The Opposite of Fate (14 page)

• dangerous advice •

M
y mother used to provide vivid examples of what would happen to me if I was foolish enough to ignore her advice. If I ran out into the street without looking both ways, I could be smashed by a car, flattened like a sand dab. If I ate unwashed fruit, I could end up poisoned, writhing like a snail on a bed of salt. If I kissed a boy—a boy who probably
never
brushed his teeth or washed his hands—I would wind up diseased and pregnant, as bloated as a rotten melon.

Thanks to my mother, I never eat sand dabs or snails, and I made sure I married a man who brushes
and
flosses his teeth every day. So it is strange to report that my mother did
not
warn me against skiing. Fact is, she encouraged it.

We were an urban immigrant family who lived in blue-collar California neighborhoods, then wended our way into the middle-class suburbs of Silicon Valley. Unlike my friends, I did not go to summer camp, where unlucky boys and girls had to ride rabid ponies and swim in snake-choked lakes. My summertime thrills included making lanyards in a cafeteria, seeing
The Angry Red Planet
at a bargain matinee, and going to the library once a week.
The only snowcapped mountain I had ever seen up close was the Matterhorn at Disneyland. Of course, I was not allowed to go on the Matterhorn ride.

“Why not?” I whined.

“This not fun,” my mother replied. “Only dangerous.”

“Everybody else is going!”

“Everybody jump off cliff, you do same?”

Smug look. “Yeah.”

“Well, anyway, too many people wait in line. Wait so long, you get sunstroke.”

Intentionally or not, my mother raised me to become the Great Indoors Type. In my youth I failed to develop any athletic prowess. I thought of myself as a klutz, and this self-image was reinforced over and over in PE classes. Three times a week I had to endure a cruel ritual in which girls lined up to be chosen by team captains.

“Let’s see,” I’d hear the captain say as she surveyed the dregs. Big sigh. “Oh well, I
guess
I can take Tan.” And I’d leap up like a grateful dog at the pound, spared yet another day from being the very last to be chosen.

I was the girl who couldn’t run a relay race without falling down and throwing up. I was the player who sprained her finger just looking at a volleyball. I was the bungler designated to stand in right field, where baseballs were seldom hit. The one time a girl did hit a fly out there, I was jeered for running away from the ball. Like my mother, I saw danger coming at me from all angles.

When I was sixteen, my mother decided to take me and my little brother to Europe, where she believed it was safer. I thought she’d gone crazy for sure. In August, we sailed to Holland with
no Dutch language skills and no idea where we would live or go to school. After a month of wandering, we found our home for the next year: a century-old chalet in Territet-Montreux, Switzerland. It was picture-postcard perfect, set in a neighborhood of fourteenth-century houses and cobblestone pathways, with glorious views of Lake Geneva and the Alps.

My mother gave my brother and me a mandate: We were to take advantage of every opportunity presented—speaking French, going to museums, skiing . . .
Skiing?
My mother had recently seen
The Sound of Music,
and she could envision no harm in an activity that took place in a landscape that even a nun had sung praises about.

Actually, I had no choice about the skiing. It was a requirement of the school I had been enrolled in—a school attended, I should add, by wealthy kids with international lifestyles who had been skiing glaciers and drinking Bordeaux since the age of three. Several of the girls shopped in Paris on the weekends.

Your basic insecure teenager, I tried to fit in and act like my peers, as though I was bored silly by a life of plenty.

“When I was in Geneva last week,” I told my new friends in a voice tinged with ennui, “I found it utterly impossible to find any ski clothes that I liked.” And then I lit another cigarette.

To buy the requisite ski equipment and clothes, my mother took me to Migros, a store that was the equivalent of an American Wal-Mart. When the shop clerk asked me to raise my right arm, I didn’t ask why. I extended it as fully as my five-foot-three-and-three-quarter-inch frame could muster. I was shown a pair of red 196-centimeter wood skis with cable bindings. So as not to be taken for a consumer fool, I carefully examined the proffered
skis, making sure they had no chips in their paint and were suitably heavy to resist breaking.

To complete the rig, my mother selected some steel poles with leather baskets—sturdy ones, nice and heavy—as well as a pair of black Dolomite boots roomy enough for the three pairs of wool socks she had knit and insisted I wear. She also picked out a burgundy outfit that could accommodate layers of sweaters. When I emerged from the dressing room looking like a cross between an overripe eggplant and an Eskimo, she pronounced me fully equipped to go schussing.

For my first ski trip I went to Gstaad with a couple of school friends and, unbeknownst to my mother, my very first boyfriend, Franz, who was twenty-two, an excellent skier, and a deserter from the German army.

At the resort, I clamped my boots into my skis for the first time and tried to walk to the chairlift, using the herky-jerky movements of a female Frankenstein. I saw a chair swing around and grab a couple in front of me, and I was reminded of a playground carousel from my childhood, a metal contraption that resembled a giant turntable in the sand. When I was four, a boy had invited me to get on. He started to push the carousel faster and faster, until it reached the speed required to play a 45 rpm single. I hung on to the metal rung, imitating a flag in a gale wind, until centrifugal force pried off my fingers and I flew through the air screaming.

Those were my thoughts as I faced my first chairlift. When it was Franz’s and my turn to get on, I politely invited the skiers behind us to go ahead. “
Mais non,
” I said in my newly acquired French.
“Après vous . . . et vous et vous . . .”
Franz picked me up
and deposited me into the next chair, and up we went. He assured me that the initial run down would be easy. “Beginner slope,” he said.

I know now that even the smallest of inclines looks like Instant Death to a beginner, and if I ever went back to Gstaad, I’d probably laugh to see that the run was nothing but a bunny slope, a mere pimple of a hill. But then I think: Why did it take
twenty minutes
by chairlift to reach the top?

At the top, Franz shoved me out of the chair and I slid on my backside, a tangle of skis and poles.

“Do you
really
think I can do this?” I asked as he helped me to my feet.

“
Ja,
sure,” he answered. “No problem. Follow me.” And then off he went, with me staring after him. Three turns later, he disappeared from view, as did the twenty skiers who went around me and plunged down the hill.

Alone at the top, I stared down the mountain. Although the temperature was below freezing, I began to sweat. At this exact moment I recalled a vision of another Swiss mountain, the Matterhorn at Disneyland. “This not fun,” the mother in my mind was warning. “This
dangerous.
”

Before me was a precipice of sheer ice. All the fears of a lifetime gathered in one terrifying vision. I would be squashed flat, my brains smashed like a rotten melon, rivulets of blood staining the clean white snow. And then I imagined my mother saying, “Everybody jump off cliff, you do same?” And that took me right over the edge with my knee-jerk response, “Yeah,” and a half-second later the long, heavy skis were aimed straight down what I today know is the “fall line.”

I quickly reached speeds that caused the scenery to blur. I pressed down on the poles to brake. That, I immediately discovered, is not a good way to stop, but it is an efficient way to snap your hands off at the wrists.

I was a runaway semi, semi-shocked, semi-delirious. I flew by the Rich and the Famous—Rod Steiger, Julie Andrews—I was skiing with the best. Only ignorance kept me from panicking completely. I thought I might be able to stay upright on my skis long enough to reach the bottom of the mountain, where I could then gradually coast to a stop. That was the plan I would have executed had not the Queen of Sweden crossed my path (I’m not making this up). She screamed, as did her retinue, and I did my first faceplant on packed snow.

Blood! There was blood on the snow. My brains must have been leaking. I don’t remember which was worse: the pain or the humiliation of being asked by Jean-Claude Killy lookalikes if I was all right. I was also crossly informed by at least two people that I had nearly assassinated a beloved royal personage.

After my nose stopped bleeding, I took off my skis. Never mind that I was still some two miles from the bottom of the mountain and it might take me hours to reach it safely. If nightfall came, the rescue team could simply follow the three-foot-deep sitzmarks I was tracking down the middle of the slope.

