The Opposite of Fate (39 page)

Look at South Africa, some will say. We criticized them for apartheid, imposed sanctions, really put the pressure on. What a success. But China is not South Africa. What works in one country, with a white ruling class, does not necessarily work in another. That’s rule number one in foreign diplomacy school.

Yet when you are aware of human suffering, you can’t simply stand by and say nothing. As we learned from the Holocaust, indifference is a murderer too.

So what should we do about human rights in China? My honest answer: I don’t know what
we
should do. I only know what
I
should do. I think about my uncle in Beijing, the one who believes China is the most peace-loving country in the world. I think about what I would do if I had to tell my uncle to mend his ways and join me at the U.S. ambassador’s house for dinner with Fang Lizhi. Would it do any good to shout at him, to threaten him, to stop calling him? That would be an effective way to start the equivalent of a war between us. With my uncle, I have to show my concern in subtle ways. I have to win his trust, spend more time with him. And yet I also know he probably won’t change his mind about Fang Lizhi, about other dissidents still in jail, about the cultural destruction of Tibet. He is set in his ways. He thinks I don’t understand China. And he’s right in many respects.

I hope the politicians know much more. What I can do is give money for cleft-palate surgeries. I can fund fellowships so that foreign journalists can study in the United States and take
fundamental ideas back to their own countries. I can provide assistance to Tibetan groups developing self-sustaining industries.

It’s not enough, I know. But my right to complain and shout doesn’t necessarily do a damn bit of good. In the meantime, I keep asking myself: What do I believe is right? What are my intentions? What are my responsibilities? How can my intentions match the hopes of those real lives I hope to affect?

• the opposite of fate •

A
t the end of June 2001, after a four-month book tour that had taken me to forty cities across the United States, then to a dozen more in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, I returned home to San Francisco. I lowered the shades, crawled into bed, and began the long rest I felt I deserved. I slept for nearly twenty-four hours that first day, and then another twelve to twenty at a time in the weeks that followed.

Even before the tour, I had been exhausted, always desperate for sleep. Any amount of activity felt overwhelming. Mail piled on my desk, and I had no motivation to sort through the debris. While on the tour, I was plagued with a constant headache, a stiff neck, a heart rate that zoomed to 130 at odd times, as well as middle-of-the-night insomnia and a moldering apathy, all of which I would blame on the constant change of hotels, the frequent-flyer miles, and the emotional upheaval of recently having lost my mother and my editor just two weeks apart.

Back at home, I told my husband, Lou, that I felt as if something in my body had broken. Something was not right. Weeks
went by, and still I did not feel rested. If anything, I was more tired than ever, in part because I could sleep for only two or three hours before being awakened by a sensation I described as “Dolby Digital syndrome,” a constant vibration within my body, which felt as though someone had installed in me a souped-up megabass system for stadium-strength rap music. Unfortunately, such symptoms do not match anything in the standard diagnostic criteria.

During the day, I could not concentrate long enough to write anything new and found myself looping around and around the same pages I had written months before. Writer’s block too, however, is not a recognized medical malady. Reading had become a similar challenge with my waning attention span. By page three or four of the stories I started, I was unable to recall anything I had read, and had to begin anew. At dinner parties, I often could not keep up with fast repartee. I could not follow segues in conversation. Everyone I met seemed quick-witted to the point of intimidation. I nodded and laughed at the moments when I saw everyone else do so.

For reasons unknown to me, I was easily overcome with dread when I was alone. Small sounds startled me, made me leap and jerk, then imagine descendants of the boogieman from my childhood. I guessed that I was not acknowledging some deep-seated anxiety, and so off I went to consult a psychiatrist, the first time I had done so in nearly twenty years. The last one I had consulted had been pivotal in my life: he was a taciturn Jungian analyst who fell asleep during three sessions, and that had the effect of leading me to replace the sleepy doctor with a more lively fiction-writing workshop. With that, I began to write stories, a
whole new career opened for me, and voilà, here I am, able to appreciate the absolute necessity of the doctor’s falling asleep when he did. Had he been more attentive, I might have continued my other course in life. Naturally, I wondered what profound changes in my life the new psychiatrist would bring.

