The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,71

I did have the right to know. But I don’t believe that was the only reason for her.

True to her belief in “keeping it in the stomach,” my mother is adept at repressing her darker emotions. I can remember her crying only twice in my presence—once at my grandmother’s funeral, where she suddenly burst into tears, and the other time as she said goodbye to me in my college dorm room right before the beginning of freshman year, when she was blinking so much that I thought her eyelashes might fall off. While words flow easily to her when telling any story, they seem to dry up when they could be used to expose her vulnerability.

In my family she is not alone in that regard. Words like “I’m sorry” or “I love you” or even “thank you” are never uttered in my family, although there are exceptions among those of my generation who grew up in America. Otherwise, those types of words are simply not part of our spoken familial language. Instead, we are forced to interpret the words that are spoken to us and to master an unspoken language in which our actions are our words.

When my parents cook my favorite dishes in the whole world in honor of my visits home, they are showing me how much they love me, which has always struck me as a much more compelling and persuasive expression of love than simply saying words.

So even though my mother seemed to tell the story without emotion that night, I knew that below the surface there were so many unspoken messages, things that my mother wanted me to know but she just couldn’t bring herself to say aloud. Later I would mull over the music in her voice, the nuance behind her every word, and the subtlety of her body language a thousand times, maybe a million times, to figure it all out. In the slightly elevated pitch of her voice, almost angry sounding, somewhat akin to that of a petulant child denying responsibility for something, and in the even slighter jutting of her chin, there was defensiveness against the reproach she expected from me. It wasn’t my idea. I didn’t really want to do it, she seemed to be saying. Mostly, though, there was guilt. Her defensiveness would not have existed but for the guilt.

I knew based on statements she’d made over the years that she felt responsible for my being born with cataracts, statements like “I was stupid to take those pills while I was pregnant with you.” She is the type of woman who sucks blame and guilt into herself through a giant straw. She would say things like “I couldn’t find any cow’s milk for you when you were a baby. You would have been so much taller if I had been able to.” It was her fault that my skin was too dark because she hadn’t known the right foods to feed me. It was her fault that I didn’t get into Yale since she hadn’t pushed me hard enough.

If my mother was going to feel guilt for the cataracts and things like my height and the color of my skin and the fact that I couldn’t quite make it into Yale, then the guilt she carried for taking me to see that herbalist must have been unbearable. For twenty-eight years my mother had tried to repress the guilt of attempting to kill me, and that night she finally stopped trying. In the very act of telling me, of risking my father’s and grandfather’s wrath, of freeing herself from the frightened woman she has always been, of finding the courage to look me in the eye and admit what she had done, she was begging me for absolution, giving me the power to free her from her guilt.

Absolution is difficult. Sometimes it just isn’t possible. Pity is one thing. Forgiveness is something else altogether.

That night, those words, “Please forgive me,” unspoken, hung between my mother and me after she had finished telling her story and after she asked me to not tell anyone what I had just learned. She stood over me with her hands at her sides, waiting. I could not look at her. At some point during her telling of the story—I don’t know when—I had begun to weep. I am not like the other members of my family. I am not good at holding back my tears, suppressing my emotions. I left her room then,