Supersurvivors

by David B Feldman

  In late 1999, Aaron arrived in San Francisco to attend a conference on behalf of a Bhutanese refugee organization. He wanted to stay and raise awareness about the Bhutanese refugee crisis. So he applied for asylum. With the support of organizations such as Global Youth Connect, he relayed the plight of his people to anyone who would listen. He waited tables, slept in strangers’ living rooms. He thought about what had happened that fateful year back in Relukha. But he had to move on. In 2013 he transferred to Manhattan for a job working for the survivors of torture like his father. There, continents removed from the turmoil of Bhutan, he believed there was an opportunity to promote change. He managed the Human Rights Clinic for the global health organization HealthRight International, then known as Doctors of the World USA. He oversaw the forensic evaluations, affidavits, and testimony of more than three thousand torture survivors seeking asylum in the United States. Invigorated by this work, he steeped himself in the nuances of asylum law and immigration court practices. Within a year of immigrating to America, he became an expert on human rights violations and developments in the field of torture treatment. He also raised grant money for the program.

  Due to the hard work of many international organizations, leaders in the refugee camps in Nepal, and activists such as Aaron, an opportunity arose to resettle Bhutanese refugees in the United States. Enthusiastic, Aaron visited the refugee camps in Nepal soon after this decision.

  It was during this visit that he was met with some surprising opposition. “There was an uproar in the refugee camps when I came back,” he says. “Many people wanted to come to the U.S., but they wanted justice more. For them, justice was returning to their homes.” While Aaron didn’t agree, he understood; he’d held that view once himself. Hoping to return to how things once were, his father remained in the refugee camps and refused to leave for these same reasons.

  Eventually, however, people relented. They started arriving in the United States in large numbers. Their arrival sparked a new great need. “For the uninitiated, the U.S. is a very strange and unnerving country,” Aaron says. “Refugees don’t know how to immediately fend for themselves. They come here without legal representation, with no understanding of the laws, no access to medical care, and without any resources or finances. When they get here, they are really quite alone.” Using his knowledge of the law, immigration courts, asylum offices, mental health providers, medical clinics, and resources, Aaron had a big new goal.

  The idea was to establish a charitable cultural, social, and advocacy program for the needs of the Bhutanese people in the United States. In 2007 he and a number of his friends founded the Association of Bhutanese in America. The organization hoped to become the portal to a new life for thousands of Bhutanese American families, providing counseling services, job networking opportunities, and other resources to help the refugees integrate into American society. “If old ladies can tailor,” Aaron says, “we would get them needle and thread.”

  Today, the organization is a resource specifically for Bhutanese exiles in the United States. It also serves a unique role as America’s largest carrier of Bhutanese cultural identity, with programs to maintain ties to a country that betrayed its refugees, a country they once called home and might someday forgive.

  As for Clemantine, she and her sister survived six years in seven refugee camps, witnessed the unspeakable, and found their long-lost family with the help of arguably the most powerful woman in the history of American show business. Although there was more than a bit of luck involved, Clemantine is also sure she made it happen herself. “I felt strength to take steps out into the world for the first time,” she says. “I would no longer be a victim. I wasn’t going to take what life gave me. I was going to go after things.” We’ve called this broad belief in one’s ability to go after goals grounded hope, and it’s what led Clemantine to send her essay to The Oprah Winfrey Show. Marshal Goldsmith, from chapter 3, called it trying many different things. Clemantine calls it growing into knowledge.

  During her junior year at Yale University studying comparative literature, Clemantine joined Oprah to travel to South Africa to speak at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls. In a letter home to friends, Clemantine later wrote, “I am not as afraid of the future as I used to be because some places, like that school, are creating leaders who listen. I cannot wait to see [the students] in action once they have built a strong intellectual foundation. My journey here has left me hopeful and inspired.”

  Clemantine writes that forgiveness is a journey—and not necessarily one she has fully completed. That journey, however, continues to teach her how to be a whole person again. Today, she brings this message to people all over the world. When she lectures before audiences at the United Nations, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, human rights law conferences, and high school assemblies, they don’t hear a story of vengeance. “It’s a story about hope,” she says with a smile that could only come from wisdom.

  On October 28, 2011, President Barack Obama appointed Clemantine to a key post as a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, alongside her hero Elie Wiesel. “These fine public servants both bring a depth of experience and tremendous dedication to their new roles. Our nation will be well-served,” the president announced.

  Yet no accomplishment, title, or feat of supersurvival has made the past fade from Clemantine’s memory. On quiet nights in her dorm room, she still thinks about the screaming in the forest. But she is not bound to that past. She has found ways to channel that tragedy into great accomplishments, hopeful forays into a future she is determined will be better. Besides accumulating obituaries, Clemantine collects vintage buttons. Buttons are remarkably simple and beautiful objects of metals, glass, pearl, and bead. More than just fashion trimmings, they serve the specialized purpose of fastening and keeping things together. Today, when bad memories come flooding back, Clemantine calms her mind in the act of sewing the buttons into bracelets of tight piles on six-inch strips of heavy fabric. She wears these button bracelets on her arms. “Can you see the anger behind the bracelets when you look at them? See, I’ve transformed the anger into something beautiful,” she says.

