Love and Grit in the Shadow of Death：A Leukemia Survivor\’s Journey

Excerpt from 【Chapter I Wedded in a Foreign Land with Heaven and Earth as Witness】

8.

　　The next morning, I rushed home right after Chinese class to start writing a paper that I had already planned out. Under the direction of Professor Munro, I had opted for a course on the comparison of Chinese and English literature. My chosen topic was an investigative study of utopian satire through a comparative analysis of Lao She's Cat Country and George Orwell's Animal Farm.
　　Silence rang through the house as my housemates were all in classes. I took out the electric typewriter, put the paper in, and laid out my books. The room soon filled with the intermittent tap-tap of the keys, and I became deeply absorbed in my thoughts. The sudden ring of a phone broke the silence. I got up from my chair and rushed downstairs to answer it.
　　Nurse Nancy was on the line. After she had confirmed that it was me at the other end and without her usual friendly pleasantries, she said tersely: “Dr. Yoneda would like to speak with you.”
　　The receiver passed hands and Dr. Yoneda's deliberate voice came on sounding more somber than ever: “I just got your blood results and have some unfortunate news to tell you, ... you've got leukemia ...”
　　This English medical term that he had used was completely unfamiliar to me, so I asked him like an earnest student: “What's leukemia?”
　　He sounded as though he was trying to find just the right words to keep from frightening a small child: “Do you know what cancer is? Leukemia is a kind of cancer of the blood. Your white blood cell count is more than 40 times the norm. It was your spleen that swelled up. Most people would already be laid out flat by this ... I've taken the liberty of setting up an appointment for you with a blood specialist. Tomorrow morning you need to go first thing to the Cancer Center and see Dr. Belch; he will inform you of the specifics ...”
　　I asked him to hold on for a minute while I went to get a pen and paper to write down the appointment time, the address of the cancer center, and Dr. Belch's name. I politely thanked him before hanging up the phone and with the note in my hand went back to my room.
　　I sat down at my desk and continued writing my paper. The monotonous tap-tap-tap of the keys swirled around the room. Line after line turned into page after page and I lost track of how long I had been writing. All I wanted to do was to squeeze out every thought in my brain until my mind had been emptied. And then, something hanging over my head finally dropped.
　　What had he just said? I looked at the note on the edge of the desk and let each syllable of each word slowly sink in.
　　He said I had leukemia, that I had blood cancer. I felt as though I was telling some stranger something that had nothing to do with them. But what was odd is how I suddenly felt liberated in a way I had never felt before. The question that had been swirling around in my head for more than two months finally had an answer, and the answer was that I had blood cancer. It was just as simple as that.
　　I went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror, scrutinizing the face before me: pale, placid and young. Young in love, young in death; the things we do in our youth are always so beautiful. I'm going to die. There'll be no need to write another paper, to worry about a scholarship, to strive for higher grades, or to fear the loss of someone I love. Yes, that's it, clean and care-free, just a pat on the back and off you go.
　　I don't know how long I stood there like that until I heard a key turn in the lock at the front door. It was my housemate, Carmen, getting back. “Hello ...?” He stood in the entryway calling out to see if anyone was in.
　　“Hi!” I adjusted the hair at my temples and called back to him.
　　A look at my watch told me it was already four in the afternoon. I had totally forgotten about lunch. Moving softly across the room, my body felt as though it was floating on air.

9.

