The Unwinding of the Miracle

August 1, 2018

Born blind in Vietnam just as the war was ending and nearly euthanized by her grandmother, Yip-Williams fled with her family across the waters during the turbulent 1970s, landing in Hong Kong and America, where surgeons partly restored her sight. Harvard Law School, a big career, and a family followed in quick succession. Then, at age 37, Yip-Williams was diagnosed with terminal metastatic colon cancer; writing this book gave her purpose and understanding before her death at age 42. It humbles you.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 22, 2018
When lawyer Yip-Williams was diagnosed with stage-IV colon cancer at the age of 37 in 2013, she decided to write her story, which resulted in this inspiring and remarkable work that chronicles her immigration to the U.S. and her final five years. Born in Vietnam with congenital cataracts, Yip-Williams writes that her grandmother—who deemed her a burden to the family—had found an herbalist she hoped would administer a potion to put the infant to “sleep forever.” He refused, and Yip-Williams’s ethnic Chinese family later moved to Hong Kong, where a Catholic charity sponsored their relocation to California, where Yip-Williams was raised and underwent corrective eye surgery. She attended Harvard Law School, joined a firm where she met her husband, moved to Brooklyn, and had two children. After her diagnosis, she was determined to make the most of the time left (she died in March 2018), and to leave a written legacy for her daughters. Yip-Williams faced cancer head on, with “brutal honesty,” anger, humor, and resolve. Planning her death, she made Costco runs, traveled to the Galapagos Islands, found a child psychologist for her daughters ages six and eight, and even joked about her husband getting a “Slutty Second Wife.” Yip-Williams’s wise and moving account of her battle with cancer is an extraordinary call to live wholeheartedly.

November 15, 2018
Yip-Williams chronicles her medical and psychological struggles with the metastatic colon cancer that killed her in March 2018; she was 42.As she writes, the author barely escaped childhood. Born in Vietnam (to Chinese parents) with severe cataracts, her grandmother decided that, due to her blindness, she be "filled as an infant." Thankfully, family and friends with moral consciences demurred, and the young girl eventually escaped with her family, arriving in the United States, where she pursued an education at Williams College, earned a law degree at Harvard, and commenced a career. The diagnosis came in 2013, and the author, who divides her text by years, journeys around in time in each section with evident ease. Her story is unquestionably painful--and sadly familiar to those suffering from terminal illnesses. Moving among doctors, hospitals, scans, tests, and surgeries as well as increasingly darker news and deepening emotional and psychological stress, on her and her family--these are the events she relates, sometimes with a reporter's disinterest, other times with a sufferer's anger, depression, and sorrow. Yip-Williams had two daughters, both early in elementary school, and her grief at not being able to be with them--to see them grow and mature--is palpable throughout. Along the way, the author considers a fundamental question: Is it more courageous to keep struggling (trying new meds and procedures, seeing new specialists) or to surrender to the inevitable? Eventually, she realizes, she will have to do the latter, and she enters hospice care. Although she is careful to tell stories of other sufferers she met, she does not talk about her great fortune of having a substantial income and a good health care plan. She confesses that she is not traditionally religious but does believe in a God and an afterlife.The human confrontation with death--stark and painful and often inspiring.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

For Yip-Williams, accepting death meant embracing life. Answering her daughter Mia's wish to narrate her story, Yip-Williams, who died in 2018 at age 42, shares an emotional and powerful work of family and living with a visual disability. Born to an ethnic Chinese family living in poverty in Vietnam, the author also had congenital cataracts and was legally blind. To save her from a life of dependency, her grandma suggested a potion that would allow her granddaughter to sleep--and never wake up. Yip-Williams tells intertwining accounts of fate and luck; her family fleeing Vietnam during a period of ethnic cleansing, making their way to a refugee camp in Hong Kong and ultimately to California, where she would receive sight-giving surgery. Yip-Williams describes her resentment, her feelings of not fitting in because of her thick glasses and later being diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer in the midst of a successful law career. Yip-Williams relates her final journey of physical, emotional, and spiritual fatigue, writing letters to daughters Mia and Isabelle and husband Josh along the way. VERDICT Similar to Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air, this page-turner will be hard to keep on the shelves.--Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal