Once there was a beautiful little girl who could
neither walk nor talk. She couldn't see, eat, sit up, roll over, or understand
a word of any language. She was fed through a tube and propped up in a
specialist chair. She was British, Mexican and Chinese, but had no concept of
race, nation, gender, or even what a person was. In short, she was an odd
creature.
The first three years of my daughter Sayuri’s
life have been turbulent from the beginning. Born on a stormy night in a
midwife’s centre in Mexico, she opened her blue-grey eyes for a few seconds
before falling into a deep sleep, not to fully awaken until she was injected
with glucose two days later and put on a drip. A year later, now in England,
she was rushed to hospital in the midst of a seizure, where a CT scan
revealed a huge cyst in her brain. Emergency surgery was followed by a week in
intensive care, three months on the ward, a diagnosis of septo-optic-something-asia, and an ongoing
prescription of various types of medication.
This wasn't the tale I'd foreseen, but it was
that which came to be. Add to the mix the fact that I'm a single mother, and it
sounds like a tale of unremitting woe. A friend mentioned recently that when
people ask after me it's generally in tones of sorrow and pity. I'm not
surprised. Here lies Junyi, who was once a carefree traveller and now she's
entombed in a lifetime of changing nappies, may her tortured soul find some
respite. The irony is that I'm happier now than I was eight years ago when I
was drinking whiskey and coke out of a bucket on a beach in Thailand. But who
would believe me?
That same year, the year of the whiskey buckets,
I found myself in the middle of nowhere meditating with a Buddhist monk. He
read me a poem given to him by a Japanese girl, which began, 'Pray for utter
hopelessness...' I wrote it down in a notebook I've since lost, and only the
first line remains in my head. I'd been seduced by the poem, but also repelled
by it. I mean, c’mon, really. Utter hopelessness?
You want me to pray for that?!
Look closely at a barren landscape and you'll
probably find it teeming with hidden life. The place of utter hopelessness I
entered with Sayuri was not a black hole, but a liminal zone in which old hopes
had to die so that a new understanding might be born. Our society promotes the
quick fix and endless seeking of pleasure, shunning the place of utter hopelessness.
It hastily boards over this anomaly and pretends it doesn't exist. Dare to
enter, however, and you may undergo a powerful transformation.
I'd asked myself why a child so ill-equipped to
survive should be in this world, what meaning there could be in her life. I'd
blamed everyone I could think to blame, including myself. But meaning is not
found in things themselves; it rises from the spaces in between, in the way
things connect. We are not the independent individuals we like to think we are.
Rather, as one translation of the African word ubuntu puts it, "I
am what I am because of who we all are."
After the gnashing of teeth and the railing
against the heavens was over, what was right in front of me slowly came into
focus. The wide eyes of a child in a perpetual state of innocence. The
motivation and focus I’d previously lacked. The kindness of the many who have
supported us. The tenderness with which she is held by certain people in whom
this tenderness rarely otherwise surfaces. The young man marching down the
street, eyes on the ground, who looked up for an instant and caught sight of
Her chubby Majesty asleep in her wheelchair, then beamed suddenly and
wholeheartedly at me.
There’s nothing to prove her existence isn’t as
rich as my own. She laughs, and the sound rises from her belly and ripples out,
till I’m laughing along with her at god knows what. She cries, and the piercing
screams seem to surge from the depths of some tormented hell realm. I tune in
to BBC World Service on the radio, and her face takes on an expression of total
concentration. I hear accounts of war
and genocide; I’ve no idea what she
hears, but it’s clearly compelling.
We live side by side, she and I. We dance our own
dances, different in flavour, but our steps intermingle as we breathe life and
love into one another. As the New Year is ushered in, I crawl into her bed for
the first cuddle of 2014. I take a deep breath, my face in her hair, and let
out a sigh of gratitude. She’s stuck around for another year. She wriggles and
kicks excitedly, showing no regard for my need to rest.
As I lift her out of bed and strap her into her
chair, her eyelids become heavy and hooded. She realigns her head and body in
the position most conducive for vertical unconsciousness. One arm lies
outstretched across the tray, the morning sun caresses her cheek, and her mouth
falls open in an upside down V shape. She sleeps, and dissolves the world.
Written by Junyi Chew