I did not become an excellent skier that year. For forty-five minutes twice a week, I managed to use my poles to push myself across the flattest part of the parking lot until I had fulfilled my ski exercise requirements for school. Yet I was determined I would not let my newfound fear of speed defeat me. If anything, fear now fueled my defiance.

When I returned to the States, I continued to ski. Year after year I persisted, despite bad equipment, ludicrous ski outfits, and humiliating faceplants. Over the years, I’ve broken a pair of skis in half, been carted off a mountain in a rescue sled, and even managed, while merely standing in a lift line, to knock over a dozen skiers, like dominoes. I’ve learned that all this was necessary to transform myself into a person who not only seeks out terror but enjoys it tremendously.

This year, I fell down the entire length of the East Face in Squaw Valley, California, and went back up for seconds. I followed brain-altered friends whose idea of fun is skiing fast between trees in a blizzard. This year, I even took a lesson.

“Oh, going to ski again?” my mother asked one day when I told her I was heading to my cabin in Lake Tahoe.

“Yep,” I said. “I’m going to try and break a couple of legs.”

“Okay,” she answered. “Have fun.”

Who am I to ignore my mother’s advice?
*

• midlife confidential •

A
s the daughter of hardworking Christian immigrants from China, I was given little opportunity to cultivate a misspent youth.

Ours was a family that rarely went on vacations; during the first sixteen years of my life, we took only two, one when I was six, one when I was twelve, both of them brief trips to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. Most of my summers were spent in Bible classes or in school cafeterias, where I wove lanyards, or planted sweet peas in milk cartons, or made maps of South America out of dried kidney beans, split peas, and lentils. Common amusements during my childhood included riding my bike around the corner, going to the library, mowing the lawn, staring at the candy counter at the corner market, feeding leaves to caterpillars that eventually died, or watching cocoons that never hatched.

I count as the most memorable moments of my life those that were laced with heart-pounding terror—times when I was so scared out of my wits I could not even scream. When I was two, for example, my mother took me to a department store where I
saw one man without limbs and another with legs as long as ladders. When I was three, I stood outside an apartment window and heard the echoing screams of a girl my age whose mother was beating her nonstop in the bathroom. When I was four, I desperately clung to the rails of a hand-pushed carousel, forever it seemed, until I let go and landed facedown in the sand. When I was five, a nurse in a hospital yelled at me for wanting my doll to accompany me to the operating room. When I was six, I stared at a playmate lying in a coffin, her hands crossed flat over a Bible on her chest. When I was seven, I watched people’s skin blister and foam in the movie
The Angry Red Planet.
When I was eight, I flew down a hill on a boy’s bike only to realize, at the bottom, that it had no brakes. When I was nine, I caught a snake in a creek—and the scary part was
not
telling my parents that the snake had slithered between the seats of the Rambler right before we drove to the airport to pick up my grand-aunt Grace. The last experience also counted as one of the most fun car rides I ever took.

The word “fun” was not commonly used in our family, except, perhaps, in the following context: “Fun? Why you want have fun? What’s so good about this? Just wasting time and money.” In our family, “fun” was a bad
f-
word, and its antonym was “hard,” as in hard work. Things that were hard led to worthwhile results; things that were fun did not.

Another bad
f
-word was “freedom,” as in, “So you want American freedom to go wild and bring shame on your family?” Which brings me to another bad
f-
word, “friends,” those purveyors of corruption and shame whose sole purpose in life was to encourage me to talk back to my mother and make her long to return to China, where there were millions of girls my age who
would be only too happy to obey their parents without question. The good
f-
word, of course, was “family,” as in “go to church with family,” or “do homework with family,” or “give your toys to your family in Taiwan.”

Lest you think my parents were completely feudal in their thinking, let me clarify that they did adopt some important American precepts—for instance, the notions that “time is money” and that “a penny saved is a penny earned.” As a consequence, they were also very fond of the word “free”—which should not be confused with “freedom” or the like-sounding “free,” uttered in useless expressions such as “free time” or “free to do what you want.” I’m referring to the sort of “free” that conveys valuable ideas such as, “You are free to go to summer school because they don’t charge us any money there.”