And then I grew angry at the image of this other woman who would have the time and life I should have had with Josh and my girls. I hate her, this woman I don’t even know. I vow that if she does wrong by Josh and my children, I will hurt her. I will come back as a poltergeist and hurl books and vases and anything heavy and painful at her head. And yet I also want her, need her, to come into their lives, to take care of my husband and children. I need her to love them as well as if not better than I do; for as long as Josh and the girls are okay, then I know I will be okay. I need them to mourn me, to remember me for a time, and then I need them to move on and live their lives with joy and abandon. This is what I want for them above all else.
In sleep, I found a reprieve from my waking nightmare, for in sleep I do not have cancer. In sleep, I live the life I wanted. I’ve half convinced myself that death will be like my dreams. In death, my soul will travel to a different dimension, where I will get to live my ideal. There, I will no longer be plagued by the limitations and hurts of this body, but I will have the compassion and wisdom gained from the painful experiences of this life. There, I will know what it is like to see the world perfectly, to drive a car, fly a plane, play tennis. I will get to live a full and complete life with Josh, my great love of many lifetimes. With him, I will travel more of the world and have our two girls and more children. I will cook grand feasts for them and fill the house with the smell of freshly baked breads. Our home will ring with the sounds of innocuous yelling and mundane dramas and warm laughter. And there will be so much love, always so much love.
Every time I woke from sleep, the first thought I had was that I had incurable cancer with a prognosis of several years (and probably less given the seeming aggressiveness of the cancer), and I wanted to scream at the loss of my dreams in my waking hours. Each time I awoke was like mourning the loss of my dreams again and again and again. Torture. Agony. Crushing. It’s enough to make you want to die so you can go live the life that you’ve half convinced yourself awaits.
Josh wouldn’t allow me to lie broken on the ground. He yanked me up by the arms, screaming right back at me, “I will not let you give up. Do you hear me? You will not give up!” In the next breath, he was begging me to fight for him and the children, if not for myself.
I honestly think Josh and the girls would be better off starting over sooner rather than later. No one has been able to convince me otherwise. I don’t want to be a burden. I don’t want my family to see me die a slow and painful death. I don’t want them to live through my emotional roller coaster. In no way am I minimizing the love Josh feels for me. It is very real and deep, but I also know that he is capable of loving someone else, that he should and will need to love someone else. And perhaps that love will be as profound as, if not more profound than, the love we have. He is a good and wonderful man, and I have been inordinately lucky to have him. And I know that the children are resilient, that they will withstand my loss and thrive regardless. They are, after all, my children, and I like to think the best of me flows through their veins.
I know that so many will step in to help Josh raise them and that so many will tell them about their mother. I know they will be surrounded by love.
So no, if I choose to keep fighting, it won’t be because I think Josh and the girls really need me or that somehow more time with me will make much of a positive difference in their ultimate destinies. Nor will I fight based on some delusional hope that I will somehow still miraculously beat this, or that I will have a lot more time than I now expect to have. I have always had a tumultuous relationship with the concept of hope, and I still do. I’m not a believer. I will leave the hope stuff to all of you.
Even so, I do choose to keep fighting. It took me nearly two weeks to make that affirmative choice. It took me nearly two weeks to recover from the lows of that day after Christmas, to pull myself out of that darkness. It happened with the help of Josh and my girls, my beloved longtime therapist, and the words of my even more beloved sister, Lyna, and best friend, Sue. They helped me to see important truths about me and how I want my life to be viewed now and after I am gone.
When I did poorly on a test in high school—and by “poorly” I mean by my nerdy standards a 92 instead of a 95, or a 97 instead of 100—I would come home tearful, convinced that this unacceptable grade was the greatest tragedy of my young life, and indeed it was. My parents were not the typical crazy Asian American parents who put pressure on us. Yes, my dad would pay us for every A we got on our report cards, but there were never any demands or threats. In response to my crying, my mother would ask in her broken English, “Did you do the best you can?” Of course I had. “Then that’s all you can do,” she would tell me.
It was such simplistic advice, and yet it was so true. Your best effort is all you can ask of yourself—no more and no less. And once you’ve done that, there can be no regrets. I will continue to fight this disease—not with the same gung-ho attitude I had at the beginning—but I will continue to fight it with an even more nuanced, deeper, and more realistic understanding of its deadliness. I am an overachiever, used to doing my best at everything. A lot of times my best wasn’t good enough to get the stellar grades. Similarly, my best will not be enough to beat cancer, but even as I lie dying someday not that far in the future, to know that I tried my best to gain more time in this life and to live as well as possible in the face of this disease and therefore have no regrets, that knowledge will be enough for me. It will bring me peace, because by choosing to fight without ceasing, even in the face of such a formidable foe, I will teach my girls one of the most important lessons there can be. I want them to understand the importance of always doing the best they can in whatever endeavor, a lesson that their maternal grandmother taught me and one that I now must teach them.
