While it was true that coming to America had saved some of my vision and that in America there was more help and opportunity for people with disabilities, my parents still saw me as a helpless blind baby, deficient, undesirable; to them I was still probably unmarriageable.
I was very broken by the time I left for college at seventeen, and I would continue to be broken for many years thereafter. I was so angry at the universe. Why me? Why did I have to be the one to be blind? Why did I have to be the one to wear ugly, thick glasses? Everywhere I turned, all I could see was what I couldn’t do. I couldn’t help but also believe that I was defective and deeply flawed. I hated my parents for bringing me into the world and letting me live. I even once hysterically screamed at my father and demanded to know why he had allowed that to happen. Little did I realize how close to home I had hit. Ironically, it was my grandmother who came to calm me. Most of all, I hated myself.
And so even though my romantic self dreamed of you, I never thought I would actually find you or that, if you did exist, you would want me. You’ve often asked me about the boyfriends I had before you, and I always found ways to evade your questions. The reason is there were no boyfriends before you. Sure, there were dalliances and holiday flings, but the guys never stuck around for more than a few weeks. Maybe they couldn’t handle the Williams and Harvard degrees. Maybe my grandmother and parents had been right that no man would want someone as defective as I; it certainly seemed like guys would become exceedingly uncomfortable when they learned of my vision problems. Maybe I believed I wasn’t deserving of love, and that my grandmother and parents had been right all along.
I didn’t engage in any of the “boyfriend-girlfriend nonsense.” No, instead, I put my energies into studying, just like my father wanted me to. But, unwittingly, I also put my energies into fixing what was broken inside me. I packed my bags and left for Williams College, three thousand miles away from home. My dad might have believed that there was no real value in educating a girl and letting me go so far away from home and risking my potential ruin, but he couldn’t resist the allure of the college ranked number 1 in the annual U.S. News & World Report ratings, and since I had earned a full scholarship, he really had no say in what I did. I studied Chinese, the language my mother thought I could never learn because of my vision. My junior year, I studied in China, traveling around the vast country during every break on as little money as possible. After I graduated college, I studied Spanish in Seville for five weeks and backpacked through Europe alone for another five weeks. The summer after my first year in law school, I did my internship in Bangladesh. After I sat for the bar exam, I traveled to Chile and Peru and then Thailand, and went back to Vietnam for the first time in twenty-three years with my parents. After I started working, I had a few more adventures, to South Africa and New Zealand. And right before I met you, I went to Antarctica, after which I could proudly say that I had been to the seven continents by the time I was thirty.
Somewhere in between having my cabin invaded by squawking chickens on the barge sailing down the Yangzi River, and having the door fly off the bus in some dusty western Chinese province, and praying for my life as we wound down the roads that hug the base of the Himalayas, and camping on the Antarctic ice, and sitting in wonder at the mystic beauty of Machu Picchu, I fixed what was broken inside of me. Nothing could have made me confront my limitations as much as traveling the world did. Nothing could have made me more frustrated or hate myself more than standing on the streets of Rome trying to find a place to sleep for the night while struggling with a map and a magnifying glass. And nothing could have made me more proud of myself and love myself and feel such profound gratitude for what I could do and what vision I did have