I haven’t traveled alone since my trip to New Zealand. I convinced Josh to go to Egypt and Jordan for our honeymoon, and I even dragged him to China before Mia was born. We went to Puerto Rico when I was pregnant with Belle and stayed in a resort for a week. Now that I have children and am a little older, I’m not sure I would take the risks I once took to save a few bucks or have a crazy adventure I could laugh about years later. I’m out of practice when it comes to traveling alone. I’ve gotten used to Josh being my eyes. I’ve gotten used to him guiding us through airports while I deal with the children and follow him unquestioningly. I’ve gotten used to traveling with my little nucleus of a family and making our little trips about getting through flights without children melting down, making sure there are enough snacks to hold them over, finding child-friendly destinations where there can be no surprises and to which there can be no wrong turns. Life and priorities have changed since November 2006.
I’ve gotten weak and soft over the years and now I don’t feel entirely ready to tackle this new phase of my life, this newest journey upon which my life hinges, which requires more bravery, strength, resourcefulness, calm, and grit than I have ever had to summon. Unlike my journey to the seven continents, this cancer-fighting journey is not one that I chose as part of some self-selected test to prove my worth. This came at me and caught me off-guard. This time I don’t feel the invincibility and freedom of youth. This time I have the lives of a husband and two little girls to consider. This time the stakes are much, much higher.
Yet the bliss that can come from my cancer-fighting journey cannot be so different from the bliss I once knew traveling the world. There are extraordinary people whom I have met and whom I have yet to meet on my present course. There are lessons to be learned, resourcefulness and discipline to be cultivated, good to be done, and courage, strength, grace, resolve, and pride to be gained. I know this to be true. This is what I will remind myself when I go in alone for my first PET scan and as I listen to the doctor tell me the results. This is what I will tell myself during all the future CEA tests and chemo treatments to come. It really is okay for Josh to not be present for a chemo treatment, because his absence reminds me of the importance of being alone and honoring that solitude. All of it is part of my solitary journey, a journey that I embrace wholeheartedly and with as little fear as possible, for I know that through my wanderings I will once again find that same bliss.
9
The Secret
All families have secrets, and this was ours.
It might sound strange, but even though I wasn’t told about my grandmother’s order that I be killed as an infant until I was twenty-eight years old, it is something I’ve known from the time I was a baby. I knew it in that part of the soul that remembers all trauma even before memories can be retained by consciousness. The secret has hurt me in ways that few can imagine. Ever since my diagnosis, I’ve redoubled my efforts to find a lasting peace with the secret, feeling like doing so would yield hidden truths that would aid me in this fight for survival.
As my mother told me the truth about what had happened, she wept. But in her confession, I sensed the lifting of a burden long carried.
My mother had dressed me in dingy clothes that day because “it would be a waste for her to wear anything else,” my grandmother had told her, glowering.
My mother did not respond—no response was required or expected—as she tried to hide her tearstained face behind the fuss of lifting me off her bed and gathering me close. With me dressed, there was nothing left to do except go. She grabbed her purse with one hand, slipped past her mother-in-law mumbling, “Goodbye, Ma,” without meeting her eyes, and went down the narrow cement steps to the first floor.
Outside, my father was staring at his shoes and kicking dirt about, waiting for us to join him so we could begin our trip. It would have been like any other family trip to Da Nang to visit relatives and friends, except my sister, Lyna, and brother, Mau, were conspicuously absent, and I was conspicuously present. It was my first trip anywhere. My father had just taken the two older children to his in-laws, where they were to play with their maternal grandparents and uncles for the day. Instead of driving to Da Nang, as my parents had done so many times during the course of their seven-year marriage, we would be taking a public bus. A bus would give us anonymity, a way to get lost in the crowd and minimize the risk of relatives and friends seeing a familiar car and asking questions. On this trip, my parents were not planning to visit relatives or friends to introduce me as the latest addition to the Yip family, as would have been the expected and normal thing to do; after all, my great-grandmother had been asking to meet me now for two weeks during her periodic phone calls from Da Nang. My parents’ response was pretending that the connection was bad, which was easier than telling her that they did not intend to ever introduce her to her newest great-granddaughter.
We met my father in front of the metal grille door that was open only wide enough to let a single person through. The door had not rolled open for business since South Vietnam had been “liberated” by the North Vietnamese forces, eleven months earlier. With the weight of my grandmother’s stare from her second-story window on us, my parents walked silently away from the house. They walked without looking at the women who squatted on the side of the road, selling rice pancakes and rice crepes with shrimp and pork doused in pungent fermented fish sauce. They turned onto a side street and passed the two-room house of the woman who had delivered two generations of Yips into the world, my father and his brothers and my siblings, the house where my mother had given birth to me not two months earlier. And then they made another turn onto a street that lay on the outskirts of town, where the bus to Da Nang waited, its motor idling and its passengers already climbing aboard.
“One hundred dong to Da Nang per person,” the bus driver told my father when we got to the door, which looked like it might soon fall off its hinges. “Fifty dong for the little one,” he said as my father handed him two bills.
“But she’s not even going to take up a seat,” my father protested.
“Doesn’t matter. Lots of people don’t get a seat on this bus and they still pay full fare. You should be happy I’m letting her ride for half price,” the driver said.
Not in the mood to argue with the man’s reasoning, my father handed over another bill and boarded the bus, and my mother followed close behind. They were lucky to find seats at the back of the bus, because soon people were standing in the aisle and hanging out the back windows. Only when the bus could not take another single person, when a man’s leg was shoved against my father’s arm, did the bus finally move.
My mother was glad she was sitting. It would have been difficult to stand with a baby for two hours on the stop-and-go ride she knew this would be. Only one road connected Tam Ky and Da Nang, and its two lanes were often clogged with a steady stream of trucks, buses, cars, motorcycles, and horse- and donkey-driven carts, especially at midday. She didn’t care how long it took. She would be happy if the bus broke down and they never reached their destination.
The two men sitting in front of us each lit a cigarette as they continued to talk about their plans for the day. The breeze from their window blew the smoke directly into my mother’s face. She pressed my face into her chest and leaned closer to her window. The bus was passing a roadside market where people were quibbling over squawking chickens awaiting their execution, and dragon fruit, grapefruit, young green coconut, and an abundance of other fruits and vegetables in all colors of the rainbow. After the market were the lush green fields from which the bounty of the market had come. Overhead, the tropical sun cast a brilliant light, making the colors of this rain-drenched region even more alive. My mother had to squint against the assault of light and colors. Life was happening all around her. People talked, smoked, bargained, bought and sold. The world continued to move as it had always moved; it was just another ordinary day. Yet for her the wo
rld had become a dream in which she and everything she saw were not real. She had a feeling that if she tried to grab the cigarettes to toss them out the window, her hand would slip right through them as if she were a ghost, or if she got off the bus to feel the smoothness of the young coconut’s skin, it would vanish in mist and the whole market would disappear with it. For the last month, she had been caught in this dreamlike state, ever since my grandmother had discovered that there was something wrong.
The only things that did feel real were the warring voices in her head. They had grown more strident with each passing day, and now on the bus they were deafening.
I can’t do this!
You have to do this. There is no other way!
There must be another way. She is so beautiful, so adorable. Just look at her skin and how smooth and healthy it is. And her hair—it’s so thick and shiny. Feel it! She’s perfect in every other way, every single other way!
There is nothing we can do for her. Even your own parents think this must be done, not just her. You cannot let your child, whom you say you love so much, suffer through life like this.
Would her life be so bad? I would be there to take care of her. All my life, I swear.
You won’t be around forever. And then what will happen to her? You already have one child who can’t see right. That’s enough to deal with.
I’d rather die than do this.
It was the same conversation that had been churning and churning in my mother’s head since my grandmother had made her wishes known.
My mother had waited so long for me. I was to be part of her dream of having four children and a full family. Four was a nice, even number, not too many, not too few. She’d always felt that her parents’ six kids had been too much, and yet she had enjoyed the noise and chaos of a full household. Lyna had come first, less than a year after the wedding, sweet and gorgeous with pale skin like our father’s. As the first child and first grandchild on both sides, she had been spoiled with new sweaters and Barbie dolls and the attention of many relatives welcoming the birth of a new generation. Mau came two years later. As the first male child and the first grandson on both sides, he was especially welcomed. Everyone commented on his potato-shaped head, which they believed was a sign of incredible intelligence.
Four weeks after my birth, my grandmother had been holding me by her bedroom window. It was the first time I had been taken out of my parents’ bedroom and out of my mother’s sight. Consistent with Chinese traditions and superstitions, until then my mother and I had been secluded in my parents’ bedroom, prohibited from bathing, required to breathe air moistened by the steam of boiling lime and lemon leaves, and compelled to follow other rituals that had been passed down from generation to generation, all to ensure that our bodies’ qi, our life force, properly recovered from the trauma of birth, thereby reducing the risk of future organ failure and other illnesses.
Since my parents’ bedroom was an internal room, the bright daylight streaming in through my grandmother’s window was the first natural light that had shone on me since I had been brought home from the midwife’s house hours after my birth. My grandmother, holding me on one arm with the practiced ease of one who had cared for many babies, gazed down into my face, studying me under the light, trying to determine from whom I had inherited my features. It was obvious that I had inherited my mother’s dark, creamy complexion, but my large eyes were characteristic of the Yip family. She was pleased with me. Even though I was not a boy and I resembled my mother’s side of the family more than my father’s, I looked very healthy, with lots of meat on my bones. In fact, of her four grandchildren born thus far, I had certainly come out the biggest, a good omen in her mind considering that I was the first one born after the end of the war. She hoped that my health was a sign that things would not be as bad under Communist rule as everyone feared.
Suddenly, my grandmother’s brows snapped together, her eyes narrowed as her stare intensified, and she moved closer to the window.
“Dieh!” she called to her husband, who was downstairs. After raising five sons, my grandmother had taken to calling her husband what their sons called him—Dad in Hainanese Chinese, the primary Chinese dialect spoken in my family.
