The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,9

the face of self-doubt and uncertainty, is definitely the most difficult part of dealing with cancer. But tricks of the mind are not my forte. The life I have lived has taught me to be a somewhat ruthless realist.

6

Deals with God

I didn’t grow up with any organized religion. The closest I came was going through the motions of my mother’s ritualistic offerings to the Buddhist gods favored for generations in our ancestral Chinese villages, and to the spirits of my ancestors on the first and fifteenth of every lunar month. I stood before the fruit—and, on special occasions like Chinese New Year, the poached chicken, fried fish, and rice—holding the burning incense, and asked the gods and my ancestors for things like straight A’s and getting into the college of my choice and, of course, health and wealth for my family.

During my great-grandmother’s and grandmother’s funerals, when I was ages ten and twenty, I also unthinkingly imitated the chanting, bowing, and kneeling of my parents, uncles, aunts, great-uncles, and great-aunts, all garbed in their white robes and headdresses. I didn’t understand the philosophical underpinnings of the rituals, and my mother couldn’t explain them to me the few times I bothered to ask. No one in our family went to temple other than maybe on Chinese New Year, and no one read any religious texts. Our quasi-religious practices were very much rooted in popular cultural and mythic traditions of village life dating back hundreds of years, and not in the esoteric teachings of Buddha and his disciples, which would have been more akin to the Judeo-Christian practices of the West. At school I couldn’t help but absorb some of the teachings of those religions, since biblical allusions permeated nearly every poem, play, short story, and novel we studied in English class, and as I learned in history class, Judaism and Christianity shaped the course of Western civilization.

So I grew to believe in a little bit of everything, developing my own spiritual and philosophical approaches to life. I believe in my ancestors and that their spirits watch over me. And I believe in God, not perhaps in the image of God depicted in the Bible, but an omniscient and omnipotent being nonetheless. I think God is beyond what my little, limited human brain can fathom, but perhaps something my limitless soul can just begin to grasp in my moments of utmost clarity, moments that the Buddha would describe as the outer edges of enlightenment. For simplicity, I called all these unseen forces God.

I talked to (and yelled at) God a lot growing up, especially on sleepless nights, during which I angrily demanded answers to my questions, which pretty much boiled down to Why me? I of course have this question in common with every human who has ever lived. But we all make it our own, don’t we? In my case, Why was I born with congenital cataracts? Why was I forced to live a life limited by legal blindness, forever cursed to not realize my full potential? After all, I could have been a great tennis player, a spy for the CIA, or a legendary diver like Jacques Cousteau. Why could all my cousins and friends drive and I could not? Why were all those pretty but brainless girls always surrounded by the cutest boys while I was shunned because of my thick glasses? Yes, all the things that hurt so much growing up with a visual disability became fodder for the angry tirades at God. God had a lot to answer for.

I listened closely for his response. I searched with my head and heart for the answers to my questions. I found them eventually, over the course of many years. I grew to embrace a belief in universal balance, something the Chinese very much believe in, as evidenced by the idea of yin and yang (e.g., man and woman, earth and sky, sun and moon, good and evil). In the karmic order of the universe, all things will return to equilibrium, and there will—indeed, there must—be balance.

So I made a deal with God on many of those sleepless nights. “Fine, God. If you’re going to throw this crap at me, I demand to be compensated. I want the balance of my life to be restored. For everything that is bad—and you would have to agree that a visual disability of this magnitude is pretty bad—there must be a good. So, I want to name my ‘good,’ my compensation for