by Lei Wang
My mother, who was a doctor, always wished she could have been a teacher instead. She was assigned to be a doctor in 1970s China in the weird way the government assigned people to careers then, based solely on test scores. (My dad, assigned as a programmer, had really wanted to pursue a purer, less applied kind of science.) Mom did like being a doctor, though always warned me against going into medicine: the dangers of knowing too much, also all those turtle shells (what she called organic chemistry compounds) to memorize. Perhaps because she really wanted to be a teacher, perhaps because when she immigrated to America, she could no longer practice medicine, she loved to talk to me enthusiastically about biology, especially about T cells and germs as the cops and robbers of the immune system, as if she were my personal Mrs. Frisbee of the Magic School Bus.
I have not gone into medicine, but I have taken weird, pseudoscientific healing classes that may very well be related to growing up with too many biology metaphors. Recently, I have been thinking: we call it healing, but for whom? When healing a cold, aren’t we actually just mass-murdering viruses? I have a friend who everyone in our friend group agrees is the most loving person we know; during the pandemic, when she got sick yet again, the dark joke was that she was too hospitable to viruses, too accommodating of their comfort. She could have stronger boundaries.
“There are two kinds of people, cancer people and allergy people,” a metaphysical healer once told me. “Cancer people take too much in and allergy people keep too much out.” This made sense, metaphorically. We want to know why, and sometimes the symptoms really do fit the situation (I also like to think, since I have allergies, that this means I will not get cancer).
In a meditation group I attended, someone mentioned their knee problem and someone else asked, “What are you refusing to bend to?” This kind of question can be infuriating if unsolicited and in the wrong context. But it can also be, at least, a thing that gets us to stop focusing on the suffering for a bit. Even if it’s not the universe communicating to us, it can still allow us to think perhaps this suffering can be in service to a greater purpose, and we can endure a lot physically, if we believe it’s for a purpose (think of those people who climb big mountains).
I suppose I am writing this because my mother is having a strange kidney ailment—including a weird kink of the ureter her urologist with decades of experience says he has never seen—and she keeps asking, “What did I do to deserve this?” Why this bad luck, right when she was about to go to China, to travel, to eat good Chinese food? One could also say it was good luck: that she went to the ER for something else and they found and temporarily healed her swollen kidney, even if it means she can’t eat good food anymore (kidney-friendly diets being extremely bland).
“But I’m a good person,” she says, whenever anything undesired happens to her, something she can’t control, and we are all flummoxed this way. When she finds my dad or me ungrateful, she says, needing an explanation, “I must have owed you in a past life.”
My mother is the only person I have ever heard of who got gout from eating too many green leafy vegetables (the uric acid that causes gout can come from spinach as from lobster). Why was she punished for being too healthy? she wondered. She is also one of the few people I know who agreed to surgery when she got cancer but stubbornly defied her doctors and refused chemotherapy and radiation: did qigong instead, took Cordyceps and Reishi supplements, and survived. It has been two decades. However, she was convinced that she got cancer in the first place because the neighbors were reflecting bad luck to our house via their mirrors, and she pasted blank CDs on all our windows to protect against the supposed voodoo.
When I look up the metaphysical implications of kidney problems, it says: fear of the world. A need for control. And that feels very true for her, but it also feels unfeeling to say to anyone who is ill that there can be something meaningful to their misfortune, something they caused. Maybe Louise Hay was a crackpot and it doesn’t mean anything at all.
But also: maybe the metaphysics of illness is not about what it says about us in the past or even about who we are, but simply a way to transform what we may be up against: turning meaningless suffering into the spiritual kind.
The poet Andrea Gibson writes, through her cancer diagnosis and treatment process, “The universe does not give me anything I can’t handle.” I have been trying to gain more and more capacity to be able to handle what life gives me—through meditation practice, through these healing classes—and yet I hope I won’t be tested. Like training martial arts as a hobby, praying never to encounter the kind of situation that would need it.
It is when we feel out of control that we look for ways to command randomness: what were early religions but ways to try to influence the weather for the travails of agriculture? (All those powerful thunder gods.) Randomness is hard to accept; even luck is hard to acknowledge. Privileged people often want to believe their privilege is due to their own hard work, while the disenfranchised often want to believe it’s due to the system they’re in, when the reality is more complicated. We each have our little superstitions; I am suspicious of anyone who claims they don’t.
One (scientific) theory of cancer cells is that some mutation made them think they are still in an ancient environment outside of the body, without boundaries, where it is okay to just spread and spread and spread. They have forgotten to be civilized, are basically being inconsiderate—but are they really selfish when they don’t realize there are boundaries? We can anthropomorphize, but can’t presume to understand, just as they can’t understand that through their endless need to proliferate, they are killing their own means to live. They are just trying to survive, to be free. It is a little romantic, though admittedly useless, to imagine cancer this way, or mosquitoes.
If we weren’t trying so hard to control our boundaries, what could we learn to accept? Some biologists have written and signed a document called the Microbial Manifesto: given the trillions of bacteria we carry that outnumber our own cells, are we really humans, or would we more accurately be considered walking ecosystems for microbes?
Maybe anything that reminds us of our fallibility in the grand scheme of things is not useless. I hate the idea of random badness, but the very fact of chance also includes random goodness. How beautiful, and frightening, that life is not a 1:1 correspondence between what we deserve and what we get, whereby input A (healthy habits) automatically gives you output B (health). Though you can certainly try to influecne the outcome, life is more than just a product, and the most beautiful things—falling in love, even writing a book that truly resonates—are kind of accidents. Though I am trying to be more accident-prone.
Because my mother was a doctor once upon a time, in another country, in another life, she makes for the worst kind of patient. She knows too much and also not enough and does not trust her doctors, because she knows all the things that can go wrong, and yet she has little to no control over any of these things.
“I have to think of everything that could go wrong,” she says, “because it’s better than being wishful and then everything goes badly.”
“But aren’t you then suffering twice?” I want to echo Mark Twain. To take randomness and think you had a hand in it?
There is, my healing teacher says, two kinds of karma: one is the kind you can clear and one is the kind you just can’t. Sometimes things just happen. And every religion, despite all the prayers and other rituals, is trying to get people to understand how we can’t really understand the intentions of God or the cosmos. There is such a thing as chance, and a universe of things outside us with their own intentions. We each have a role to play, for better or worse (according to whom). Are we humans or human-microbe biomes?
Yet can we imagine that bad-according-to-us things are not our fault and yet good things are? The trick to journaling, apparently, is that you should try to analyze negative memories of the past—it takes the emotional charge out of them—and you shouldn’t analyze happy memories at all. You just feel them. This is maybe not the most realistic way to live, but it might be what works. We all have our delusions anyway. Sometimes the tip into mental illness is just having opposite kinds of delusions: believing that bad things are our fault and good things are out of our control.
When my mother was pregnant, beautiful calendars were trending in Shanghai. She bought a lot of them, with happy babies, flowers, and other positive images, to look upon so the fetus might take shape accordingly.
“And look,” she said, “I made you.”
I’ll let her have it.
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