My grandfather, used to his wife’s many summonses, came, but not as quickly as she wanted. He stood over me, too.
“There’s something wrong with her eyes. Look!” my grandmother whispered loudly to him. Her whispers were reserved for the most serious of matters, things that she did not want prying ears to hear.
My grandfather looked as he was ordered to do, and indeed he did see an odd milky whiteness in the centers of my pupils; it could have been mistaken for a reflection or trick of the light. So my grandfather held up his hand and waved it in front of my face. My eyes did not move to follow his hand; there was no change of expression, no sign that I could see his hand, waving so close and ever more fiercely.
“She’s not seeing it. She’s not!” My grandmother’s whisper bordered on a scream. She was also now waving her hand furiously in front of my face.
“She has what her sister has. It can’t be anything else,” my grandfather stated in a low, matter-of-fact voice. Lyna had also been born with cataracts, although not as serious as mine.
“But Na didn’t look like this at this age. She was perfect…” My grandmother’s voice trailed off as she tried to understand what she was seeing, tried to grapple with this new reality for her and her family, tried to figure out what to do. “What are we going to do?” she asked her husband, looking desperately into his eyes. My grandfather was not one to give in to fear and panic; he believed in reason and a clear mind, the same approach he had adopted for running a successful business through decades of colonialism and civil war.
“Well, Na got better with surgery. We’ll try to find her a doctor,” he offered reasonably.
“What doctor? There are no doctors in Tam Ky. Na was operated on in Saigon. Saigon is days and days away from here. And even if we could get to Saigon, do you really think there are any doctors left? Na’s doctor, like every other doctor, either left for Europe or America or was sent to a reeducation camp.” My grandmother’s tone was bitter, angry, desperate.
“We can try,” my grandfather said with more hope than he felt. It was true—many of the educated had fled the country in the days before the fall of Saigon, and those who couldn’t get out had been arrested and sent to camps in the countryside, where they were forced to work the land the government had confiscated from individuals and families in an effort to “reeducate” these elites in the ways of Communist ideology. Word had trickled out from those camps that their inhabitants were being overworked and underfed. There was no telling when they would be released and, when released, what condition they would be in.
“It wouldn’t do any good even if we could find a doctor. The surgery in Saigon didn’t fix Na’s vision. Sure, she improved a little bit after the surgery, but now it’s getting bad again, even though she has those thick glasses. You can tell by the way she walks around so carefully, trying to feel things. It’s just a matter of time before she goes blind. Those doctors were quacks pretending they knew something so they could steal our money. And have you even thought about how dangerous it would be to operate on an infant? She would die for sure then.” My grandmother spat the words as if her husband were to blame.
My grandfather sighed with exasperation. His wife was a pessimist, a chronic worrier who believed that the worst was bound to happen at every turn. But he tended to bend to her will. “We have no choice. We have to do something,” he said.
My grandparents were unaware that my mother was leaning against the doorway to her bedroom next door, as if afraid to break her monthlong seclusion. She could hear the whispering, even above the squeals of Mau and Lyna, who were playing downstairs. But she already knew what my grandparents were talking about. She had seen the whiteness
in my eyes days before. She had been searching for it, dreading it, knowing what it would look like, because she had seen that same whiteness creeping into my sister’s eyes only a couple years before.
While living in Saigon, Lyna had begun to have trouble seeing—trying to place her toys on the table but falling short, missing the door, bumping into things. The doctor they found in the local hospital diagnosed her with cataracts, white protein growths that were clouding her vision in both eyes. He operated on the right eye first, planning to follow with surgery on the left eye several months later, but before that could happen, the Communists won the war, and then no doctors could be found anywhere. The doctor’s prognosis after the one surgery had been guarded. He said that surgery had helped, but the cataract might return to the right eye. The left eye was still untreated, its cataract clearly visible and, to my mother, growing whiter and larger with each passing month.
My mother told no one, not even her husband, about seeing the cataracts in my eyes. What did it matter anyhow? Everyone would know soon enough, and they would all blame her. I was blind and it was her fault. She suspected that it was because of the green pills the herbalist had told her to take during her pregnancy after she, while helping the cook, had accidentally poured a big pot of boiling water on her legs. She had tried to not take the medicine, but her legs had become masses of angry welts that burned like fire. Now, though, she regretted taking the medicine; she should have just endured the pain. Or maybe this had happened because she had eaten too many foods with hot characteristics during her pregnancy—too many oranges, grapefruit, mangoes—and not enough cool foods, like watermelon and lettuce. The heat generated by those hot foods had been too much for her baby. Or maybe it was because of her faulty genetic makeup, which both her daughters had had the misfortune to inherit. Or maybe the gods were simply angry with her for something she had done, and now they were punishing her. Whatever the reason, she had failed to protect not only me but Lyna, too; she had failed at her most basic responsibility as a mother. As the whispering went on in the next room, my mother crawled back into her bed, careful to not make any noise so that she could hide for just a little longer.
The Unwinding of the Miracle Page 5