Miya Rodolfo-Sioson, the only survivor of a murderous rampage at the University of Iowa in 1991, remembers seeing the soaring blue tapestry during the three months she spent at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.
Hanging in the main lobby, based on the Book of Job, it was a rallying banner from Marc Chagall, a proclamation that people in challenging circumstances can find their way in the world, pull out what is best in them, build and move on to successes they never dreamed of before.
Rodolfo-Sioson doesn’t talk in such terms. Nor is she particularly upbeat. But in the 16 months since a bullet cut through her mouth and throat and lodged in her spinal cord, one second of random violence that left her a quadriplegic, probably for life, she has kept pressing forward, not given up.
Now she is planning to buy a van and ride with friends from Iowa City to El Salvador, a 2,800-mile journey, four days each way, maybe in May.
“I didn’t think I’d be able to go to Central America again,” she says during an interview in the white clapboard house next to a Christian Science Church, a half-dozen blocks from campus, where she lives with round-the-clock attendants who serve as her arms and legs.
Just before 4 p.m. on Nov. 1, 1991, Rodolfo-Sioson heard pops, looked up from her desk where she was working as a receptionist in the university’s Office of Academic Affairs and saw a student, about 10 feet away, point a .38-caliber revolver at her face.
The student was Gang Lu, a doctoral graduate in physics who, in venting his rage over an academic slight, tracked down and killed four of his mentors-physics professors Christoph Goertz, Robert Smith and Dwight Nicholson, and a university vice president, Anne Cleary-and rival student Linhua Shan. Moments after he maimed Rodolfo-Sioson, he shot himself in the head.
Now, Rodolfo-Sioson lives in a world of machines. She sips and puffs through a straw-like device to start, stop and turn her motorized wheelchair. On her bureau drawers sits a black box that recognizes words or phrases, turns on lamps, a TV set, a stereo system, an alarm clock and a dozen other appliances.
To replace her old computer system, which couldn’t handle all the demands she placed on it, she bought a Macintosh IIsi, with more capacity and a voice navigator to perform commands. She uses a metal wand that she holds in her mouth to tap keys, instead of pushing them down, as she works on letters, classwork-and her cause.
That is the university’s Central American Solidarity Committee. Before she was shot, Rodolfo-Sioson, with her long brown hair swinging and a smile people remembered, was well-known in Iowa City for her work in distributing fliers, organizing rallies, selling buttons and running Solidarity meetings. She is still on the committee’s three-person organizing group.
Her overriding goal, she says, is to continue to work in the interests of victims of human-rights abuses, notably in Central America, an interest she began in 1988 when she went to study Spanish in Guatemala. “To me,” she says, “it’s so outrageous what’s going on in Guatemala and El Salvador. I’m from the Philippines. I’ve lived abroad. I’m sensitive to Third World problems. There are issues of justice you have to do something about.”
This spring she hopes to lead a group to El Salvador to meet with activists and make a videotape documentary on women’s-development initiatives, particularly centers devoted to health care, child care and literacy.
Rodolfo-Sioson has no doubt she’ll get there, for two weeks, if lawyers can settle who’s going to pay for the vehicle she needs. It’s a Chrysler van, with its floor lowered, a ramp into the side door and the front passenger seat removed, leaving a space for her wheelchair. There’s a legal tussle going on now over exactly what is covered by the insurance held by Manpower Temporary Services, her employer on the day she was shot.
Reliving the horror
She talks of that day in a voice that is matter-of-fact, quiet, flat, a little bewildered.
“I was really busy, proofreading,” she begins. The shot was not loud. The bullet hit the lower left side of her jaw, knocking out three teeth. It lodged in her spine, at the fourth cervical vertebra, shutting off motor and sensory functions below her shoulders.