  The girl who smiled beads now wears them on her wrist.

  9

  The Right Choice

  There is scarcely any passion without struggle.

  —ALBERT CAMUS, THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS AND OTHER ESSAYS

  Of the seven thousand people in attendance at Los Angeles’s Staples Center, and the twenty-nine million television viewers, it was rock violinist Asha Mevlana, the supersurvivor we met in chapter 1, who had the best vantage point from which to watch the American Idol finale.

  The Idol band ripped through theatrical performances with Queen Latifah, Jason Mraz, Keith Urban, Fergie, and other surprise guest stars. A vital onstage player in this iconic company, Asha was vibrant, her high cheekbones elevating what would ordinarily have been a bright smile into something radiant. A dark scroll of hair dropped over her right shoulder as she led into the opening notes of “Smooth” and Carlos Santana entered from stage left. Amid bombastic pyrotechnics, KISS descended from a giant hydraulic platform to the legendary modulations of “Detroit Rock City.” Later, Queen joined the band for the night’s penultimate performance, “We Are the Champions.”

  In 2008, Asha was hired for the position of electric violinist in the string section of the American Idol band. For the past two seasons, she had helped supply the show’s live sound track, performing on national television. It was still hard to fully grasp that, roughly three years earlier, she was a public relations manager at a Manhattan start-up, with far different plans for her life. “I had a five-, ten-, and fifteen-year plan. I was going to go onto senior management, have kids, buy a couple of houses, and maybe own my own business. Something in public relations or marketing, I’m sure,” she says, trying hard to remember what her life was like before she was told it might end far too soon.

  Ricky Minor, the band’s leader, sign
aled thirty seconds until they were back live. Asha took a sip of water from her bottle, tucked it back on a table offstage, and picked up the bow of her instrument. She walked with host Ryan Seacrest back onto the stage and took her position with the band, directly behind the final two contestants. The theater lights dimmed from jasmine to red. Seacrest was handed the results in a sealed envelope. “After a nationwide vote of nearly a hundred million, the winner . . . of American Idol . . . 2009 is . . .” Seacrest was playing with the audience as one might pluck a string, manipulating its tension. He was, after all, concealing in his hands an announcement that would forever change the lives of two hopefuls, for better or for worse. The moment he pronounced the winner, an exhilarating blast of light swallowed the stage and a tempest of confetti rained from above, covering Asha and the rest of the Idol band as they powered into a victory tune. She drove her bow across her violin, her final performance full of heart and bravura.

  While Kris Allen walked away the season’s victor, Asha couldn’t help but feel that she, too, had won a game, one she’d started more than a decade before. Only, unlike the results on America Idol, her news hadn’t come in an envelope, but in a most unlikely form—an ultrasound that announced her breast cancer. She caught it early and underwent a lumpectomy, chemotherapy, radiation, and hormone treatments. But the onslaught that would eventually make her a supersurvivor didn’t stop there.

  Given her family’s cancer history, in combination with the fact that her breast cancer was estrogen-receptor positive, Asha’s doctors told her she may be at a heightened risk of developing later ovarian cancer. To save her, they recommended a precautionary oophorectomy, a surgery to remove her ovaries and eradicate the danger altogether. Although this operation might save her life, it would eliminate her ability to have children. But Asha felt strongly that she wanted a family someday. So she sought a second opinion, and then a third. Unlike the American Idol judges, her doctors were unanimous.

  Fortunately, the risk of developing ovarian cancer was statistically minimal until the age of thirty-five. This gave Asha more than a decade to put off the procedure, plenty of time to meet someone and have children. But having children wasn’t what was most on her mind at the conclusion of her cancer treatment. After those initial moments of shock and terror, she also felt an unmistakable, unexpected impulse to live life as if there were no tomorrow. “I didn’t know if I had five months or five years,” she says. “I took a look at my life and asked myself what I really wanted to do with the time that I had.”

  Becoming a rock star was not part of any five-, ten-, or fifteen-year plan. Before suffering through her treatment, Asha enjoyed playing the violin, but she never considered leaving the security of a corporate job for the financially uncertain life of a struggling artist. Nor had she contemplated moving to California, thousands of miles from the social support that had gotten her through the darkest moments of her illness. When she told her friends she was leaving for L.A. to scratch out a living as a professional musician, they quite reasonably started to worry for her. Most of them didn’t even know that the twenty-eight-year-old played the violin, let alone harbored any desire to go pro.

  Judging by her performance, as Asha played season eight of American Idol into the credits, and the archives of television history, she saw clearly that her risky choices had paid off. At the same time, she would be the first to admit that stories like hers were rare, even for supersurvivors.

  So how was it that Asha so quickly, and improbably, reshaped, reformed, and rerouted the path of her life?