This psychiatrist remained awake. She listened, and thought I had posttraumatic stress disorder, aside from my long-seated depression. There were obvious elements in my life that might have accounted for that. For one, I had a mother who had often been seized by rages and despair. I had seen her dramatic attempts to end her life on numerous occasions during childhood, and instead of becoming inured to these episodes, I had grown up with an anticipatory angst, what people develop after a big earthquake, unsure as to when the next temblor will come along, yanking the ground from beneath them. As a teen, I had watched my father and brother waste away to skeletons from brain tumors, which my mother feared she, my other brother, and I were destined to have; I would hear this prediction echoed the rest of my life whenever I had a headache. Since we were doomed to die anyway, why not sooner than later? That logic led my mother once to vow to kill me as she pressed a meat cleaver to my throat for twenty long minutes.

In later years, I accumulated, as others might Hummel figurines, a variety of accidents, assaults, and acts of God. While I was in college, I was a passenger in a car without seat belts that crashed into a pole; I was thrown into the windshield, with the result the rearrangement of my face. While I was in graduate school, a robber pressed the muzzle of a gun against my temple and made me and my co-workers at a pizza parlor lie facedown
in the meat locker; he promised to blow out our brains if we made a single sound, whereupon the woman lying beside me began to scream like an actress in a bad horror movie. The next year I entered a bloody room that smelled of nervous sweat, so that I might identify what items had been stolen by whoever had also tortured and killed a former roommate of Lou’s and mine. Lou and I had slept in that same room the night before, and only by chance were we elsewhere the night of the crime.

Just before my first book debuted, I nearly managed to be published posthumously, when I came close to drowning in the Sea of Cortez. I had to be dragged back to shore and have salt water pushed out of my lungs. More recently, after forty inches of rain melted twelve feet of snow, mudslides the size of container ships ramrodded their way down the sides of our cabin in Tahoe, leaving Lou and me stranded next to a perilously rising river. To add to my sense of foreboding, there was the dark side of being published: the overly devoted fans and detractors, three of whom had expressed fantasies of killing me, one of whom had followed me onto a plane to tell me how he would do it.

In retrospect, it is no wonder I was jumping out of my skin at every little noise. I seemed to be a magnet for danger. Why was I so unlucky? Was this karmic payment for some carelessness in a past life? Were these signs that my demise was one breathless moment away? Or could it be that the reverse was true, that these calamities were proof, deliberately sent, that I was amazingly lucky, as invulnerable to weapons and villains as a comic-book action figure? I have fluctuated between the two views: incredibly lucky, incredibly unlucky, doomed to die soon, destined to overcome all. And until recently, I had accommodated
an eventful life with high resilience and a low dose of antidepressants. Why was my body now expressing its outrage at these traumas?

The psychiatrist wisely suggested that I have a complete medical workup, so off I went to consult with my regular doctor. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it turned out I was merely deficient in one of those vitamins or enzymes without which one becomes nervous, weak-minded, and neurotic?

A week later, while I was in New York, my doctor in San Francisco called with the results of my blood tests. I was perfectly normal, she told me, except for one thing: my blood sugar was low. Well, no surprise there. I had told her years before that I was prone to “low blood sugar,” especially when I was traveling or under stress. And besides, everyone had occasional hypoglycemia. It was the yuppie disease, and a bag of M&M’s was usually the remedy.

“This is really low,” my doctor said. “In fact, the number is rather alarming.” Doctors tend to be unfazed when your limbs have nearly rotted off, so I wondered what could be viewed as “alarming.”

She explained that the glucose reading was 27, a level that in most people would mean unconsciousness or at least inability to sit up and talk, whereas I had walked into her office the day the blood was drawn, and remained both conversant and vertical. My doctor ran through the possibilities that might account for the glucose anomaly, but dismissed most of them, including my having secretly injected myself with purloined insulin or eaten unripe ackee fruit from Jamaica. Finally, I heard her say she wanted to do more tests when I returned to San Francisco, so we
could rule out a tumor in my pancreas and possibly my brain. Those two things, she hastened to add, were highly unlikely.

