The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,36

rather unexpectedly, cancer has proven to be most effective in chasing away my insecurities, allowing me to shed almost completely those old and painful feelings of unlovability.

How funny that one of the two greatest challenges of my life—my visual disability—should make me feel so unloved, and that the other greatest challenge of my life—this cancer—should rectify that, resoundingly.

I am humbled. That unwanted and unworthy little girl is truly baffled by all these acts of love.

14

Hope

In March, on the eve of my HIPEC surgery, I wanted to write about hope. It’s a word that is bandied about so frequently when you have cancer. “You cannot give up hope,” Josh has told me many times. “There’s always hope,” more than one cancer survivor has told me. People have recommended to me a book (which I’ve read) called The Anatomy of Hope, one oncologist’s account of how important it is to maintain a realistic hope, sprinkled with tales of patients defeating cancer against all odds. This fuzzy concept of hope, this feeling that something desirable can be attained, is so prevalent in the world of cancer that it takes on a holy quality that people embrace purely on the basis of faith: like, if you have it, it will sustain you through your darkest hours, and maybe even cure you. Because the word is invoked so often, hope can also feel like a lie. After all, how can you say there is always hope when clearly at some point death is imminent—where is the hope then?

It is to my mother’s stories of life in Vietnam and our escape that I’ve turned often in the last eight months as I’ve examined the value of hope. Her stories reveal the mercurial nature of hope; it is like a fire in our souls, sometimes flickering weakly, like the flame of a single candle in the night, and sometimes raging mightily, casting a warm and brilliant light of limitless possibilities.

My thirty-year-old mother was one of the many who had lived through years of civil war and one of the many who watched with envy as the few Vietnamese who had ties to the Americans, or guts, or luck, or money, or some combination of these things managed to flee the country. Riding behind my father on his moped through the busy streets of Saigon in the final days of the South, my mother witnessed firsthand how truly lucky some were.

One of her most vivid memories was this tableau: an American soldier pulling on the arm of a pretty Vietnamese girl, clearly urging her to come with him; an older woman who no doubt was the girl’s mother pulling on her other arm, obviously begging her to stay. It was a tug-of-war that symbolized the opposing forces of America and Vietnam, old and new, brightness and darkness, success and failure, even life and death. Finally tiring of the game, the soldier with his easy strength picked up both women in his arms, dumped them in his jeep, and drove off into the evening sun.

My mother longed to go after them, to inhabit the glamorous and rich world of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy that she’d glimpsed in the occasional American movie. More important, she wanted to leave Vietnam in order to find better medical care for my older sister, whose vision was also impaired. How to do it exactly, she had no idea. Escape, much less escape to America, was a dream, a fantasy, a hope so impossible that my mother pushed it away to the recesses of her mind, and instead focused on surviving under the new regime. Yet, dim as it was, the hope of a different and better life was born in my mother on the day the soldier tossed those women into his car, you’re-coming-with-me style.

Obviously, my mother’s far-fetched hope came to pass. The poverty became so extreme that hundreds of thousands were prepared to risk their lives at sea, fleeing in the dead of night. As more and more people escaped, and letters and pictures arrived from France, Australia, and America proving that a new life was indeed possible, my mother’s impatience with her circumstances grew and grew and grew. But unsanctioned escape was almost exclusively for the single and young, who had easy mobility, who could move about in the dark of night in order to snag the one or two spots left on a fishing boat leaving on the spur of a moment. Despite my mother’s building hope, there