The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,70
eruption was a scorched terrain of deep, inconsolable hurt and an insatiable need to know if she and the rest of them had ever loved me or been sorry for what they all had tried to do, if any of them ever shuddered at the idea of their daughter/granddaughter dead before she had a chance to live. Was that why my father had suddenly cried upon seeing me trying on my black cap and gown the day before my college graduation, tears rolling down his roughened cheeks in a way that struck me as too much and too odd for that occasion, no matter how proud he might have been? Was he sorry then, wordlessly apologizing to me with every tear? What had my grandmother been thinking in that picture of her holding my hand in the perfectly manicured gardens at the Huntington Library when I was seven years old, wearing pigtails and my Buddy Holly glasses? Or what about when she sat down next to me and patted me on the back in that restrained, affectionate manner that was her way when I got my period for the first time? She’d seemed so proud. Was that the same woman who ten years earlier had been so concerned with what would happen to me when I started menstruating, horrified at the thought of me bleeding everywhere like a wild animal?
Did you think then about how you had wanted to put me to sleep like some rabid dog?
After the hurt came the need to clear the smoke and ashes so I could move on (I am moving on still), to create order out of the chaos in my mind, with rationalization and even pity for these misguided people I had to call my family. They were all superstitious souls trapped in a backward, hopeless country, trying to survive in difficult times, living within a culture where female infanticide was not an unfamiliar idea. Perhaps in that situation, even I would have thought murder was justified…perhaps.
Don’t fool yourself. You know you wouldn’t have. Even the herbalist, who by the way came from the same time and place as all of them, knew that.
I could definitely feel sorry for my mother, if no one else. She was the biggest victim. Yes, she was beautiful, but she was fearful and lacked the assertive personality needed to challenge my domineering grandmother. She had been taught to be respectful of and obedient to her elders and to quash her own selfish voice for the selfless good of the family. It was easy for me to imagine my mother cowering before my grandmother’s will, because all through my childhood I witnessed my mother fleeing from confrontations at home and at work. My frequently ill-tempered father cursed and yelled at her whenever he felt like it for silly and sundry things—rinsing the dishes twice because she was neurotically afraid of us ingesting detergent or watching the water boil for soup when she should have been more efficient by prepping the vegetables for the soup—to the point where I wanted to throw my little, meaty body over her thin one to shelter her from his verbal daggers. Exasperated, I once asked her why she never fought back against my father or that co-worker who had maligned her in front of everyone at work but whom she condemned in turn only in the confines of our home.
She said it was better to “keep it in the stomach,” a Vietnamese phrase that means to hold one’s tongue, to keep it bottled up inside, all for the sake of preserving the peace. Even as she revealed the truth to me almost thirty years after it all happened and almost ten years after my grandmother’s death, she was still nervous, afraid of breaking the pact of secrecy that had held them together for all those years, a pact that had become severely weakened in the absence of my grandmother’s silencing presence.
“If your grandmother were still alive, I would not tell you what I am about to tell you, and your grandfather and your father will yell at me until the end of my life or theirs if they find out,” she said as she began the story. Her eyes, brows, and mouth had pulled into a rigid mask as if to defend against the inevitable attacks. Yet she was willing to take the risk to tell me.
She said she told me because I had the right to know. She was right.