The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,57
and not aloud to me.
Some people think that I just have thick glasses. Most of the time I can move around with my bad vision pretty well, almost like a normally sighted person. Others, the people who are a little more observant, will notice the never-ending quivering of my pupils and will guess that there’s something more going on than the typical eye afflictions. In any case, almost no one ever has the nerve to mention it to me or, worse yet, ask me directly about it, for fear of offending me. So I was a little startled by this woman’s bluntness. I liked it, though; it was refreshing. And for her to connect my eye problem with what she was seeing in my palms, well, that was kind of brilliant, I had to admit. I answered her question.
“I couldn’t see when I was born in Vietnam, and I didn’t get surgery to fix the problem until I came to America—as much as they could fix at that point, because it was pretty late in the game. I imagine my life would have been very different had I not made it to this country,” I explained.
“Well then, you’re one lucky girl,” the palm reader stated. She said it with the confidence of a well-accepted fact, as simple as two plus two equals four.
“I suppose so. I’ve not always thought of myself that way, to be honest. Sometimes it’s hard to deal with, not being able to see like the rest of the world, and all you can focus on is everything that you can’t do. It really sucks, you know.” To my great surprise, I found myself choking up as I talked. I had to stop before it became obvious to this total stranger. Sometimes this happened, as if all the self-indulgent emotions I bottled up threatened to come to the surface and expose me.
Still, it’s funny how you can feel comfortable enough to tell a perfect stranger deeply personal things. Sometimes you just need someone to listen to you. Knowing that I would never see her one-on-one again and that she had no preconceived notions about me just made it easier somehow.
She was patient and kind. “What your palms are telling me, what they’re telling you if you knew how to read them, is that you should focus on how far you’ve come from where you began in your life. Be happy about that. Something that some people don’t realize is that the lines on a person’s palm can change and do change all the time. Your future is not set in stone. In the beginning, there are many things that we have no control over—where we are born, who our parents are, how we come into this world with something wrong with our eyes or maybe our ears or our legs, whatever it is—but from there it’s up to us to decide what we do with what we’ve been given. We make our own choices.”
I have often imagined what my life could have been in some alternate universe where different choices, in which I had no say, were made at critical moments that might or might not have seemed so critical at the time, choices in moments that forever defined the course of my life. What if my mother had never taken those green pills she suspects caused my blindness? What if our boat had planned to leave Vietnam only weeks later, at the same time my mother’s parents were supposed to leave? What if my mother had decided not to marry my father? What if the herbalist had been willing to do the unthinkable? There are infinite possibilities that make up that alternate universe. But there were only two, and then later three, basic scenarios that haunted my imagination most.
In Scenario One, I am born normal, or I am born in the United States, or come over within the first six months of my life so my eyes are fixed completely by the doctors here, who seem like miracle workers to most people in the world. I can see perfectly. I can do anything and everything—play tennis, drive a car, climb mountains. I am beautiful and popular because I’m not a freak with my Coke-bottle glasses, my giant large-print books, and my many magnifying glasses. I grow up as a normal kid. Scenario One made me hurt and sad for everything that could have been. It was what I longed for when I was angry, frustrated,