I remember that I forced myself to sound calm, almost unconcerned, when in truth I was the one who now felt alarmed. Could this be the fulfillment of the curse my mother had feared? At last, it was happening. I could sense it: I had a brain tumor, just as my father, older brother, and mother had had. Mine would make four, and four was the unluckiest number in Chinese, for the
si
for “four” is homophonous with the
si
for “death.” Then again, this might not be a Chinese curse but a genetic one, a fate that lay within my family’s DNA, encoded in a cell that was all too eager to turn ugly, proliferate like roaches, and squeeze its nest into the limited confines of my skull.

Confronted with all this, I did what any person with Chinese curses and bad medical news does these days: I consulted the Internet. While my mother had turned to the supernatural for its infinite wisdom, I found solace within the vastness of the World Wide Web. There I could continue the search for a diagnosis and cure with the help of Dr. Google, who guided me, nonjudgmen-tally, through a universe of astrocytomas and migraines, chemotherapy and miracle cures of charlatans.

My preoccupation with illness could be only short-lived, for the next day I had to go to the CNN newsroom in midtown Manhattan for a live interview related to the launch of
Sagwa,
an animated series on PBS based on a children’s book I had written. I had struggled against fatigue to awaken before eight that morning. In the newsroom, I was sitting in a tall director’s chair, earpiece inserted, lavaliere microphone hooked to my lapel, black monitor before me as visual focus so I could pretend to be talking face to face with my interviewer. On the TV monitors to my
right, I saw images of pregnant models wearing scanty rave-style clothing that exposed their ballooning bellies from bra line to crotch. It was Fashion Week in New York, and in my opinion, someone had scraped the bottom of the barrel for that one.

“One minute to live,” I heard a voice say in my earpiece. It was shortly before nine a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. This was the soft-news hour, when hardworking people in New York had already gone to their jobs, when alarm clocks on the West Coast were starting to sound, and mothers between those geographic points were preparing their children’s breakfasts and were eager, I hoped, to learn of a new cartoon that would occupy the minds of their brilliant young progeny.

I was relaxed, an old hand at interviews, yet something did not feel quite right. People in the newsroom were talking in loud, tense voices. I knew that background sounds gave the impression of fast-breaking news, but this level of verisimilitude was ridiculous. People seemed gruff, even rude. I concluded that these were colleagues who disliked one another and were suffering job burnout. Listen to them yell at each other:

“What do you mean, you can’t get him on the line? Then go and find him. Quick!”

“Where the hell is Aaron?”

“That’s insane! This is absolutely insane!”

“Go down to the Port Authority, right now—I said right
now!
”

“All right, we got live feed! Everybody, here it is.”

And I saw an image flash onto a dozen screens: a burning building.

I pulled off the earpiece, undid the lavaliere. From years of doing two-minute television interviews, I knew that just about anything—breaking news on political scandals, updates on O. J.
Simpson’s trial, and certainly a local fire with live footage—would be deemed more important than an author plugging her own work. And then I noticed a bizarre element. There was a plane stuck in the heart of the building, and the building itself was not just any building with a city’s downtown horizon behind it. It was one of the World Trade Center towers, and the horizon was the clear blue sky.

“It’s a commercial jet,” someone confirmed. “We have a witness.” And I realized that the shouting in the newsroom had not been rude exchanges but tension bordering on chaos.

When another plane hit the other tower, I heard someone murmur, “This is war.” I left my chair and walked to the greenroom, trying to fathom what this meant. What do you do when World War III has erupted and you’re in a newsroom hearing about it? An intern came up to me and said, “I’m sorry, but we’ll have to do this some other day.” I nodded, although I knew there would be no other day, certainly not for this interview, and possibly not for anything else. Another woman grabbed me and said frantically, “Have you seen Aaron? We need Aaron in Hair and Makeup right away.”