and self-pitying. My mother shared my longing for this perfect world. I know, because when my GPA fell short of a 4.0 or when she saw me struggling down a set of stairs, she would say, unable to suppress the impulse, “It’s so too bad. Imagine what more you could have done if you could see normally. If only the doctors had been able to fix it completely…” I could say nothing in response because she was right. I could imagine.
In Scenario Two, I am alone, trapped behind the blinding whiteness of cataracts. We never make it out of Vietnam. I am always wearing old, faded clothes with holes my mother has patched. They hang on my thin, malnourished body. I cling to my mother because I have no white cane. I never leave the house in Tam Ky because my family is afraid that I will get run over by a car. I never go to school because no one teaches the blind in Vietnam. Scenario Two humbled me in gratitude. It was what I envisioned when I tried to overcome the anger, frustration, and self-pity. My mother never spoke of this scenario. She didn’t have to, because I know its very real possibility underlay her desperate desire to leave Vietnam, more so than even the desperate desire for economic and political freedom. “We left Vietnam because we wanted your eyes to be fixed,” she would say.
And then, five years after I encountered this palm reader, when my mother told me what she did, I imagined Scenario Three: I am dead at age two months. Scenario Three makes me hurt, sad, and humbled. It always rests within my soul. Except for when my mother revealed the truth to me, no one ever talks about this scenario, perhaps because at one point it had nearly been a foregone conclusion.
After my encounter with the palm reader, in the midst of living life, of studying and working and going on vacations, of having dinner with friends, of gossiping away on the phone with my cousins about the ordinary and extraordinary events of our lives, of working out at the gym and kayaking in the Antarctic, of falling in love and getting married, the palm reader’s words finally began to seep into my stubborn brain and heart. I know this because somewhere along the way, I stopped asking the gods my list of questions with the same old frequency. Maybe my alternate universe was really not the beautiful and perfect but wistful dream of Scenario One, the loss of which I had often mourned. Rather, perhaps it was the more probable tragic fates of Scenarios Two and Three, which I had managed to escape somehow. “Illness,” “frustration,” “unhappiness,” and “early death” the palm reader had said of my alternate universe. “Lucky” she had said of my fate up to that point. We decide for ourselves how to deal with what we have been given; it’s our choice, she had said. For so long, I had been overly concerned with figuring out the purpose and reason for the oh-so-terrible circumstances of my birth, the universe’s plan for me, and what was going to come next, so much that I had discounted the importance of free choice.
The palm reader was trying to let me know that, if I would only listen and look, my palms were telling me the story of my life, of how far I had come from where I began, a place fraught with unfortunate circumstances beyond my control, but where and how far I had traveled in my life, while somewhat determined by historic and familial forces also beyond my control, was largely determined by me. The future would not seem so overwhelming with its infinite possibilities if I looked at my palms for the story of my past, to find comfort in the good choices made and the hard lessons learned. Could it be that after years of unsuccessfully looking without and to the invisible Beings of the heavens for the answers to my questions, I could actually find them by looking down at my own palms, within myself, and to my own past?
Little did I then know of the further choices I would have to make, and of the even harder lessons I would learn.
20
Numbers, a Reassessment
Somewhere, the outcome of all of this is known—everything from the largest to the smallest, including our little lives. Numbers are just the way we try to calculate the future.
At the