The more Huang Mei-qin (黃美琴) wants to suppress the trembling in her right arm and right leg, the more her limbs seem to defy her will. Since she has little control over her condition, she hides her constantly shaking right arm behind her back as she staggers around an event venue looking for potential subjects for interviews. Perhaps the attentive look of an event participant will prompt her to strike up a conversation. It may be a knowing smile or the moist eyes of someone in the audience that attracts her attention. Whatever it is, she keeps her eyes sharp for a possible story.

Huang was diagnosed with spinocerebellar ataxia when she was 17 years old. This hereditary disease causes the cerebellum to atrophy, which in her case causes uncontrollable shaking in her right arm and leg. She is timid and unsure of herself, and she rarely talks to strangers.

Despite her condition, Huang loves to write. In fact, it’s that fascination that has enabled her to face her timidity head-on as she steps forward to find a story in the life of another person. That doesn’t mean that she is completely comfortable going about the task of interviewing people. Quite to the contrary, it puts her ill at ease. She is nervous and trembles a lot, making her sweat profusely even in the cold of winter. Her volunteer uniform often bears evidence of that.

Once she has set her sights on a prospective subject, she begins moving toward the person. Because her right leg is not entirely responsive to her mental commands, her stride is slow and a little awkward, requiring obvious effort.

“How are you? May I talk to you?” She asks for this permission with a customary smile, which is but a veil to hide her own anxiety. Her subjects are usually accommodating. They take in her physical condition and often considerately reply, “Let me grab a chair for you first, and then we can chat.”

Huang used to be right-handed, but her disease has forced her to write with her left hand. As a result, she writes very slowly—too slowly to keep pace with an interview. Instead, she uses a tape recorder to capture the conversation. However, her mind often goes blank after she presses the “record” button—her anxiety over facing an interviewee, a stranger, causes her to forget the questions that she wanted to ask. In those cases, she just hopes that the person is a talker and can keep talking without her questions or prompting. If the person is one of few words, she tries her best to get as much information as she can. Whatever happens, she does what she can. After she has gotten what she needs, she rides her electric scooter home with peace of mind.

Huang Mei-qin (center) in an interview. She cannot write fast enough to take down what she hears, so she uses a tape recorder to record her interviews.

Huang remembers how as a teenager she used to envy her schoolmates when they submitted their articles to newspapers and got published. She itched to write her own pieces. Regrettably, because of her innate shyness, that desire was never more than a distant dream. Nothing ever came of it.

Who would have known that karmic forces would lead her to join Tzu Chi and make her dream a reality? Not only that, but volunteering has also taught her to count her blessings and has filled her with a sense of fulfillment and purpose, something she had lost after the disease sapped her hope and even led her to contemplate suicide.

 

Long afflicted

Huang Mei-qin was born in 1962 to a farming family in Benyuanliao, Tainan, southern Taiwan. Her mother, in an effort to improve the financial situation at home, organized a credit club, which, due to dishonest participants, landed her deep in debt instead. To repay the debt, she rented a store in the marketplace to sell grain, and she also converted the family home into a grocery store. Farming became a sideline.

Huang, the oldest child in the family, helped tend the shops after school. Her sister and two brothers worked on the farm. Though life wasn’t easy, with each doing their part, they managed to get by.

After finishing junior high school, Huang worked in a textile mill. One day she was trying to put a thread through a needle when she noticed that she was seeing two images of the same thread. Then she saw double images of a single person, and she felt funny when she walked. “What’s going on?” she wondered.

Another time, after coming off a night shift, she slept in the workers’ dorm at the factory. When she woke up in the morning, her right arm and leg both felt limp. She found she could not pry open her right fist, which was clenched tight. One side of her mouth drooped, as did one eyelid. Furthermore, she was seeing double again. All of this put her mind in turmoil. “What am I going to do?” she thought desperately. She was only 17 years old. Fate had dealt her a hard blow and was turning her life upside down.

Her mother took her everywhere for treatment, but to no avail. Eventually a doctor diagnosed her with spinocerebellar ataxia. She was later cured of her drooping mouth and eyelid and double vision, but she lost much of the command over her right limbs, which shook uncontrollably.

The disease made Huang, already shy, even more withdrawn. She avoided people and isolated herself. She could not face the wide-open, bright world right outside her window.

Fortunately, despite her misfortune, she felt secure in her mother’s love and support. Her mother was her sole ray of sunshine and her primary support, both financially and emotionally. That was why she was particularly devastated when her mother, after working day and night for many years to provide for the family, died of liver cancer in 1998. Huang was 36 years old at the time. Now, even that support had been taken away from her.

After her sister and brothers had all married and moved away, Huang lived alone at home. She was unable to work and could therefore only rely on social welfare to scrape by. She often thought about taking her own life.

Another door opens

Huang spent her days aimlessly for several years after that. Then, one day in 2004, she walked by the Annan Tzu Chi Recycling Station in Tainan. Many people were busy inside sorting out recyclables. She mustered her nerve and went inside for a closer look. When they saw her enter, the volunteers working there put down what they were doing and greeted her cordially. That brought a warm glow to her heart. It was the first time since the passing of her mother that anyone had shown her such warmth.

