The Unwinding of the Miracle

Book excerpt: Born blind in Vietnam, Julie Yip-Williams narrowly escaped euthanasia by her grandmother, and then fled the political upheaval of the late 1970s with her family. She made it to Hong Kong and, ultimately, America, where a surgeon at UCLA gave her partial sight. Against all odds, she became a Harvard-educated lawyer with a husband and two children. At age thirty-seven, Julie was diagnosed with terminal metastatic colon cancer. This book grew out of a blog Julie kept through the past four years of her life.