As a mother, I don’t get to just walk away from my children, however much I may want to escape further physical and emotional pain or for any other selfish reasons. I made the choice to be a mother and with that choice came sacrosanct commitments, the most important among them being to give my children the tools to live their lives, tools that go well beyond feeding, bathing, and clothing them. Continuing to live and battle this disease in the face of its likely outcome is about keeping the most sacred promises I made to them on the days I held each of their little, fragile bodies in my arms for the first time.
And, by God, I will live with joy.
After the bad news, I received many wonderful messages of support and love, from intimates as well as strangers. All of them lifted my spirit, and got me thinking that somehow my fight was also their fight, and the notion that I must continue to fight for them was incredibly beautiful to me, and in turn gives me the will to fight even more.
It is as John Donne wrote in his “no man is an island” meditation: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.” Yes, I suppose that my death will diminish you, but I also understand now that my living and fighting makes you greater than you are. We humans are resilient little bugs. And indeed, anyone who chooses to live and fight and show by example the power of the human spirit that we all share, and its determination to persevere against the brutalities of what life can bring, strengthens us all with a sense of the tremendous potential and fortitude that lie within each of us, a potential that is realized only when truly tested.
So I fight for myself, for my family, for the message that my war against cancer conveys to all of you, to all of humanity, about the incredible strength of which we are all capable. And by that same token, I urge all of you who face your own challenges that make you want to fall into the darkness to fight, too, because you, too, are part of humanity, and your fight matters and gives me and others strength when we falter.
As the new year began, I received many messages reminding me of how brave and strong I am. Which in the moment felt akin to telling a Chihuahua that he is actually Great Dane. I felt anything but brave and strong d
uring those weeks. Does a brave and strong person lie on the ground crying as her children look on in horror? No, those are not images of bravery and strength. It is what she does afterward, though, that matters. A brave and strong person then hugs her daughters and tells them stories about her childhood, and even though they’re too young to understand, she talks to them about what it means to get married one day and how important it is for them to love themselves first and foremost before thinking about loving someone else. A brave and strong person pulls herself out of the abyss with the help of those who have more strength, hope, and faith than she and goes about the business of living even though she doesn’t necessarily want to. A brave and strong person goes back to doing more research as she tries to figure out what to do next. She does all this knowing that there will be another abyss and many more moments and hours and days of darkness before she succumbs to the inevitable.
24
“Keeping It in the Stomach”
Enough gloom and doom from me.
Who’s got time for that?
I need to resolve something here. I want to talk about love, and about other words, spoken and unspoken. I want to talk about my mother and my grandmother. My grandmother—that grandmother—the larger-than-life woman whom I had loved so completely and respected so much for her intelligence and indomitable strength. When she died so suddenly of colon cancer at the age of seventy-three, I was convinced that I would suffocate beneath the weight of all the grief, for it was the first time in my twenty years of life that someone I loved and someone I believed loved me just as much had left me.
But then, when my mother told me how much my grandmother had loathed me, I had to learn to hate, because I wanted to hate her back—this woman who was a stranger to me now—with as much venom as she had shown me, and to set fire to everything good I had ever thought of or felt for her. I wanted to yank her back from the spirit world to demand that she answer for her crimes against me, for her betrayal.
In the aftermath of that initial eruption was a scorched terrain of deep, inconsolable hurt and an insatiable need to know if she and the rest of them had ever loved me or been sorry for what they all had tried to do, if any of them ever shuddered at the idea of their daughter/granddaughter dead before she had a chance to live. Was that why my father had suddenly cried upon seeing me trying on my black cap and gown the day before my college graduation, tears rolling down his roughened cheeks in a way that struck me as too much and too odd for that occasion, no matter how proud he might have been? Was he sorry then, wordlessly apologizing to me with every tear? What had my grandmother been thinking in that picture of her holding my hand in the perfectly manicured gardens at the Huntington Library when I was seven years old, wearing pigtails and my Buddy Holly glasses? Or what about when she sat down next to me and patted me on the back in that restrained, affectionate manner that was her way when I got my period for the first time? She’d seemed so proud. Was that the same woman who ten years earlier had been so concerned with what would happen to me when I started menstruating, horrified at the thought of me bleeding everywhere like a wild animal?
Did you think then about how you had wanted to put me to sleep like some rabid dog?