　　Just about dinner time Randy called.
　　“A few friends of mine came to town for a furniture auction. Have you ever been to a local furniture auction before? Would you like to tag along and check it out with us? I can pick you up and we can all have dinner together. How about it?”
　　It sounded like a good idea, so I agreed right away. Randy came over with three childhood friends he had grown up with. During dinner they talked endlessly about shared memories, rehashing old stories with humorous banter. I silently finished off my plate of food. Perhaps too quietly since Randy patted my hand from time to time, concerned that I was being left out.
　　The auction was in the conference room of a hotel. Upon entering, people first walked around to view the furniture and decorative pieces on display, marking items of interest on the auction lists in their hands. When the auction got underway the place buzzed with the accelerating tempo of the auctioneer 's voice, soliciting bids with a smooth cadence and agile gestures. The melodic rhythm and steady beat drew out the emptiness that had been inside me. Sitting there in a trance, I tuned out the people and happenings around me. Randy noticed my aloofness and thought the auction bored me. At the intermission he suggested we ditch the rest and get a drink at the lobby bar while waiting for his friends.
　　The bar was at the far end of the lobby. We found a quiet corner and sat down. The interior was dim, lit up only by candles in glass holders flickering on tabletops. We each ordered a cocktail. This was the first chance of the evening for us to sit down on our own together; Randy quickly took the opportunity to apologize for taking me to the auction. He hoped that it hadn't been too boring for me.
　　My mind was simply occupied with how to convey to him what Dr. Yoneda had said to me earlier. Those words still felt to me as remote and unreal as that disembodied voice over the phone. I felt as though I was reading from the script of some melodrama full of overdramatic words.
　　“Randy, Dr. Yoneda called me at noon today, ...” inexplicably I felt the urge to laugh, “He told me I have leukemia.”
　　Randy looked as though he had been slapped in the face and the glass he had been about to sip hit the table with a thud.
　　“What did you just say?” He looked like a deer caught in the headlights.
　　“He said I have leukemia, blood cancer.” I repeated this with an unexpected smile.
　　His hands went up to his face as if he had finally felt the pain of that metaphoric slap.
　　“Oh, dear God! Dear God!” He moaned on bitterly like that and I couldn't stop myself from reaching out to console him.
　　However, in the next moment it was I who was gobsmacked as Randy removed his hands from his face, gripped my outstretched hand, and blurted out, “Let's get married!”
　　I told myself he must be crazy.
　　“Randy, Randy,” I wanted to wake him up, “Do you know what leukemia is! I am going to die, I don't know how long I have, but I will die from this. There is no way you can marry me. You still have more than half of your life to live. You are still so young; you can't marry someone who is about to die.”
　　But Randy's steely blue eyes looked more determined than ever, as though he was on the verge of anger.
　　“Let's just get married. If you die within two or three years, so be it; you'll go your way and I'll go mine. Anyway, you'll be dead and need not be concerned with how I live for the rest of my years. But just let us live together during this limited time, day and night, let us spend these two maybe three years together. Don't worry about anything else.” It had turned into a plea by the time he finished.
　　I didn't know how to react to this. Was he really proposing marriage? He said it with such cold determination, drawing a clear line between life and death, as if he could just get up and leave without longing or regrets. Was he being callous? But what in heaven or earth can surpass such selfless love that has no conditions: to live and die together, all the while doing your best to care for each other. If that's not love, what is?
　　This selfless man by some twist of misfortune had met a selfish woman. I felt that I couldn't just pack up my bags and run back home this time, causing my parents to suffer the anxiety and bitter sorrow of my imminent death. I just wanted to carry on with my life as usual and do some of the things I had never tried before in the limited time I had left. If I could just live for once as I had wished, all that I had experienced in this world wouldn't be in vain.
　　Marriage? Why not! Listening to the way he put it, maybe marriage wasn't that big a deal, at least not to Westerners anyway. When it was good you stayed together, if not, then you went your separate ways. This was just how they did it here. If it didn't bother him, then what did I have to worry about? We would just be like two kids playing house, taking one thing at a time. When the end came, I thought to myself, I'll plan it out so as not to be a burden on him.

10.

　　So that's what we did. In less than a month's time we set up our wedding. I sent the good news along with the bad to my parents telling them briefly about this dramatic development. My only request was to be dressed in a Chinese style red gown. I didn't know till later how my poor mother, full of tears, had dragged my soon-to-be sister-in-law (second brother's fiancé) all over the city in search of this perfect wedding dress.
　　To express his respect and sincerity, Randy wrote to his future father-in-law asking for his blessing to marry his daughter. This act moved my father immensely, and we soon received a hand-written note in English from him bestowing his blessings and asking Randy to take good care of his daughter.
　　At the same time, Randy drove back to his hometown in central Alberta to tell his parents and family about our marriage plans and also wrote by hand a wedding invitation from which we made copies on a Xerox machine to deliver to friends and relatives. Afterward we went shopping for a pair of plain gold wedding bands. We both felt that a simple unconventional ceremony was enough to show our commitment to each other and didn't need the formality of a traditional church wedding. Thus, we decided to ask the local magistrate to perform a civil ceremony in the gardens behind the provincial legislature building, with heaven and earth as our witness.

Excerpt from 【Chapter I Wedded in a Foreign Land with Heaven and Earth as Witness】

8.

　　The next morning, I rushed home right after Chinese class to start writing a paper that I had already planned out. Under the direction of Professor Munro, I had opted for a course on the comparison of Chinese and English literature. My chosen topic was an investigative study of utopian satire through a comparative analysis of Lao She's Cat Country and George Orwell's Animal Farm.
　　Silence rang t...

Writer's Note—Before My Deadline

　　I've written many reports and finished many projects to meet various deadlines before, but none of them had a sense of urgency as the publication of this English memoir of mine, because the deadline I'm facing now is my pending death. After learning that the sarcoma in my abdomen has shown signs of metastasis last January, I immediately launched my final project of writing my life story in my mother tongue language of Traditional Chinese and had it published in February this year with the help of a Taiwan publisher, Showwe Information Company Ltd., while unexpectedly dealing with a right temporal meningioma that led to a craniotomy last November. Many of my friends, unable to read Chinese, have expressed interest in an English version, but with my declining health, I realized that I simply didn't have time to rewrite this memoir into English on my own within my looming deadline. Yet with another turn of good luck in my life, I was able to get the assistance of the American translator Scott M. Faul to translate my Chinese memoir shortly after its completion into English and worked with him to produce this finalized version. I'm also truly blessed to have a Taiwan publisher who has agreed to publish this English version of my Chinese memoir, thus fulfilling my last wish on earth.
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Translator Preface to “Love and Grit in the Shadow of Death: a Leukemia Survivor's Journey”

