"On 19 March 2018, almost five years after being diagnosed with Stage IV colon
cancer, thirty-eight-year-old Julie Yip-Williams died, leaving behind a husband
and two daughters. Her early years had been anything but easy. Born blind in
Vietnam, at two months of age she was almost euthanized on the orders of a
grandmother who deemed her to be defective; years later, as an older child, she
sailed to Hong Kong with her family and hundreds of other refugees in search of
a more peaceful life, eventually settling down in the US where her life improved
drastically.
She was soon given partial sight by a surgeon, studied at Harvard, and became
a successful lawyer, but then, in her thirties, she was struck down by the
illness that would kill her. It was then that she began to write what would
become a posthumously published memoir, The Unwinding of the Miracle. In July
2017, a year before she passed away, Yip-Williams wrote the following letter
to her young daughters."