  Asha’s story reflects many of the principles we’ve talked about in this book. Her confrontation with cancer forced her to reflect deeply on her fragile mortality. She could no longer tell herself that life would go on indefinitely, and she began questioning the choices she had made automatically up until her diagnosis. The shock shattered a worldview that previously told her that life was safe, predictable. Her unquestioned ten-year plan no longer comforted her. And she couldn’t reassure herself with simplistic positive thoughts that everything would work out fine. That’s what she used to think, but not now.

  So she mustered the courage to stare the reality of her cancer, and the uncertainty of life, directly in the face and ask herself, “What now?” She set a new, lofty goal to become a professional musician, and took steps to learn and hone her craft, making calculated decisions that brought her closer to achieving this goal. Her small early successes created the building blocks of self-confidence, the slight positive illusions of control she needed in order to believe she had a chance of playing with Dee Snider and Mary J. Blige. She started on a path of grounded hope. All the while, she widened her net of social support, reaching out to newfound friends in the music industry. They encouraged her to follow her passion, so that when big things started happening for her, she felt the support she needed to see just how far she could go.

  All this may make Asha’s journey sound straightforward. But supersurvival is rarely easy.

  From the stories in this book, some may conclude that supersurvivors have it good. After all, we’ve profiled Hollywood stuntmen, world-record holders, successful businesspeople, and human rights activists who have helped change the world. The natural human tendency is to place people with such accomplishments up on a pedestal and conclude that they’re not like the rest of us. Nearly all the supersurvivors we’ve spoken to have been called special, gifted, or even heroes. And nearly all of them reject that label.

  This is part of what led Maarten van der Weijden, the leukemia survivor who won the Olympic gold in swimming, famously to tell a newspaper reporter to stop comparing him with Lance Armstrong. But Maarten isn’t alone in this sentiment. Casey Pieretti might have become a highly sought-after stunt person after losing his leg to a drunk driver, but he’s also quick to point out that his livelihood is dependent on his phone ringing, just like everybody else’s. And as far as his journey from survivor to supersurvivor is concerned: “I felt from the moment of the accident I wanted to live. There’s nothing remarkable about that.” Paul Watkins’s decision to give up millions of dollars to become a priest after the shocking death of his friend, the copilot of American Airlines Flight 77, may seem remarkable to outsiders, but Paul says he was just pursuing another interest. “Yeah, I gave [my company] up,” he says, laughing. “But it wasn’t that great. I had millions in the bank, a lot on paper in stock. I just thought I was ready for a change.”

  When survivors experience amazing recoveries, we are often quick to label them inspirations—and not just in an “it’s amazing you survived” kind of way. Many of us are quick to assume that these people are amazing and inspirational in all other ways as well. In short, we assume they must be special people.

  Psychologists have a term for this: the halo effect, a phenomenon first documented by the great psychology researcher Edward Thorndike in 1920. The halo effect is a kind of cognitive bias in which our evaluation of someone’s character is unduly influenced by our overall impression of him or her. Most research on the topic concerns physical appearance and has shown that the halo effect really matters. For instance, some studies have shown that jurors are more likely to assign more lenient sentences to attractive people than to less attractive ones. Because people are beautiful or handsome, if we’re not careful, we may assume they’re also good people deep down.

  We seem to do something similar for survivors. Because someone’s survival story is inspirational, we jump to the unwarranted conclusion that he or she, as a person, must also be inspirational, even in ways we haven’t directly observed. We’re not saying that supersurvivors don’t deserve credit for what they’ve accomplished; they clearly do. We’re also not saying that their stories and the principles they exemplify shouldn’t inspire us; they should. But if we are to learn from their trials and triumphs, it’s important that we not make them into something they’re not.

  The supersurvivors we’ve interviewed often insist that they’re ordinary people trying to make t
heir way in the world. They see themselves as doing what anyone else would have done in their situations: making the best choices possible given what life has thrown at them. To them, it was their choices that helped them to rise up after trauma and claim the future they wanted for themselves. And of course, choices aren’t always easy, any more than supersurvival is.

  After the American Idol season ended, Asha chose to return to Porcelain, a rock band she’d joined shortly after moving to Los Angeles in 2007. The lone American in the five-person Australian group, Asha, along with her bright purple violin, was a unique addition to the usual clutch of guitarists, bassists, drummer, and vocalists. Porcelain’s exigent mash-up of big vocals, ambient underpinnings, and power pop thrusts led to sold-out venues and a recording deal with Universal Records. Porcelain produced a debut album. The band’s first single was getting heavy play on MTV Europe and on Australian pop radio, so now the label sent Porcelain on an Australian tour.

  The three-month stretch was a blur of cities, hotels, radio station stopovers, bars, and rock venues from Sydney to Melbourne, Victoria, Perth, and Wollongong—so many locations that Asha couldn’t tell them apart anymore. The response to Porcelain’s music was so strong that the label kept extending the tour. This was fine by Asha; she could picture herself staying in Australia forever. Why not? She hadn’t followed a traditional life path. There was no reason to start now. Her life had ceased to follow a practical trajectory when she developed cancer and chose to radically change things for herself. She had been happy with this choice.