products of all our experiences? Rather than looking without to find inspiration, strength, and hope, sometimes we must look within ourselves to discover and discern our own stories. There are, after all, miracles in there. Of course, looking within is much more difficult, for we must confront our painful mistakes, our fears, our weaknesses, our insecurities, our ugliness.
When I was first diagnosed with cancer, Josh read my surgical and pathology reports what seemed like a hundred times. I could barely manage to get through my surgical report once without being nauseated by the image of parts of my body being removed. Josh read every relevant medical study he could find online multiple times, learning foreign medical terms and making reasoned conclusions about my prognosis that left him more hopeful. I read one sentence of one study and felt drowsiness setting in, and that was the end of that endeavor to take my medical care into my own hands. Josh puts his faith in science, based on numbers and reason. I put my faith in me and a higher power, based seemingly on nothing tangible, in what some would call complete irrationality.
As irrational as it may seem, my faith comes from my memories, from an understanding of my own history, and to a lesser degree, the history of my parents and those who came before them. My very first memory is of crawling up the narrow staircase of our house in Tam Ky, Vietnam, where there was no railing to protect me from falling onto the dust-covered cement floor. My second memory is of sitting on my grandmother’s lap on the Vietnamese fishing boat on the South China Sea, a bare, dim bulb swinging overhead (in my blindness, I could still detect some light and motion) and the mournful prayers of three hundred people begging to reach the safety of the refugee camps in Hong Kong ringing in my ears. I remember a year later trying to fight off the mask that would deliver the general anesthesia in advance of my first sight-giving surgery, at the Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA. I remember lugging my large-print book around and all the other kids staring at me like I was a freak. I remember not being able to fill out the answer sheet for the PSATs my sophomore year in high school because the bubbles were too small for me to see them, even with my magnifying glass, and sobbing for the rest of that weekend, feeling the weight of all my limitations. I remember the elation I felt when I told my parents over the phone I had just been accepted into Harvard Law School and how I heard my father clapping with possibly more joy than I felt, like a little boy who had gotten what he wanted for Christmas.
There are so many more memories, both joyful and painful, but I think anyone can understand based on these memories alone why I have faith in myself and some unseen hand. I have felt God’s presence more than once in my life, and I have felt his absence. And in those times when God was otherwise occupied, I found, through my shame, frustration, heartache, self-pity, and self-loathing, a strength and resolve that I didn’t know I had.
When I woke up at 4:00 A.M. the day after my colonoscopy, the day after we learned that I had colon cancer and before I was transferred to UCLA for the surgery, during what I would call the darkest hours of my life, after I realized that this wasn’t a nightmare from which I would awaken, the fear overcame me and I couldn’t breathe as I sobbed hysterically into the lonely darkness of that miserable hospital. The future, however long or short, loomed ahead of me, a mass of pure darkness the approximate shape of the mass inside of me. I dug deep then into my past, to find another moment of comparable fear. In truth, there was no fear that I had ever experienced that was comparable to that. But there was one memory that was close, which came during the summer after my first year of law school, when I went to Bangladesh. Although I yearned for what I knew would be an enriching experience, I was terrified. A little Asian girl who can’t see very well going alone to one of the poorest countries in the world without any familiarity with the language or culture—it was a bit daunting. Bangladesh,