The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,51

rental, toting food and our laundered clothes, chargers, toiletries, and anything else we needed. Cousin N and her husband offered a bed and shower at her nearby apartment so Josh could freshen up in a place more comfortable than my hospital bathroom.

Family and friends offered playdates and other fun and distracting activities for my girls. Third Aunt and Uncle came to visit in the hospital, donning hazard masks and gowns before they entered my room (for this was when I was still being tested for C. difficile, and precautions had to be taken to prevent the spread of any bacteria). Fifth Aunt and Uncle made the long drive after work from the east side to visit me. Other aunts and uncles whom I hadn’t spoken to in years showed up to tell me they loved me. Yes, Chinese people telling me they loved me; that was nearly as shocking as being told I had cancer. In a true gesture of love, they cooked me feast after feast to try to fatten me up. My family and friends threw a big party to celebrate Belle’s second birthday and as a celebration of life for me, to which family and friends from different walks of my life came, some of them traveling thousands of miles to be there.

While in some respects the story of my diagnosis was a nightmare, I think it is ultimately a story of love between me and all those who came to support me. In my moments of elusive faith, I believed the hand of God had brought me to Los Angeles then so that I could know that kind of magical and singular love, a love that I had never experienced before and, I daresay, that even many of those who have lived many more years than I have never experienced and will never experience. Sadly, it’s the type of love that is shown only when life is threatened, when for a few minutes, hours, days, or weeks, everyone agrees on and understands what really matters. And yet, as transient as that love can be, its magic, intensity, and power can sustain the most cynical among us, as long as we allow ourselves to linger in the glow of its memory. This disease may bring me to the final days of my life on this earth, but the story of how cancer came into my life reminds me every day that while it has taken from me the innocence and happiness of my old life, it has also given me the gift of human love, which has now become part of my soul and which I will take with me forever.

19

Fate and Fortune

When I learned that my parents and grandparents tried to kill me, it didn’t just make me feel a thousand different volatile emotions; it also made me think those grand thoughts and pose those mind-numbing questions that theologians and philosophers have been pondering and raising for millennia. But fortunately, unlike the raw emotions running through my body, these thoughts and questions were, for the most part, comfortingly familiar and calming in their intellectual nature, as I’d been pondering and raising the same ones in some form or fashion since I was a little girl.

From the moment I was capable of somewhat advanced thinking and realized that I was different, and not necessarily in a good way, I began compiling a list of questions that grew in length and sophistication as I grew, a list of questions for the Buddhist gods and local Chinese saints I had known in my childhood, my ancestors who might as well have been gods, the Christian God that all Americans believed in it seemed, at least based on what the television was telling me, and any other Being who might be out there. I must have been six or seven when I began the list. Through the years, I would stare up at the ceiling on sleepless, frustrated nights and present my list.

Buddha, Goddess of the Sea, Great-Great-Grandfather, God, All Powerful and Knowing Being, if any of you has the time to listen to me, can you please answer some questions for me? I need to understand.

Why was I born blind?

Why couldn’t I have been born in this country, where the doctors could have fixed me with a snap of their fingers?

Why didn’t we make it to America sooner, because sooner would have meant more vision?

Of all the bodies in this world I could have been born into,