The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,59
beginning of this cancer detour, when faced with the sobering statistics, for my own self-preservation I intuitively shunned the numbers, insisting to myself and Josh as well that I am someone who has always defied the odds and that this would be no different. I knew I wasn’t a number.
Since then, I’ve portrayed Josh as the steadfast adherent to science, studies, and statistics on one side and me as the staunch believer in self, faith, and all that is unquantifiable on the other. As another autumn comes on and I am still alive, sixteen months after my diagnosis, I have come to realize that those two sides, theoretically representing two opposing perspectives, are not so opposite or cut and dried, that indeed numbers don’t just mean squat, that they are informative and valuable. But they must be understood within a nuanced context that overly simplistic statements like “You are not a number” don’t even begin to capture.
A Tuesday in October 2014 was our seventh wedding anniversary, and it seems only fitting that I should write something to honor our marriage. I am happy to report that the state of our union is strong and good, that we fight less, communicate better, and if possible love each other more than we did a year ago, and certainly about a thousand times more than we did the day we married. It might sound like a funny subject for a love note, but I wanted to mark this anniversary by resolving our longstanding disagreement over the virtues and faults of statistics.
The night before my diagnostic laparoscopy, as I agonized over what tomorrow would bring and my future, remembering as always the stated odds of me beating Stage IV colon cancer, and with the thought of our wedding anniversary still at the forefront of my mind, I asked Josh, “What were the odds of us getting married when we were born?”
He posited, “Zero.”
Because Josh and I come from such different worlds, separated not just by physical distance, but also by culture, war, politics, education, and even my blindness, I’ve often marveled at how we managed to find one another and fall in love. I’ve wondered what we were each doing at the various defining moments of our respective lives apart.
While he was born into the relative comfort and luxury of Greenville, South Carolina, into an insular and genteel world of southern charm and propriety, my ten-month-old self was living on the other side of the earth in a subtropical world of monsoons and rice paddies, in the throes of extreme poverty and ethnic and economic persecution as the Communists sought retribution against those who had defied them during the war. Government thugs were on the brink of occupying my family’s home and confiscating all our personal property to contribute to the collective that stood at the core of the socialist ideal. While Josh’s grandmother was bragging about her three-year-old grandson’s uncanny ability to read at such a young age, I had not yet seen a written word and had instead just immigrated to the United States, a nearly yearlong journey that began one dark night as we all boarded trucks bound for the harbor where an unseaworthy fishing boat awaited its three hundred passengers.
On the evening my mother removed the bandages from my eyes after my first surgery and at age four I saw for the first time a relatively unclouded world, Josh must have already been fast and cozily asleep in his bed three thousand miles away, so obviously full of a unique intelligence and potential that was presumed to be completely lacking in me. While I skipped a day of school to celebrate Chinese New Year in January or February of each year, to collect red envelopes filled with money, listen to firecrackers go pop pop pop at least three hundred times, and make our annual trip to a Buddhist temple to pray, Josh had a normal day at his parochial school, where I assume he went to chapel and then moved quickly through the material that had been assigned for that day, much more quickly than how I progressed at my poorly ranked public school in Los Angeles. While he ate turkey on Thanksgiving and opened presents on Christmas Day, I watched TV or read a book or played with my cousins, like it was any other day we had off from school. When I ponder the disparate worlds from which Josh and I hailed, I do believe he is