Back To Article Brief
Back To Article List
Opening and Closing the Gates of Heaven
Author: Martha Burr
Miracles are in short supply these days, though we seek them daily. Sometimes we find them, or possibly they find us. Seven years ago a beautiful young girl lay dying in a Vancouver hospital bed, victim of a rare and aggressive form of lymphoma. After a devastating course of chemotherapy failed to eradicate the disease, doctors told her that she had only two weeks to live. Her only hope was an extremely painful bone marrow transplant with a success rate of five per cent. Faced with death, many people would desperately cling to any offer of hope, but with courage rare in one so young, Helen Liang resolved to spend her final days out of the hospital, at home, trying to find a kind of peace with her family. Her father, the famous martial arts master Liang Shou-yu, refused to let her give up hope and embarked with her on a course of qigong, tai chi, meditation and alternative Chinese and Western medicine. Two weeks passed. She was still alive. Another two weeks, and then another. Week after week became five years. Whether to attribute the miracle to Kuan Yin, the goddess of mercy, to qigong, to bitter Chinese herbs, to a family’s unwavering love, or Helen’s own will to heal her cancer, the answer is still a mystery. But seeing Helen today, performing her favorite martial art form, Liu He Ba Fa (Water Style), is poetry of the soul in motion, a miracle in action, and a dancing light beaming steadily out of the darkness that nearly extinguished her life nearly seven years ago.
Successive Rings of Fire
It's not like Helen or her family had never known hardship. It was there from the beginning. She was born in a very remote village in China's Sichuan province in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, where her father had been forced to relocate after graduating from University for "re-education." Liang Shou-Yu was a famous wushu teacher, highly educated, and one of China's top coaches. Students of this poor Sichuan region were lucky. But luck hangs in the balance. As many people's fate spun out years later from that turbulent era, Helen's may have also been entwined with the politics that tore through wushu as through everything else. She says, "I was born in that village. I didn't even go to the hospital; somebody helped my mom with the delivery. In 1994 when my dad took a demonstration team back to China, he took me to that village to see the actual room I was born in. It was old and dark. People were poor then. I also have a younger sister, but my parents sent her to my grandparents in Chongqing city, because it was so poor and very difficult to take care of two children. They wanted the best for both of us. So in Chongqing she had a much better living standard, and that's why she's a lot healthier too. I was weaker because the facilities and the food. But they tried to provide me with the best they could."
Essentially Helen became the only child once her sister was gone, but, as she recalls of her early years, "Later on we moved to another town. I was with a whole bunch of other wushu sisters and brothers so it was never really like I was alone. That's when I started wushu, when I was about four years old, with my dad. He trained me every day. I remember how I would start a form each morning and I had to do it ten times. Every time you had to do it with a lot of power; my dad was very serious. You'd get really tired after three or four times, and you just don't want to do it, and he'd say, no – ten times. He'd come over and hug me and kiss me and then go – ok, keep on going! So I'd have to finish my form ten times every day."
Helen's youthful wushu training continued with her father until she was eight. Then he had the opportunity to go to Canada as a wushu coach. Seeing a better future for his family, he made the hard journey, leaving his family and students in 1980. He wouldn't be able to return for them until four years later.
Meanwhile, he told Helen she must keep on training. She had an extended wushu family to help her. "My dad left a lot of students," she says, "and he really had been a father figure to them, so they'd hang out at our place almost every day. My brothers and sisters -- and that's how I actually addressed them -- would come every day and train me, just like my dad would. Ten times every day. And of course I'd do the basics, as well. They would stay at my house, and my mom would cook for them. It was like a big family."
"Every day we would walk from my house to the training place, about forty minutes of walking. At that time there was no transportation, no car, you had to walk forty or fifty minutes to the place you train, and then walk back. But actually that was the fun part."
