The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,23

clutched my head and unconsciously covered my ears. She could feel tears building up under the attack of questions and the words that felt like daggers in her stomach. She pressed her lips together, fighting the tears, because she knew that they would be viewed as a sign of hysteria and weakness.

My father spoke then. “Of course we don’t want that fate for her, but don’t you know that there might be some doctor somewhere who could help her? She’s our blood. It just seems so wrong to do that to her.” His voice was desperate, begging.

Now my grandmother turned on him. “Doctors? There will be no doctors. Don’t be so stupid! You know as well as I do that come tomorrow the police may be knocking on our door and arresting you for having served in the wrong army, and you could be joining those doctors you believe in so much in the reeducation camps. And then what good will you be to this blind child of yours? Who knows if you’d even come out of there alive? Or tomorrow they could come to our house and steal the clothes off our backs, not to mention our gold if they manage to find it, just like they’re doing to the other families with a penny to their name. They’ll come for us soon enough. How are we supposed to take care of a blind child when we have nothing? And worse yet, a blind child who will grow up to contribute absolutely nothing to this family? She won’t even be able to go sew or clean the house. And have you even thought about what people are going to say about us once they realize we have this in our family? I’ll tell you what they’ll say. They’ll say that we are bad luck, cursed; they’ll look down on us, on you and your son. Is that what you want?” Grandmother was shaking with indignation, so convinced that she knew best, incredulous that anyone would question her judgment.

There was silence. And then finally, she spoke once more, calmer now. “You two need some time to think about this and then I’m sure you will see the wisdom of what I’m suggesting. You should go to bed now.”

My parents did as they were told. For the next three weeks, my grandmother pummeled them with the same impassioned assaults, until their collective will weakened, until they agreed to see the herbalist she had found, a man in Da Nang who would concoct a potion that would make me sleep forever.

* * *

—

By the time we came to stand before the gray concrete building where the herbalist lived, the voices in my mother’s head had quieted, and in their place was a protective numbness, an armor to withstand the pain that was to come. My father, who was at his core a pessimist and a worrier like his mother, had put on his own armor since he had decided to come to Da Nang. My mother followed him up the steep stairs to the herbalist’s apartment on the fourth floor. They said nothing to each other, having withdrawn into their own solitary sorrows.

My father knocked, and the door opened to reveal a man whose thinning, whitening hair suggested that he was nearing the end of his middle-aged years. My father spoke without preamble, calling him Uncle, a title of respect in Vietnamese for a man of his own father’s generation. “Uncle, we were sent here by your wife. She said you would be able to help us.”

The herbalist opened the door wider and stepped back to let us in. Inside was a one-room apartment, lit by a single open window and a kerosene lamp on a wooden table. In one corner was a cot, and in another a two-burner stove connected to a gas tank that sat underneath. Against the wall were shelves lined with a cornucopia of dried and drying herbs and other plants, spices, and knobby roots. Along the top shelf lay a long ivory tusk with its point blunted, perhaps by the herbalist himself when he had ground the tip and poured it into a simmering pot of thick tea to unleash the magical medicinal powers of an elephant’s tusk. The room smelled of everything in nature, of trees and leaves, of roots buried in dirt, of the bones of dead animals. It smelled of decayed and decaying things and yet of life, too, for these were