The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,37
was still no way to manage the evacuation of an entire family that included my seventy-nine-year-old great-grandmother. Ultimately, geopolitical forces played out in our favor as cooling relations between Vietnam and China caused the new Vietnamese government to “invite” all ethnic Chinese to leave—a mild form of ethnic cleansing—subject of course to adequate payments in gold and the transfer of all property to the state. So in February 1979, my family—at least fifty people—boarded different fishing boats, bound for Hong Kong and Macau.
The rickety fishing boat I was in measured roughly fifty-four by twelve feet and carried three hundred people packed against one another. The journey to Hong Kong lasted a month and included eleven days on the open seas with little food and water. We were lucky because our boat did not sink, as so many others did. We were lucky because we were not forced to engage in cannibalism, as some refugees were. Less than a year after we arrived in Hong Kong, the United States Catholic Church sponsored my immediate family’s emigration to the United States, providing the funds for our Pan Am flight from Hong Kong to San Francisco. On November 30, 1979, my mother’s long-standing hopes were realized when we set foot on American soil. I was three years old.
I once asked my mother whether she was afraid when she sat on that precarious fishing boat, at the mercy of the sea gods and countless other gods who controlled her and her family’s destiny. I wondered as she sat there for days on end, looking out on the vast expanse of ocean, what she envisioned in her heart and mind, what she hoped for in those moments of absolute terror when she and everyone else were violently seasick, when she and her children were hungry and had no idea when refuge would be found. Did she dream of Jackie Kennedy? Did she have images of American streets paved with gold? Did the hope embodied in such images keep her going through the darkest moments of her journey?
“I wasn’t afraid because I had no expectations at that point,” she said. “I didn’t really think. When I thought about the future, whether it was the next day, the next month, or the next year, it was just blank whiteness. There was nothing beyond that moment, that second even.” In order to get through the ordeal, my mother essentially banned hope from her consciousness so she wouldn’t be incapacitated by fear. She stopped thinking and moved instinctively, living one second at a time. I think that’s what people call survival mode.
In this war against cancer, I, too, have found the need to go into survival mode, to envision a future of blank whiteness. Each time my heart is broken in this war, out of a primal sense of self-preservation, I vow that I will never allow myself to feel that kind of debilitating disappointment, devastation, and pain again. I can’t bear it, I tell myself. It is in the darkest moments with cancer and as I recover from the latest defeat that I say “Fuck hope” and forbid my mind and heart from creating happy visions of a distant future that is entirely unlikely. I’m afraid to hope. And so in those moments, I don’t cling to hope to sustain me as so many say I should. Rather, I reject it.
Hope is a funny thing, though. It seems to have a life and will of its own; it is irrepressible, its very existence inextricably tied to our spirit, its flame, no matter how weak, not extinguishable. After disappointing CEA results, and after a weekend of feeling like it was futile to fight this war, I came to grips with the latest setback and started being able to see beyond that day and that week and then that month. Soon, I decided that I realistically had eight good years left, that I could see eight years out when my children will be ten and twelve, and that I was going to focus on compressing a lot of living into those eight years and whatever I got on top of that would just be sweet icing.
But no more dreaming of retiring with Josh; no more imagining holding grandchildren in my arms. From now on, it was about establishing a concrete, specific, and entirely achievable goal, and if I made it to that goal, then I would think about the next attainable goal.