When Mia hugs me with her long limbs, I feel her love; I feel her need for me to bolster her being and her need for me to assure her that I love her no less than I love her sister. I wish I could explain to her the incredible grace, beauty, intelligence, and kindness that I already see in her despite her tender age, and I marvel with pride that I produced such a lovely, lovely being. Indeed, I love both of them without end and marvel constantly at how I could be a mother to these amazing girls. I feel a love for them I never knew possible.
But Belle’s hugs are different. When Isabelle hugs me with her more compact, stockier body (for she is all solid torso and meaty flesh, while her willowy sister is all impossibly long legs and arms), I feel her love, yes, but there is not the same neediness from her. Rather, I feel like the weight of her body holds me to this earth and to this life in those moments when I want to leave it most, as if in her embrace she is silently telling me that I must live not for her but because there is more for my soul to do and learn in this life, that I have more to give to the world before I move on, that my presence in this life has served and continues to serve a greater good than just taking care of her and her sister.
So now with all of that said, you will understand what it meant to me for Isabelle to come into my darkness that lonely, miserable night and bring me out, to extend her hand to lift me off the floor of my abyss.
I woke up the next morning, exhausted but clear-eyed and resolute. I knew that I and my family had grown tired and bored of the narrative of self-pity I had constructed for myself over the previous weeks and months. I knew that I had to do something to pull myself out of my darkness. Isabelle had offered her hand, but I had to do the remainder of the work.
31
In Which the Yips Come to America
I am sitting on my grandmother’s lap. I can feel the rocking of the boat—right now the rocking is gentle, but I know it is not always so. I can see the eerie glow of a bare incandescent bulb dangling from somewhere above and a cloudy night sky that is not completely black. I can hear the motor. Chuk…chuk…chuk. But most of all, I hear the strident voices of the people around me—there are so many people—human voices of desperation that are louder than those of the boat and the ocean. I can tell that the people are talking skyward, to something or someone in the night sky. I understand their words. They say things like “Please, God, please help us,” and “Dear God, please look after us.” And there, with my head lying on my grandmother’s chest, I, too, look toward the sky, staring at its gray-blackness, and I think for a second that I hear a voice from the clouds. But then, I think it was just my own longing to hear an answer to the prayers, because I understand instinctively that what these people are praying for is important to all of us. I understand that their prayers are about wanting to live and not die, and I want to live, too.
Then I feel the hunger gnawing at my stomach again, and I cry out for more milk, banging my empty bottle against my grandmother’s lap, fighting for food in the only way I know how, in the only way I can. My grandmother yells at me. She is angry with me.
“There is no more milk! Do you hear me? And there won’t be any milk anytime soon no matter how much you cry. So shut up!” She snatches my baby bottle from me and hurls it, spinning, into the black sea, as if doing so will make everything better. A part of me knows that she would have liked to throw me overboard instead, but she can’t.
I cry even harder. I can’t stop crying.
It is on the boat that my first real and conscious memories of the world were formed. I say real and conscious because these images and sensations are the first memories in which I recall something more than just vague flashes of color and light, the first memories that have always floated more in the realm of reality than dream, remembered by my mind and not just my soul, and the first memories in which I have comprehension of the world around me and a self-awareness of my own existence within that world. Nascent though that comprehension might have been, I grasped the desperation of the moment and the precariousness of my own life. On that boat, I learned fear, hunger, and the desire to live.
The boat was such a primal and frightening experience that afterward it would cause most members of my family to try to rid the experience from their consciousness, never to speak of it again. It was so primal and frightening that the memories of it still make my mother shudder every time she sees an endless expanse of ocean, prompting her to declare even after so many years, “I would have never dared to get on that boat had I known…” But, of course, she didn’t know, and therefore she dared.
That we are even here to testify to our flight from Vietnam, that we survived, beggars belief. Before we had even embarked, the water, already a foot deep in the ship’s hold, poured in through its battered hull, and the boat settled more and more deeply into the water. People rushing to find a place to settle down on the open boat’s one and only deck could see the water when they scurried past the short flight of stairs that led below. Yet none of them seemed to care, for no one tried to get off and more continued to come on board. Apparently they believed, bravely or perhaps stupidly, as my parents and so many others before them believed: Better to die at sea than to live in Vietnam. Better to get on a sinking boat than to stay one more moment on Vietnamese soil.
But then a voice of sanity cut through the drone of the boat’s engine and the din of the crowd.
“Get rid of luggage! We have to lighten the boat!” Brother Can yelled to the hundred people or so who had already boarded. And then he yelled at the two hundred people still waiting to board the boat via the thick wooden plank that bridged boat and pier, “Only bring what you need on board. Nothing else!” And to the boat’s helmsman—the person charged with the responsibility of steering the boat—and his brother, standing helplessly nearby, Brother Can pointed and ordered, “Start pumping out the water now! Now, I said!”