“I was conscious through everything, except when they operated on me. I fell to the floor right after I was shot. It happened really fast. One of the other secretaries was holding my head. The paramedics put me on a stretcher. They had to stick something down my nose to keep the air passage open. I vaguely remember being in the ambulance, right after I was shot. At the hospital, they kept asking me to spell my name. Everything in my mouth swelled up. I was turning blue. The doctors did an emergency tracheotomy.”
No one, she recalls, ever told her she would be paralyzed, but she knew.
At the university hospitals, where she spent five weeks, “it was hard not to be depressed,” she says. “I was really exhausted. I had respiratory failure. I was sleeping hardly at all. I was incredibly bored. I couldn’t hold a book.”
Hooked to a respirator, unable to speak, her head held firm in a brace from which she still has scars, she suffered the loss of spirit common to many victims of sudden catastrophe. At the rehab center in Chicago, the depression continued, “but I talked it out with my counselor; it helped,” she says.
What also “helped me live through my darkest hours,” she says, was an outpouring of support, in the form of cards, letters, gifts and $240,000 in donations sent to the Miya Rodolfo-Sioson Assistance Fund, which is still open, at the Iowa State Bank and Trust Co., P.O. Box 1700, Iowa City, Iowa 52240.
The mail also brought a letter of apology, written in Chinese, from Huimin Lu, a sister of Lu.’s
“She said she’d like to meet with me someday,” Rodolfo-Sioson says. “I don’t blame her. It wasn’t her fault.”
Nor is she angry and bitter at Lu.
“If he was alive, I would probably be,” she says. “But he’s dead, so I have no one to direct my anger against.” If Lu had lived, she says, “I’d ask him, `Why did you shoot me?’ “
The other side of caregiving
These days, she says, “I need 24-hour-a-day help. That implies a lot of tension, simply from having people around all the time. I don’t have any privacy. The personal-care attendants are my hands and feet. But they feel like I consider them machines. One of our issues is that we have to treat each other like human beings, not just giving orders all the time.”
Rodolfo-Siason worked in Iowa City as a personal caregiver before she was shot. Two of her clients had spinal cord injuries. She says that when the parents of her last disabled client were repeatedly late with her pay, she quit-and took the temporary job with Manpower.
“I’m demanding,” she admits. “When I was a caregiver, I didn’t do as much as I ask for now.” Her helpers include longtime friends and her brother, Renato, who has taken time off from his doctoral studies at the University of California at Berkeley to be with her.
She is taking one university class this semester, on contemporary Spain. “After I finish my second bachelor of arts, which should be in December, I might do a master’s in Third World development,” she says. “It depends how I define what I can or cannot do. I might become a consultant, or perhaps make a career out of Solidarity work.”
Her landlady, who lives next door, had already made the house where she lives accessible for an aging relative who eventually will live there. She put in ramps, lowered bathroom and kitchen counters and turned a glassed-in porch area into a bedroom that Rodolfo-Sioson now uses. Wide French doors allow easy access to the living room where Rodolfo-Sioson keeps her computer.
But fitting back into the community hasn’t been so easy. “I don’t go out much,” she says. “It’s a hassle. Until I get my van, I have to schedule rides. Also, too many people recognize me. It’s hard to be anonymous.”
No anger-but
Several times a week, a physical therapist arrives to stretch her arms and legs. The process takes an hour. She feels nothing. “You lose all physical pleasure when something like this happens,” she told the Des Moines Register. “I’m not just talking about sex, but sensations, touch. I can’t feel it when someone holds my hand. “
Last Thanksgiving, a year after the shootings, NBC’s “Today Show” sent a camera crew to Iowa City. “Miya is an inspiration,” observed Hunter Rawlings, the university’s president, “because she seems so remarkably free from anger from this incident, so pointed toward the rest of her life.”
That’s not exactly it.
“It’s true, I never really felt that much anger,” Rodolfo-Sioson says, “but one of my counselors suggested a reason. Maybe it was because the people around me were so angry. My mom is still pretty bitter. My brothers too. Everybody asks the question, `Why was it me?’ There is no answer.”
