The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,130

only see them as my little miracles, just as most any mother would. I marveled at the physical aspect of the miracle of life, the feel of skin on skin, the moving limbs, the beating heart of a new life in the world that hadn’t been there seconds before.

But there was more that my children needed to understand, which only I could explain to them—the nonphysical aspects, the miraculous parts of their birth stories that involved their very existence, their life stories. Who else could make them understand the truly miraculous nature of their lives and my life, of our lives, inextricably intertwined and shaped by historic and familial forces far beyond our control? Who else could tell them how their births were especially miraculous for me, how insofar as they came from me, their lives could easily have never been, just as mine could easily have never been?

My parents, my grandparents, especially my grandmother, did not see me as a miracle in the physical or nonphysical sense of the word. Quite the contrary. My existence was seen as deeply flawed, a gross failure of whatever miracle of life there was in that forsaken time and place, an abomination, a curse, a problem that had to be addressed in a most drastic manner.

On the bus to Da Nang to have the herbalist give me something that would make me sleep forever, my mother cradled me and quietly wept. She stroked my face. She’s so beautiful, she thought. Why must I destroy her? She searched the passing faces, all oblivious to the crime that was about to happen, all smiling and laughing and blithely living life. None of it made any sense to her. Her tears fell like rain onto me.

But between the herbalist, who turned out to be a man of good conscience, and my great-grandmother, who commanded that I be left alone—“How she was born is how she will be!”—my life was saved by a woman I barely remember and a man I never knew. And because my great-grandmother was the ultimate matriarch (the mother of five sons and four daughters, and grandmother and great-grandmother to countless descendants), her decree was the ultimate law in our family. No further attempts were made to end my life. Somehow, despite all, I survived, and I grew.

And then that which seemed impossible in the early days of my life came to pass—I gained vision, imperfect as it is. My mother got me to UCLA, where a young pediatric ophthalmologist, originally from Missouri, who had never seen a case like mine and who warned my mother he didn’t know how much vision I would ever have, operated to remove the cataracts. Had I been born in the United States, it would have been an easy matter. But I hadn’t been, so it wasn’t easy at all. Too many years of cataracts shuttering me from the world had caused my brain to forget the optic nerve pathways that linked brain to eyes, and now my brain didn’t know how to use them. Four years old, and my brain was flooded with visual information it could make no sense of. It was too late to teach my brain, even with the best corrective lenses.

But it was more than I had ever had. I could see color and shapes and I could walk on my own and I could read with visual aids and I could watch TV. In time, I would learn to work with the vision I had been given and even thrive despite the severe limitations it imposed. A relatively normal childhood in this new land, family, friendship, academic success, scholarships, elite institutions of higher learning, high-powered career, lots of money, world travels, handsome husband, two beautiful children. All of it came to be despite what my grandmother saw as my future in those early days.

Some might call what happened to me and my life itself a miracle—that is, minus the cancer.

I think a lot about miracles, but not in the context that everyone in the “cancer community” throws about the word, as in hoping for a miraculous cure. I had somehow achieved the impossible in my life. So when I was diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer, many would have argued that if anyone could find a miraculous cure, it would be me. That thought never occurred to me. Rather, when I learned that I had life-threatening cancer, I thought that somehow my grandmother, who had died seventeen years earlier, was