Brother Can stood on the port side of the boat, glaring suspiciously at every person who came on board. He was determined to keep order and to stop the boat from sinking before it had even left. After all, the boat was his. Brother Can was technically a brother to only a handful of the passengers; everyone knew who he was, though, and everyone used the word “Brother” as a title of respect (as is common practice in the Vietnamese language). He was the lead organizer of this expedition, the man who had masterminded the acquisition of this boat, approached my grandfather to register the boat in Tam-Ky, and located the helmsman; he was primarily responsible for recruiting and assembling these 315 refugees. People referred to him as the “Boat’s Boss,” the captain of the boat, and the captain expected his orders to be obeyed.
Brother Can’s four younger brothers, tall, beefy, and intimidating like Brother Can himself, moved to do as Brother Can commanded, prepared to forcefully manhandle the luggage of so many complete strangers. The brothers targeted the largest bags squeezed in among the passengers. “Only essentials can come. Just one bag, and not too big!” Brother Can told people again and again as they tried to slip through with loaded backs and hands, as though they were deaf to his instructions. Most of the people Brother Can had to stop turned around and went back to shore to rearrange the belongings from their multiple pieces of luggage so that everything they really wanted and needed would fit in one bag. Those who tried to push past Brother Can came face-to-face with his many brothers-in-law.
Ignoring the cries of outrage at their callous disregard for people’s things and knowing that there was no alternative, Brother Can and his relatives tossed, and forced passengers to toss, dozens upon dozens of bulky canvas and nylon bags, straining at zippers and seams, back onto the pier. The wooden pier jutted out from a sandy white beach nestled in a natural harbor protected from the currents of the South China Sea. Sometimes the fishermen from the nearby village of Ky Ha would use this pier to unload fish. But on this dark evening, it was the repository for refugees’ abandoned possessions, personal items that had been
chosen from a household and a lifetime to be brought with them as they left their native land—clothes, miniature Buddha statues, trinkets, photographs, books, diaries, and a host of other things that had significance only to those who once owned them. Also in those bags were valuable commodities that could be sold in Hong Kong or anywhere else in the world: gold bars and other gold jewelry well in excess of the two taels that the Cong An (the police) permitted each person to take out of the country; thick and fragrant barks of cinnamon trees grown in the jungles of Vietnam that when ground would produce the finest quality cinnamon in the world; and barks of sandalwood that were valued for their perfuming and medicinal powers and could command significant sums of money.
“Don’t take my bag! It’s not heavy!” a gray-haired woman shrieked, half in protest, half in plea, at one of Brother Can’s men. They stood only a few bodies away from where my mother and I sat, me on her lap and she on the wooden deck. After a futile tug-of-war, Brother Can’s man wrestled the bag, which was twice the size of the woman’s torso, out of her hands, threw it overboard, and then turned to find his next victim.
My mother leaned more heavily against the one bag she had packed for us, pushing it that much harder against the wall at her back, trying to shield it from the man’s reach. My grandmother sat next to us, leaning against her own bag and the wall. My mother could see my brother sitting next to my father on the bench that ran along the back of the boat. She could see Grandpa arguing with one of Brother Can’s brothers. My grandfather had brought along a dozen two-foot-long barks of cinnamon, tied together and stuffed into a woven sack that was supposed to protect them. Only after my grandfather reminded the man that he had done his part to make this trip possible did the brother relent, allowing my grandfather to keep half of the cinnamon bark and throwing the other half onto the pier.
From her position on the floor, off to Brother Can’s right, my mother watched the surreal scene unfold in the dim glow of the two bare bulbs that swung freely from the boat’s canopy. It was already nine o’clock, past dusk. The Cong An were forcing many boats carting ethnic Chinese to leave at night, fearing that sightings of refugees in flight would encourage the ethnic Vietnamese in their attempts to flee. And so here we all were, maneuvering about in the dark save for the boat’s few weak lights. My mother witnessed the yelling and shouting and arguing and negotiating and pressing together of more and more people everywhere; she looked upon the cast-off shreds of people’s lives and life savings hurled into the air to lie helter-skelter on the pier where they would be picked over by scavengers by morning. None of this seemed real, not the people being forced to abandon what little they had left after the Communists had already taken so much—some left with just the clothes on their backs—nor the water threatening to drown this tiny, overcrowded boat that was supposed to take three hundred refugees to Hong Kong, more than a thousand miles of open sea to the northeast.
* * *
—
Maybe because it is now winter, I’ve been thinking a lot about the ghosts of our migration, and of Tobacco Woman, and Grandfather Spirit. And maybe that in turn is a result of not such good scan results, and more recently my bout of severe diarrhea that led me to feel like death.
In Vietnam, on the road outside our house, a Vietnamese woman sold tobacco every day, squatting on the dirt before a cloth that displayed her wares. The spirit of Tobacco Woman’s deceased grandfather would sometimes return, and when he did, she would send word to my paternal grandmother. The Grandfather Spirit would often tell my grandmother what numbers to pick in the local lottery—she was an avid gambler—and she would win. But his spirit also advised on much more serious matters, matters of life and death.
