The Unwinding of the Miracle

Julie Yip-Williams had a remarkable life. This memoir is mostly about her colon cancer diagnosis, how she and her family dealt with it, and her preparations for her death, but she also writes about her experiences as a migrant to America, having fled Vietnam with her family at a very age, and of her blindness from cataracts, a disability that nearly cost her life as a newborn. Some of these stories are told multiple times; perhaps, an editor could have removed/combined these passages, but the repetitiveness doesn't take away how wonderfully Julie writes and how remarkable these stories are. The chapters, almost journal-like entries or essays, that were written over 5 years, also demonstrate several contradictions in Julie's thinking, plus her dramatic shifts in her mood and outlook, from the time of her initial diagnosis and then at different stages of the disease's progression; she changes her mind and how she views her circumstances, her expectations on herself and others, constantly, as she tries to come terms with what is happening. For example, as Julie writes herself, only soon after chapters where she herself had used the “cancer=war” metaphor:

I hate the rhetoric of war that pervades the cancer world, even though I once used it liberally. With fighting and war, there is a winner and a loser. Will you judge me then a loser when I die because I succumbed to my disease? Will you judge me a loser if I simply choose to stop treatment and to stop actively “fighting”? If you do, so be it.