My dad would write back to us often, saying to my mom, 'Make sure Helen is training, and that she remembers her forms.' He put so much emphasis on it. I really missed my dad, but I was more mature. I would write to him, telling him don't worry about us, don't worry about Mom, I can take care of my mom. I would feel that my mom was lonely. And write to my dad that I was being a good girl, and not giving my mom trouble."
Life went on this way for several years. Helen trained, and wrote letters to him in Canada, which seemed very far away. When she was twelve she went away to the Sichuan Provincial Wushu school, and trained there for a year. Recalling her trip to the school, she notes, "I had to travel from that small town, and basically it's two days of boat ride. Then you get to Chongqing city, and then you had to take a train from Chongqing to Chengdu. At that time it was the capital of Sichuan. So I did all that on my own. People on the boat asked me, 'Where are you going?' I'd tell them, I'm going to the wushu school. 'Oh, wushu, do you know somebody named Liang Shou-yu?' I'd say yes I do, he's my dad. He's very well known in Sichuan province, especially around the Yangzte river. They'd say, 'Oh, you're in trouble. Your dad is in North America, and he's not going to come back, and he's not coming to get you guys.' At that time there are all these stories about how martial artists go to North America, and they get killed, fighting with people, stories like that! It was so frightening to hear. Or they'd say he'll find another wife and never return to you. So every time I'd hear that I'd say, no no, he's coming back, but I felt angry."
Helen trained at the Sichuan Wushu school for about a year, and then word came from her father that he was coming to take them to Canada. Finally the long wait, and her fears, were coming to an end. Still, even this happy event was touched by sadness as Helen's grandfather died just before the move. "My dad was very close to my grandfather," Helen says. "My grandfather practiced wushu too, and then he was a businessman who traveled to Hong Kong and Shanghai. He was very successful. But in his later years China didn't turn out to be the way he wanted it to be, because of a lot of things going on there, and it was quite sad. He always had high expectations for my dad. And my dad was coming back, after being established in North America, to take him out, but then he passed away."
Then it was time to move to Vancouver. "It was very overwhelming," Helen remembers, "My first time on an airplane. In my small town people hardly ever see any airplanes. Everything was very new to me. But I was young and easy to adapt to a different world."
At first Helen only studied English, in a class with students from many other countries. She recalls not being afraid, just trying to speak, and how her teacher liked her. Soon she went on into high school and became a normal Canadian school girl. Well, except for being one of the top wushu students in the country, still under the tutelage of her father who was now a professor teaching wushu at the University of British Columbia.
"I was still training quite a bit," says Helen. "I think in China going to the professional school was a good experience, but I do feel I got the most from my dad. My passion about wushu is from him. He influences you in a way that you love this art. He also emphasizes the culture, and the history of wushu, of China. He's concerned about your body's health, and doesn't push you, he's very careful, even with his students in China. He's taking care of you as a person. That's something very important. My dad would get us to read the Chinese martial arts novels, so that we don't forget Chinese, that's also important to him. We were so into those novels, every day. And that's partly how we kept up our Chinese language."
With her dad as her teacher Helen made dramatic improvements in her wushu. When she was seventeen she began teaching kids in her dad's school, and then later adults. "My life," she recalls, laughingly, "was really just school and wushu. And my parents were quite strict about us going out. So even though I was here in the West I guess I had a very different teenage life from other kids, who go out and hang out at parties and clubs. No, none of those for me. Just training, and then come home. A lot of it’s because they’re worried about us. So it was very strict. But they love us very much, and we're very close as a family."
Staying close to wushu and her family, Helen went to the University of British Columbia and studied Economics there. Her parents relaxed the rules a bit, but Helen still spent many hours in the library and hanging out with her friends. The year she graduated her father took a North American wushu team back to China to demonstrate and tour in 15 cities. It's the only time she's been back to China since her immigration.