She started volunteering at the station. Her weakened right arm and leg, however, made it quite difficult for her to physically handle things. She would break into a sweat even before she had really gotten started.

The volunteers felt for her, so they suggested that she take up other volunteer work, work that was more sedentary. They suggested she try serving as a documenting volunteer and help record other volunteers’ stories or Tzu Chi events in the community. She accepted that invitation right off the bat, forgetting how difficult it would be for a shy person like her to carry out the requisite tasks: finding prospects and conducting interviews in the midst of a crowd. Regardless, she hoped to fulfill the dream she had when she was a teenager.

This new endeavor helped her step out of her small world and put her in contact with the big world. One of the first cases that she reported on involved a Tzu Chi care recipient who was in her 70s and lived with her mentally ill son. The mother and son got by on a small government pension for the elderly. They ate just one meal a day, typically consisting of a bowl of rice and some pickled cucumber or fermented tofu. Despite their difficult financial situation, the mother refused to take money from the foundation. However, she did agree to let volunteers help her clean up her home.

Volunteers removed the rotten steel-framed sofa that had not been used in decades. They fixed the roof, which had collapsed in places so that pools of water would form inside the house every time it rained. They scrubbed the kitchen and the bathroom and restored the toilet, darkened after years of use, back to its original white.

Huang was both surprised and sad to see the deplorable living conditions of the mother and son. She didn’t know there were people in this world that lived like they did. When she went home, she took out her pen and paper and began to write about what she had seen. She had to wipe away her tears as she wrote. It hurt her to think of the mother and son’s situation. At the same time, she couldn’t help but admire the old woman’s contentment and strength in the face of life’s trials and tribulations.

Huang has also volunteered at Dalin Tzu Chi Hospital in south-central Taiwan. There she saw people experiencing birth, illness, or death—one scene after another appeared right before her eyes, as if they were being played out in a film. She saw the joy of living, as well as the agony of illness, dying, and death. She saw patients who were accompanied and supported by their caring families, and she saw patients whose families were distant, uncaring, and impatient with them.

Again she wept for these people when she wrote their stories. As her sadness for others poured out, she stopped crying over her own misery. From the misfortunes of others, she learned to notice and appreciate her own blessings. Every story she wrote touched her life in some way and allowed her to see that though her life’s path had been overgrown with brambles, there were buds along the way waiting to bloom.

By and by the dark clouds in her mind lifted, and smiles easily found their way to her face. “I was so ignorant that I didn’t see the blessings right under my nose,” Huang said. “Nobody has been more blessed than I. Though I need financial support, I have food to eat and a place to live. There are many people in the world who have it much tougher than I do.” Seeing others’ suffering has kindled gratitude and contentment in her.

The big Tzu Chi family abounds with warmth. Huang feels loved, and volunteering has kept her busy, so much so that she has forgotten about the things that used to worry or bother her. The programming on Da Ai TV, the Tzu Chi channel, also nourishes her mind and helps cleanse her of negative thoughts. Needless to say, she has totally forgotten about taking her own life.

Since Huang lives alone, she usually spends a lot of time tending to the mundane tasks of everyday life, such as cooking, housekeeping, and laundering. But she honors deadlines above all else. Everything else takes a backseat when an article is due: Clothes wait to be washed, the house waits to be tidied up, and even her meals are curtailed.

An article is usually due within three days of an event. The first thing that she does after getting home from an interview is to put on her earphones and transcribe what she has recorded. As she transcribes the tape, she also thinks out the structure of the article. As anyone who has done this knows, transcription is not easy, even for an able-bodied person. It is that much more difficult for Huang, writing with her left hand. But she willingly does it and does not deem it hard work.

When that is done, she turns on her computer and writes the article. She cannot use conventional ten-finger touch typing because she does not have the use of her right hand. With her left hand, she uses a single finger to peck at the keyboard. One keystroke after another, she puts what she has seen and heard into written words. Because her right hand and leg keep shaking, making sitting uncomfortable for her, she types standing up. Prolonged keying with the left hand and standing on her left leg can be excruciatingly painful for her, so she has to sit down and rest every ten minutes.

Huang’s right limbs shake out of control, and that makes it hard for her to sit and work. Therefore, she types standing up. The posture tires her, so she needs to rest every ten minutes. An article takes her at least more than one full day to finish. She uses only a desk lamp to provide light, leaving the rest of the room dark to save on electricity.

She plugs along, slowly but surely, until she is satisfied with her article. It takes her more than a full day to transfer her thoughts to a digital file, and it is usually late at night when she is finally finished. But as she lies in bed exhausted, the satisfaction of having completed and submitted the article fills her heart with the joy of fulfillment. She falls asleep, content and happy.

Everyone is a like a sutra from whom we can learn. As Huang records other people’s stories, she enriches her own life and lives out her own sutra the best she can. Many of us are familiar with the expression, “When God closes one door, he opens another.” Instead of weeping behind a closed door, it is important to find that open door and let our life shine through in its own way.

A smile has returned to Huang’s face since she found a family in Tzu Chi. “I’m grateful to the Tzu Chi sisters,” she said. “It’s their companionship that makes me what I am today. I’m a happy person now.”