The odds of anything
Chinese New Year, growing up biracial, and the rarity of a perfect bone marrow donor
I know precious little Chinese. My father did his best to teach us, but various hurdles factored into me not ever learning the language (Cantonese specifically). Perhaps foremost, through no fault of her own, is the fact that my mother is white. A lovely woman from the flat farmlands of Wisconsin, she met my father through cross-continental serendipity in the somehow-even-colder state of Minnesota. Some years later I was born.
Thirty-five years after that, my Cantonese has boiled down to three abilities: I can count to ten, I know how to order dim sum (50% of which is pointing), and most importantly, I know these four words: Gung hey fat choi.
This Saturday is the official beginning of the Lunar New Year celebrations, or more commonly known to me, Chinese New Year. 2024 is the year of the Dragon, which coincidentally is my year. This weekend begins a roughly two-week stretch of celebrations across many Asian countries—but in our house we picked one night.
On that night my mother would whip up a feast of Chinese food (taught to her by my father’s mother, my Amah, a transference of culinary knowledge devoid of any crock-pot shortcuts). Sometimes we would invite other families over to share in the feast, myself serving as an enthusiastic food ambassador to friends who fumbled with chopsticks and had never seen white rice made at home before. On that night, noodles symbolizing longevity were stir fried instead of boiled and topped with ragu.
After dinner we would form a line in front of my dad and recite those four magical words, gung hey fat choi. In return for our small act of memory recall we would be gifted a red envelope, a gold-lettered gift called lai see. I would open it and carefully remove… Cold, hard cash.
Unlike Christmas or birthday gifts, lai see was different. It contained the thing that was exchanged for gifts. I had been gifted the magic paper that my parents traded for pizza at the concession stand or pokemon cards at the comic book store. If wrapped gifts were a wish fulfilled; cash was a wish to be had.
As I squirreled away my good fortune in whatever ceramic piggy bank I was investing in at the time, the significance of the more implied well wishings of the New Year were lost on me. Twenty dollars may have made me feel rich, but the true benefits were wrapped in the symbolism of the gesture. The real gift was a desire—that my new year would be filled with good luck, good fortune, and good health.
During a high school semester of biology I learned about Punnett Squares. Like the picture below, it is a square diagram used to predict the genetic makeup of any two genes when they are crossed. You learn about these through flower colors but everyone is usually more interested in bodily attributes. Dominant genes outweigh recessives ones, giving special attention to all of those blue eyes, red hair, and the crowd participation favorite—the rolling of the tongue.
Via upper and lower case letters, I remember piecing together an insight about my own genetic makeup—if I was half-Chinese (more colloquially categorized as half-Asian) and half-White, which was the uppercase letter and which was the lower? Which was the dominant gene and which was the imperceptible recessive? Was I “Aw” or “Wa”?
At school the question was answered. Compared to my classmates, the phenotype of my body was unmistakable—though not by much, I looked more different than I looked the same. Even by a shade, since I wasn’t fully white, I was Asian. I was Aw.
As an Aw, I was lucky to have a decent go of things. I wasn’t bullied, though I know that’s not the case for everyone. The inner-workings of America’s racial bias unfortunately assigns different values to skin tones, making public reception to being mixed race often feel like flipping through paint swatches at Home Depot or trying to identify where someone falls on an evolutionary chart between Majority and Minority-X.
I landed in the territory of being too similar to be different and too different to be the same. Living in between the lands of other and same, I was able to assimilate without much friction. But in the wide spectrum of qualifying criteria for childhood bullying—red hair, freckles, too small, too quiet, too “weird”—my percentage of the majority allowed me to pass without acknowledging the actual rarity of my existence.
In an already smaller pool of minorities, and without full citizenship with either of my fully dominant brethren, being a mixed minority can feel as if you are rarer than rare.
A bone marrow transplant is a potentially life-saving procedure for blood cancers that requires the patient to find a matching bone marrow donor. That match is determined by a ten-out-of-ten ranking system that compares Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) markers. These markers are proteins found on cells throughout your body, but the main takeaway is that you, as the patient, are looking for a ten-out-of-ten (10/10) match.
In the U.S., your faith is usually first put into the National Bone Marrow Registry. It is a nationwide database of people who have volunteered their genetic markers so that medical teams can comb through and pair them with patients in need.
The goal of many organizations is to expand the registry. In the states, the foremost organization is likely the newly rebranded NMDP (formerly Be The Match). The logic is simple; the more people who sign up, the more potential matches can be made. In fact, you should sign up. Just click here, go through the questionnaire and they will send you a non-invasive, not painful kit—and one day you might get the chance to save a life.
But generally speaking, there is an effort to sign up more individuals from minority groups because it is more likely that a genetic match will be found within people from their own racial background. For this reason, the registry could use more diversity.
