The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,52

why this body with the fucked-up eyes?

Is there a reason, a greater purpose, for me being born into this body, in a poor country, and at a turbulent time? Because, you know, if there were, that would make my fucked-up vision and the hurt so much easier to deal with.

What is that greater purpose?

And what is to come next in my life? What lies in my future? What am I supposed to do?

After my mother told me what she’d done, I reasked all those questions and added another question to the top of the list:

Why did I live when I could have so easily died?

After each question, I would pause, listening carefully for an answer and looking for a sign that might be an answer. No answers ever came, not when I was eight, not when I was eighteen, and not when I was twenty-eight. Without any answers, the questions became inner musings, evolving over the years into metaphysical discussions that took place entirely inside my head. Instead of answers, they produced more questions.

Well, maybe it was all an accident. Maybe there’s no reason for any of it and I should be happy and grateful that things just happened to work out the way they did.

But how can all of this, this whole world, our convoluted, complicated lives, be a gigantic accident? How can people suffer from disabling diseases and die for no reason? How can suffering and death be matters of sheer bad luck?

No, there must be a point to it all. There must be a plan for me, for everyone, put in motion by a god or the gods, our ancestors, the universe, Someone or Something. And maybe in the end, all we can do is live and make the best choices we can, and everything will just work out…

But that’s unacceptable! Am I, are we all, supposed to just flail around hoping that there’s some plan out there and that no matter what we do, it’ll all be okay in the end? I mean, how do I know what choices are best? How do I know what the plan is? And if there really is a plan and a reason for every horrible thing that happens to us in this world and everything has been predetermined, what is the point of doing anything at all, because self-will and free choice would be utterly meaningless. Why should we do anything to make the horrible things not so horrible?

I started looking elsewhere for my answers. I must have been about twelve when we got a free copy of one of the Mysteries of the Unknown books when my brother or sister subscribed to Time magazine. Mysteries was a series that explored the strange and the unexplained—UFOs, hauntings, witchcraft—but the book we got was about psychic powers. Pages were devoted to the art of palm reading, depicting differently shaped palms with various line patterns. I was captivated and comforted by the idea that a person’s character and future could be discerned from the lines on his hand, because that would mean that there is a set plan and we don’t have to flounder about in this universe with its frighteningly infinite possibilities. I watched with fascination when self-proclaimed psychics appeared on Donahue, Geraldo, The Sally Jessy Raphael Show, and Larry King Live, people who could see the future through reading palms, tarot cards, or tea leaves, read the auras of the living, or talk to the prescient spirits of the dead. Now, these were people who might be able to answer all my questions or connect me to the Beings who could.

Even though I knew that there were many frauds out there who fueled the skeptics’ arguments, believing that there were true clairvoyants was not a stretch for me since I came from a family culture that embraced a bit of Buddhism and lots of popular religion, which itself consisted of healthy doses of ancestor worship and old-world superstitions. When I was growing up in Southern California, the world of fortune-tellers, of spirits and ghosts, of all those invisible things that move in some supernatural dimension was real, part of my experience through the stories my mother told of the old country and through the rituals of our everyday lives. Ghosts had been known to roam our house in Tam Ky, washing dishes and cleaning floors in the dead of night. The woman who sold tobacco on the streets of Tam Ky (the one married to the Da Nang