My sister, who is six years older than I, developed cataracts at an early age. I suspect they were present in some nascent form when she was born, but they didn’t become evident until she was older, maybe around age four. I of course had much more pronounced and obvious cataracts at birth. In any case, neither of our vision problems could be addressed in Vietnam, with even less hope of successful treatment after the Communists won the war.
People fled the country at the time of the fall of Saigon, in 1975, but those early refugees tended to be the Vietnamese who feared reprisal for having sided with the South Vietnamese regime and the American forces.
By 1978, the ethnic Chinese, robbed of their economic freedom, and others were searching for means of unsanctioned escape. Given the clandestine nature of these escapes, it was often the young, single men and women who dared to brave the voyage on rickety fishing boats to locations like Hong Kong and Macau with the hope of eventually reaching a better place. Everyone dreamed of the United States, but other countries such as France, England, and Australia would also do. My third, fourth, and fifth uncles, my father’s younger brothers, were the young ones in our family, so they were the ones who dared.
But it was my mother who was the most daring of all. She asked her brothers-in-law to take my eight-year-old sister with them in the hope that Lyna would arrive in a place where her vision could be treated. We would follow later—perhaps to be reunited, perhaps not. Now that I am a mother I can imagine how difficult it must have been to let go of her firstborn child, to know there was the distinct possibility that she might never see her child again, that her child might die on this journey into an unknowable and unimaginable future she’d only glimpsed in movies and fairy tales. My mother tells me now she wanted me to go with my uncles, too, but I was just two years old and too young to thrust upon someone else.
My sister left. Weeks and months went by with no word from the uncles. Mail back then could take six months or longer to arrive, if it arrived at all. My worried mother went to consult Tobacco Woman’s Grandfather Spirit when he appeared. He told her that indeed my sister had arrived in America, that she was safe and that all was well. Weeks later, my mother received a letter and enclosed within was a picture of my sister posing with the glorious Golden Gate Bridge behind her, wearing her new American-bought clothes and sporting new glasses.
I realize that many who hear these stories will still not believe in ghosts, and that is perfectly understandable. While I believe in the existence of ghosts and spirits, I also believe that the souls represented by these ghosts and spirits eventually move on to something else, whether it be into a new life or another dimension in time and space, somewhere the soul has a chance to experience more of this universe and to learn. Ultimately, I believe in the evolution of the soul—that the meaning and purpose of life is to enrich the soul with all the joys and heartaches that this life and other lives can impart, that once the soul has learned as much as it can, with all its wisdom and knowledge it enters what the Buddhists would call Nirvana and what Christians might call Heaven and a closeness and even oneness with God.
Since my diagnosis, I’ve witnessed so much determination to remain alive at all costs, sometimes with a disturbing, maniacal frenzy. I am confident that it is my unwavering belief in ghosts, spirits, reincarnation, and the evolution of my soul that makes me unafraid of dying. Indeed, it is these convictions that will prevent me from clinging to this life and, in some respects, makes me look forward to death. These beliefs lie at the heart of the enduring, evolved, and thoughtful peace that I seek to find with my own death.
Believe what you need to believe in order to find comfort and peace with the inevitable fate that is common to every living thing on this planet. Death awaits us all; one can choose to run in fear from it or one can face it head-on with thoughtfulness, and from that thoughtfulness peace and serenity.
32
Living
On the first day of spring I had a chest CT scan and an abdominal and pelvic MRI. It had been ten weeks since my PET scan in early January, which was “mixed” in that there was some growth, some stability, and some regressions in the various tumors in my lungs. My oncologist and I had agreed that notwithstanding the growth we would continue w
ith the weekly Erbitux infusion and 5-FU push for the time being, but that we would rescan in six weeks as opposed to the more conventional three months. The February rescans showed essential stability, as compared to the January PET, but what was more alarming to me was that they showed “significant” growth from the October CT and MRI.
The different types of scanning technology offer different pros and cons, which I don’t pretend to fully understand. I generally get PETs every six to nine months because they can detect disease in the bones as well as metabolic cancer activity in nonsolid areas (e.g., the peritoneum) and cover a more expansive area, from neck to midthigh. While there is a CT scan connected with a PET, the image quality is inferior to that of an actual CT and MRI. All this is by way of explaining that comparing a CT/MRI to a prior CT/MRI is more accurate than comparing a PET to a CT/MRI. Therefore, the change from October to February was more relevant (and disturbing) to me. February’s scans showed a couple new tumors and growth of about one to three millimeters in a few others. The MRI also showed an enlarged lymph node in my retroperitoneum that could be cancerous or benign inflammation—radiologists couldn’t seem to agree on which. As I had suspected, the Erbitux and 5-FU were starting to fail, if not already completely failing. My oncologist and I agreed, however, that we would hold off on changing treatment until I returned from an upcoming vacation, after which I would rescan and we would decide on the next treatment. The last things I wanted to deal with on my vacation were unforeseen side effects or complications.
I came home from that appointment dejected and upset (although not as upset as I have been in the past—you get used to bad news after a while). I was lying on the couch when I asked Isabelle to come over and give me a hug. This is the conversation we had:
The Unwinding of the Miracle Page 21