　　I first encountered Shou-fang's abilities for telling the human story when I accepted an invitation from Taiwan's PEN affiliate to translate a work of hers. A beautifully told narrative called “Till Death do US Part.” At that time, I read her autobiographic account as a love story and did my best to bring the tenderness, grace and resilience expressed in Chinese to an English reader. It wasn't until a few years later, with the translation of Love and Grit in the Shadow of Death: a Leukemia Survivor's Journey which recounts that narrative in its first chapter, that I realized just how extraordinary her life has been. Her “love and grit” journey tells a story of love but it's not a mere love story. She teaches us how to love living and to fight back against death in the face of tremendous odds. To me, her refusal to alter life in the face of life-altering news demonstrates true resilience and survival in the shadow of death. And her defiance at giving up on ordinary living under extraordinary circumstances is a portrayal of uncommon courage. She doesn't just quit on life to wallow in grief and rage at an unjust prognosis, but sets her sights, instead, on completing the hitherto commonplace goals she had begun in the time she's been told she has left. Perhaps this is the reason death had been unable to catch up to her in the forty plus years since. She never gave up on living her life.
　　How did Shou-fang beat the odds and live many times beyond her first of several harrowing prognoses? How did she cope with setback and hardship? What kept her going when others might just quit? These are the answers readers want and they will find them here. She details her sufferings and reveals some of the keys to facing down imminent death. She doesn't consciously change anything about her life but just keeps going on doing what it means to live. Though she remained always fully aware of the road before her, she never stopped doing the things that living people do. Afterall, living is about doing the things you want to do, and not giving up on doing this seems to be an important element in the defiance of terminal illness. Her goals didn't change because a doctor told her she had less time, they just became more poignant, such as making sure she finished her two-year interior design program in the two years given by her prognosis. And then, by the time she had completed that degree a new treatment, bone-marrow-transplant, had been developed, opening a window to life on a door that death had closed. As an author she doesn't point to this as way to cope, but rather it is just what she did and, in the doing, demonstrates an unconscious resolve to live life. To this reader, her determination to keep on shows us all how you don't need to tell yourself “I'm going to beat this;” you just need to live as though you haven't been beaten. For so many, imminent death means putting off new plans, but Shou-fang's understated resolve shows us just how extraordinary carrying on with the ordinary can be for making the impossible possible.
　　There are so many examples of courage, love, and grit within these pages. A testament on how to live life in the shadow of death. Her words speak to everyone; it's just that with some the message resonates more loudly. Keep turning these pages to experience the unfolding of an extraordinary journey, one of resilience and love. Along the way Shou-fang reveals life under the heavy cloud of death and how to overcome darkness by way of lightness in everyday living. Confronting pending death needn't mean giving up on living life. Her journey bears witness to how death can be taken for granted but life remains always a gift to be lived. And much of the meaning in this gift derives from the enjoyment of its simple pleasures, like a friend's steady hand holding yours on a snow-filled walk to a local coffee shop, the appetite-restorative power of another friend's description of five-spiced braised beef, or the reassuring serenity that comes from knowing we are all connected by not only those we know, but also those we never meet, and without whose help we would not be here today. Shou-fang shows us how to live in the shadow of death with dignity and joy, and how to keep on living when the world seems to be telling us we can't. Would it be a bridge too far to say that her journey of love and grit transports us beyond the shadow's reach?

Writer's Note—Before My Deadline

　　I've written many reports and finished many projects to meet various deadlines before, but none of them had a sense of urgency as the publication of this English memoir of mine, because the deadline I'm facing now is my pending death. After learning that the sarcoma in my abdomen has shown signs of metastasis last January, I immediately launched my final project of writing my life story in my mother tongue language of Traditional Chinese and had it publis...

Writer's Note — Before My Deadline
Translator Preface to “Love and Grit in the Shadow of Death: a Leukemia Survivor's Journey”

Prologue
Chapter Ⅰ Wedded in a Foreign Land with Heaven and Earth as Witness
Chapter Ⅱ Reflections on Facing Death
Chapter Ⅲ Taking up Interior Design
Chapter Ⅳ Bone Marrow Transplant Therapy at the Hutch
Chapter Ⅴ Post BMT Complications
Chapter Ⅵ Studying Architecture
Chapter Ⅶ Dry-eye Scare
Chapter Ⅷ Hong Kong Public Housing Study-Tour4
Chapter Ⅸ Graduating from Architectural School
Chapter Ⅹ Architect-in-Training in Certification Hell
Chapter Ⅺ Returning to My Literary Roots after Becoming a Licensed Architect
Chapter Ⅻ Health Problems Resurface
Epilogue

Writer's Note — Before My Deadline
Translator Preface to “Love and Grit in the Shadow of Death: a Leukemia Survivor's Journey”

Prologue
Chapter Ⅰ Wedded in a Foreign Land with Heaven and Earth as Witness
Chapter Ⅱ Reflections on Facing Death
Chapter Ⅲ Taking up Interior Design
Chapter Ⅳ Bone Marrow Transplant Therapy at the Hutch
Chapter Ⅴ Post BMT Complications
Chapter Ⅵ Studying Architecture
Chapter Ⅶ Dry-eye Scare
Chapter Ⅷ Hong Kong Public Housing Study-Tour4
Chapter ...