. Sometimes it’s hard to deal with, not being able to see like the rest of the world, and all you can focus on is everything that you can’t do. It really sucks, you know.” To my great surprise, I found myself choking up as I talked. I had to stop before it became obvious to this total stranger. Sometimes this happened, as if all the self-indulgent emotions I bottled up threatened to come to the surface and expose me.
Still, it’s funny how you can feel comfortable enough to tell a perfect stranger deeply personal things. Sometimes you just need someone to listen to you. Knowing that I would never see her one-on-one again and that she had no preconceived notions about me just made it easier somehow.
She was patient and kind. “What your palms are telling me, what they’re telling you if you knew how to read them, is that you should focus on how far you’ve come from where you began in your life. Be happy about that. Something that some people don’t realize is that the lines on a person’s palm can chan
ge and do change all the time. Your future is not set in stone. In the beginning, there are many things that we have no control over—where we are born, who our parents are, how we come into this world with something wrong with our eyes or maybe our ears or our legs, whatever it is—but from there it’s up to us to decide what we do with what we’ve been given. We make our own choices.”
I have often imagined what my life could have been in some alternate universe where different choices, in which I had no say, were made at critical moments that might or might not have seemed so critical at the time, choices in moments that forever defined the course of my life. What if my mother had never taken those green pills she suspects caused my blindness? What if our boat had planned to leave Vietnam only weeks later, at the same time my mother’s parents were supposed to leave? What if my mother had decided not to marry my father? What if the herbalist had been willing to do the unthinkable? There are infinite possibilities that make up that alternate universe. But there were only two, and then later three, basic scenarios that haunted my imagination most.
In Scenario One, I am born normal, or I am born in the United States, or come over within the first six months of my life so my eyes are fixed completely by the doctors here, who seem like miracle workers to most people in the world. I can see perfectly. I can do anything and everything—play tennis, drive a car, climb mountains. I am beautiful and popular because I’m not a freak with my Coke-bottle glasses, my giant large-print books, and my many magnifying glasses. I grow up as a normal kid. Scenario One made me hurt and sad for everything that could have been. It was what I longed for when I was angry, frustrated, and self-pitying. My mother shared my longing for this perfect world. I know, because when my GPA fell short of a 4.0 or when she saw me struggling down a set of stairs, she would say, unable to suppress the impulse, “It’s so too bad. Imagine what more you could have done if you could see normally. If only the doctors had been able to fix it completely…” I could say nothing in response because she was right. I could imagine.
The Unwinding of the Miracle Page 13