Helen Liang To the Edge of Darkness
Upon graduation Helen got a job at a Vancouver bank. She was up for a promotion when all of a sudden she got sick. "It started with pulling wisdom teeth out and I got a bad infection. Even now they don't know what is the cause of lymphoma. I just remember I had a very high fever for nearly a month. I went to the hospital and they were trying to find out what it was; they thought it was some kind of infection. I stayed in the hospital for so long, getting different kinds of antibiotics. But nothing happened. Lumps started coming out, and it was very painful. It was awful. Once they were taking a biopsy, and I was there by myself early in the morning. Doctors came, and they took this huge needle, didn't give me any anesthetic, but drilled into me, and I fainted. My parents came while I was unconscious, for I don't know how long.'
The doctors did all kinds of tests. "One day my doctor came," Helen recalls, "he was also our family doctor and had always taken care of me. He referred us to this oncologist; I think he was already suspecting something. I remember one morning I was with my dad, just the two of us, and this doctor came in. 'I have something to tell you,' he said. 'I'm afraid Helen's got cancer.'"
"To me at that time, cancer was the end of the world. I was so young, and I'd been so healthy, and just graduated and had a whole life ahead of me, so I just felt I couldn't accept it. How could it be cancer? My dad was very quiet, he didn't say anything. The doctor continued, we have to treat her right away with chemotherapy. I didn't know what chemo was, I didn't have a clue. And then he left. "
"You always see it on TV movies, somebody gets cancer, and then they die, that sort of thing. And so right away, I was lying there, looking at my dad, he was holding my hand, and I was having so much pain at the time, and thinking cancer…I just felt like crying, but I didn't cry. I didn't know what my feelings were. My dad said, 'Well you have to be strong.' I asked, what happens when I die? Where would I be going? Where are you guys going to be? And my dad said, 'Just make sure that if you see any kind of light' – he’s into Buddhist and Taoist meditation – 'if you see light you have to follow the light, you can’t be afraid of it, you have to go there.' I was trying to imagine how that would be like."
"Then he had to go, he had a class that night. My mom came to stay with me. I was lying there that whole night and I didn't want to fall asleep because I was afraid in the darkness that I wasn’t going to wake up again. Later on I heard that when my dad got to class -- he's very strong, never cries -- but later on students told me that he could barely talk, and he told me he was crying in the car by himself."
Helen started an aggressive chemo treatment, which was very difficult and harsh for her small size and frail body to take. "I had long hair," she says, "and of course they told me that I’d lose my hair. Each new thing was something that you just can't imagine happening. One day in the shower a whole handful of hair suddenly came out. It took me so long but I couldn't get out of the shower. My dad was very worried, because I was very weak, and a lot of times I needed their help just to take a shower. I came out and I was crying. "
"My parents just felt so bad, and they tried not to show it in front of me. They gave me a lot of care, and my friends and their friends and a lot of doctors did too." Despite the debilitating effects of chemo, Helen also practiced qigong and meditation.
The chemotherapy went on for about 3 months, but after the final doses the cancer came back again a few days later. Helen started to get lumps once more, and developed a very high fever. "I was hospitalized again," says Helen. "They tried other things, but then they said to me, you only have a few weeks to live. The only thing we can do is try a bone marrow transplant. But the success rate of that is less than five percent. And we have to find the right marrow."
"Then they took me to a wing of the hospital and tried to show me what the transplant would be like. They showed me some of the people in there, and that was the most horrible thing that I remember. I saw all kinds of tubes running into their bodies, as I was passing by their rooms, and I just didn't feel it was a life any more."
The doctors told Helen they could not give her any other treatment for her cancer. This was the last hope they could offer. She had been in the hospital for three weeks with a raging fever, which no medicine was able to cure. "That afternoon," she says, "we had to make a decision on whether to go for a bone marrow transplant or not. I remember that day. All my family was there for this decision, because it was an urgent issue. And nobody could make that decision. I had to make the decision. So eventually I was thinking about the pros and cons. I think my Dad was leaning towards not doing it and seeking alternative medicine, but he couldn’t really make the decision for me. I was just sitting there and I was thinking, I’ve looked at those people and is that a life that I really want? And the chances were less than five percent. Do I want my last f ...