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