Rise of the "Third Wheel"
FOR ME, LIFE was a chance occurrence. My existence was an accident. You could even say that it was an ordeal, one that I barely survived.
I was not even supposed to be born.
My parents were already in their early forties. As they were already raising a son and a daughter, they had no plans for any other children. My mother actually became pregnant two more times before she gave birth to me. Unfortunately, before my would-be siblings were ever able to view this world through their own eyes, or even reach infancy, their futures were cut short on an operating table when they were mere cell clusters.
In order to completely eliminate the possibility of any future pregnancies, my mother bluntly decided to have an IUD inserted. This was by far the most common and effective contraceptive method at that time in China.
With both a son and daughter in their home, my parents already had all they could hope for.
I have no idea how those fragile but somehow tenacious cells (arguably not even yet constituting a "life" ) managed to slip past the gauntlet of defenses my mother had prepared and set up camp inside her body. Then one day, despite all her strict precautions, my mother was dumbfounded to discover that she was pregnant again!
Their third and fourth children had vanished before being born. What reason, and what need, did this fifth child have to exist?
Several years later, when I had just started learning to read, I stumbled upon the diary that my mother had kept during this part of her life. In the section pertaining to this particular period, I saw that she had spent each day in a state of painful hesitation. "Should I get rid of it, or should I keep it? Keep it? Get rid of it?"
My heart leapt to my throat each time I read my mother's deions of how she wavered between these two choices. My mind was in turmoil.
To live? Or to die? Not even Prince Hamlet had faced a dilemma this dire!
A grave illness struck my father, and he spent his days recuperating at home. His life hung by a thread. In his own words, "There's a time bomb lurking inside my body. It could go off at any time, anywhere!" Well aware that his time upon this earth was coming to a close, my father penned an autobiography, a full-length testament and farewell letter. My mother, on the other hand, had grown as slim as a sheet of paper. She looked as if even the slightest breeze would send her soaring into the air like a kite.
Given their circumstances and physical conditions, my parents simply lacked the energy, the ability and the courage for another child. They did not even have any way of guaranteeing that they would live long enough to raise this hypothetical child to adulthood.
Gritting her teeth, my mother finally went to the hospital. An aura of dignity surrounded her as she lay down upon the operating table.
As I came to this entry in her diary, the room around me grew dark. A chill went through my extremities. A desperate thought filled my mind.
My poor little life was done for!
Yet fate followed a circuitous path on that day. After the doctor finished his mandatory examination, he apologized to my mother, telling her that her body would not be able to endure the stress of another operation. There was only one possible outcome that day: the death of both my mother and the child in her belly.
My mother was dumbfounded. "So what you're telling me is that I'm going to have this child whether I'd like to or not?" She asked.
The doctor nodded solemnly.
She gave this some thought before asking another question. "But what about the IUD inside my uterus? Will it affect the child's development or lead to any complications?"
The doctor furrowed his brow as he pondered this query. After a long pause, he opted for a prudent response.
"There aren't any precedents, as far as I can recall."
After grudgingly making the trip home, my mother glanced over at my father, who was lying on his sickbed. They exchanged a pained look. What was done had been done. All they could do now was to prepare for whatever came next!
Her parents had no choice. Dauntlessly struggling against the IUD in her mother's womb, the third Wang child (or, more precisely, the fifth Wang child) fought her way into the world tooth and nail.
Thus, my very existence was a complete accident. None of the circumstances were in my favor, yet I was born nonetheless!
Life is a gift bestowed on us from above, but it is also a struggle for us all. My own unappreciated life may have been trivial in the grand scheme of things, but I still stubbornly refused to give up! Fate was already working against me before I was born. The signs were clear, it seemed: my life was destined to be a bumpy ride.
My parents had a nickname for this unexpected outcome of theirs. They called me "Third Wheel" .
There was a silver lining, though. Despite all the treacherous obstacles that stood between this "Third Wheel" and her birth, she came into this world without a scratch, both physically and mentally. As fate would have it, the IUD that my mother had fretted about did not affect my prenatal development at all. After spending nine peaceful months together, the device and I emerged peaceably from the womb, and we went our separate ways.
Despite the late age at which my parents had me, not to mention their poor health, I did not end up as what some sardonically refer to as a "bean sprout" . To the contrary, unlike my delicate siblings, who were no strangers to illness, I was strong, hardy and full of life. I never saw the inside of a hospital during my childhood or adolescence, and all my childhood scrapes and tumbles never left so much as a single scar. At the very worst I would catch a cold every year or so. My love for food never diminished one bit, and I ate as I pleased. This puzzled my father. "Is there a hole in our daughter's stomach?" He would ask my mother, puzzled.