After the hurt came the need to clear the smoke and ashes so I could move on (I am moving on still), to create order out of the chaos in my mind, with rationalization and even pity for these misguided people I had to call my family. They were all superstitious souls trapped in a backward, hopeless country, trying to survive in difficult times, living within a culture where female infanticide was not an unfamiliar idea. Perhaps in that situation, even I would have thought murder was justified…perhaps.
Don’t fool yourself. You know you wouldn’t have. Even the herbalist, who by the way came from the same time and place as all of them, knew that.
I could definitely feel sorry for my mother, if no one else. She was the biggest victim. Yes, she was beautiful, but she was fearful and lacked the assertive personality needed to challenge my domineering grandmother. She had been taught to be respectful of and obedient to her elders and to quash her own selfish voice for the selfless good of the family. It was easy for me to imagine my mother cowering before my grandmother’s will, because all through my childhood I witnessed my mother fleeing from confrontations at home and at work. My frequently ill-tempered father cursed and yelled at her whenever he felt like it for silly and sundry things—rinsing the dishes twice because she was neurotically afraid of us ingesting detergent or watching the water boil for soup when she should have been more efficient by prepping the vegetables for the soup—to the point where I wanted to throw my little, meaty body over her thin one to shelter her from his verbal daggers. Exasperated, I once asked her why she never fought back against my father or that co-worker who had maligned her in front of everyone at work but whom she condemned in turn only in the confines of our home.
She said it was better to “keep it in the stomach,” a Vietnamese phrase that means to hold one’s tongue, to keep it bottled up inside, all for the sake of preserving the peace. Even as she revealed the truth to me almost thirty years after it all happened and almost ten years after my grandmother’s death, she was still nervous, afraid of breaking the pact of secrecy that had held them together for all those years, a pact that had become severely weakened in the absence of my grandmother’s silencing presence.
“If your grandmother were still alive, I would not tell you what I am about to tell you, and your grandfather and your father will yell at me until the end of my life or theirs if they find out,” she said as she began the story. Her eyes, brows, and mouth had pulled into a rigid mask as if to defend against the inevitable attacks. Yet she was willing to take the risk to tell me.
She said she told me because I had the right to know. She was right. I did have the right to know. But I don’t believe that was the only reason for her.
True to her belief in “keeping it in the stomach,” my mother is adept at repressing her darker emotions. I can remember her crying only twice in my presence—once at my grandmother’s funeral, where she suddenly burst into tears, and the other time as she said goodbye to me in my college dorm room right before the beginning of freshman year, when she was blinking so much that I thought her eyelashes might fall off. While words flow easily to her when telling any story, they seem to dry up when they could be used to expose her vulnerability.
In my family she is not alone in that regard. Words like “I’m sorry” or “I love you” or even “thank you” are never uttered in my family, although there are exceptions among those of my generation who grew up in America. Otherwise, those types of words are simply not part of our spoken familial language. Instead, we are forced to interpret the words that are spoken to us and to master an unspoken language in which our actions are our words.
When my parents cook my favorite dishes in the whole world in honor of my visits home, they are showing me how much they love me, which has always struck me as a much more compelling and persuasive expression of love than simply saying words.
So even though my mother seemed to tell the story without emotion that night, I knew that below the surface there were so many unspoken messages, things that my mother wanted me to know but she just couldn’t bring herself to say aloud. Later I would mull over the music in her voice, the nuance behind her every word, and the subtlety of her body language a thousand times, maybe a million times, to figure it all out. In the slightly elevated pitch of her voice, almost angry sounding, somewhat akin to that of a petulant child denying responsibility for something, and in the even slighter jutting of her chin, there was defensiveness against the reproach she expected from me. It wasn’t my idea. I didn’t really want to do it, she seemed to be saying. Mostly, though, there was guilt. Her defensiveness would not have existed but for the guilt.
I knew based on statements she’d made over the years that she felt responsible for my being born with cat
aracts, statements like “I was stupid to take those pills while I was pregnant with you.” She is the type of woman who sucks blame and guilt into herself through a giant straw. She would say things like “I couldn’t find any cow’s milk for you when you were a baby. You would have been so much taller if I had been able to.” It was her fault that my skin was too dark because she hadn’t known the right foods to feed me. It was her fault that I didn’t get into Yale since she hadn’t pushed me hard enough.
If my mother was going to feel guilt for the cataracts and things like my height and the color of my skin and the fact that I couldn’t quite make it into Yale, then the guilt she carried for taking me to see that herbalist must have been unbearable. For twenty-eight years my mother had tried to repress the guilt of attempting to kill me, and that night she finally stopped trying. In the very act of telling me, of risking my father’s and grandfather’s wrath, of freeing herself from the frightened woman she has always been, of finding the courage to look me in the eye and admit what she had done, she was begging me for absolution, giving me the power to free her from her guilt.
The Unwinding of the Miracle Page 16