This makes being of mixed ethnicities more difficult. For me personally, there were Chinese people and there were white people, but there were dramatically less who were both (White is generalized here for any number of countries, but the maxim holds that if you are of Caucasian descent your odds are improved). This forced the eventual decision to go with a cord blood transplant— a same but different procedure that engenders a call-to-arms for pregnant folks to donate their baby’s stem cell rich umbilical cord blood.
In Chinese, two is considered a lucky number. There is a cultural belief that good things come in pairs. As evidence, you may very well have a “Double Happiness” restaurant near where you live. In Chinese mother and father are “maa-maa” and “baa-baa”, the repeated intonation favored in the language.
In writing this, I have realized that there is a certain poignancy to the duality in my life. Whether by fate or coincidence (or conspiracy theory drummed up to make this post work), a certain repetition of “two” has followed me from the beginning.
Born of two continents, I have toggled between the lands of sickness and health, living in and out of hospitals, dancing with cancer as I have appeared very obviously sick and almost impossibly not. I celebrate two new years—one on January 1st and another a few weeks later, on Chinese New Year, a separate but equal acknowledgment of making it one more year around all those celestial bodies.
I also have two separate birthdays—One for the day I was brought into this world by the fated meeting of my parents, and another transplant birthday, when I was hooked up to an IV tube and given the stem cell transplant gift of new life.
I have also (thankfully, unfortunately) been given the gift of transplant two times. Twice I have been given someone else’s blood and rebooted my immune system, bald as a newborn, welcomed back into this world to try again.
In sickness I have tried to train myself to not think of odds, but cancer has a way to make you comb through the wandering threads of your life to, at the very least, try and find an answer to that dreaded, “why me?”
But these are incalculable numbers. The odds that you were struck with the disease, the odds that you will survive it, the odds of any given procedure working or not, the odds that a plate of food will make you throw up, the odds that you will ever be the same again… It can become a fool’s errand to bother betting on anything at all.
But as always, the odds work both ways. The odds of me getting sick were something. But what were the odds of me being born at all?
What were the odds that my Amah happened to work at the American Embassy in Hong Kong during a short period of civil unrest, which awarded her a civilian medal and honorary visa to send her children to America for college? And how did the odds further narrow to have a newly-made American friend introduce her youngest son to a girl from Wisconsin who went to an entirely different university—and what were the odds of them falling in love? And what were the odds of them rolling the dice on marriage and family and the mixing of two cultures to create children of unique genetics?
And after all of those numbers winnow and expand, what are the odds of all of those happy accidents and genetic interminglings to then flip from fortuitous to unfavorable with their middle child whose cellular hiccup would eventually manifest as leukemia?
It is a game of chance that you could play with anyone— a shrug of the shoulders and a wide-eyed look at how any of us made it here at all. But for me, perhaps the most comforting answer that I’ve found for my personal run of existential dominoes is provided by the need for more mixed race donors.
The increased need means that there is an increased number of multicultural people getting sick— which, in aggregate, means there is an increasing number of multicultural people being born. This means that more people are following the path of my parents, who see the barriers between social structures, geographic borders, and outdated taboos diminishing to ideally allow that beautiful concept known as “love” to do its thing.
The odds are improving as the registry hopefully expands, and as in all illnesses, perhaps one day medical advances will make the need for good luck to become more symbolic than data-driven. Who knows, a few more years from now, it may be the best tidings of all that good fortune and good health for everyone could become less of a rarity.
Sensory Activation: Things I Was Into This Week
is a kindred spirit in the world of cancer and leukemia. My wife got me a copy of her book "Between Two Kingdoms” as I made my own journey through similar lands of sickness and health after recovering from my CAR-T procedure. It’s been inspiring and a little surreal to follow her journey now on Substack, a wonderfully cyclical nature to all of this duality in life— myself well when she was sick, and then sick when she was well— and perhaps back again.She posted this week on her own Subtack about having to miss out on going to the Grammy’s with her husband because of her own relapse (what are those odds!?). Though devastating, this last weekend she made her own triumphant return and I have to imagine it felt great.
It struck a chord with me as she described how, despite the distance, when she could not attend, her and her husband’s experiences felt more intertwined than it seemed, experiencing “those highs and lows together”. I can directly relate to the my own wife’s coming and going as I awaited another transplant just weeks after getting engaged— but it also struck a chord on a newer plane.
As I’ve begun writing about my experience with sickness, I have gone from no interaction to much interaction with other cancer kin. Primarily online, the takeaway has been a wonderful shrinking world, the geography and seemingly aloneness of illness becoming less rare and more shared. I wish I had done it sooner. Because even if the world seemed to be turning without me, there were and are many more than I ever imagined who are turning in the exact same place.
Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed what you read, please Like, Comment, or Share— it helps boost visibility of the newsletter and is a nice acknowledgement from the void. But most of all, I would love to hear from whoever is reading.
Happy Year of the Dragon — may it be a happy and healthy one for you from a fellow Hapa 🧧🐉
My heart goes to you and I wish the odds are well in your favour this year, the next, the one after that, the one after that until you are very old and very shrivelled..
All the best man, truly