Chinese medicine, by prescription

Initially, it was supposed to be for a concoction to treat asthma the Chinese way, and I was just going along with a friend who was more knowledgable and eager about the plan than I was. But according to the TC doc, you can't treat specific diseases in Chinese medicine. You have to treat the whole system. It's a matter of qi. I was roped in and, it just so happens, my qi that day was 19 plant products and a scorpion low.

I've actually finished taking that first prescription, so today I went back along with three friends to get my prescription adjusted to my new health state. Here's how seeing a Chinese doctor works, at least in this case.

The doctor's office, on the corner of a busy intersection, is straight inside. The door remains open, covered only by the plastic fringes so common here, as long as the weather is decent. There's a partial partition which shields it from the rest of the area, but it's not a room to itself.

The whole consultation, besides a brief glance at the tongue, consists of sitting across a desk from the doctor as he 'listens' to your wrists. He puts three fingers along the right wrist first, applying light pressure in different combinations for a couple of minutes. During this, he was explaining what the points are, how they apply to different body parts and circulation pathways, but it was tough to follow. In any case, according to my friends, he was astonishingly right. You have a weak stomach, he'd say. Do you have a pain in your lower back, or perhaps related to your kidneys? Some of it I think could be easily guessed by chance, and I'm a skeptic. But, some of it was remarkable.

The left wrist follows, in the same way, with the tongue glanced worked in along the way.


The doctor never asked for symptoms, only asked for details or clarification once he came up with them himself. Since none of us are actually that sick, and coming for general health instead, I don't know what treatment for very acute issues would be like.

Next, the prescription is thought over as it is written out:
My prescription, as illegible as doctors back home, so far as I can tell.
This is then taken to the cashier, in the other, larger room of the establishment, who calculates how much is owed. The consultation with the doctor costs 5 yuan (70 cents), and the medicine preparation (including putting the product into individual packets) costs the same. The rest is the cost of the materials, which varies, in our experience between 75 and 150 yuan ($11-21). So it's sort of expensive, but it's a lot of herbs. I can't imagine what it would go for back home.

The prescription is passed to other employees, who seem extremely knowledgable. They gather the various herbs from a set of drawers behind the main counter in the room, weighing by sliding a marked metal rod until it balances at the length representing the weight desired. These are piled neatly along reusable sheets of pastic-y paper as you chat with the gatherer and try to figure out what's what and what it's for.








There are roots, seeds, berries, leaves and if you're lucky, a bit of scorpion or seahorse. None of us got the seahorse, but we did have a look at it up close, upon request:


I had scorpion in my first concoction, though I didn't realize what it was until I got back and looked up the character. It's sort of a funny story. When the doc was writing the presctiption I had asked if they were all plants, and he had chuckled and said almost but not all, for I had 'xie' in mine. Now, I know the word 'xie,' and it means crab. So I put my hands up like pincers to confirm I had the meaning right and he nodded happily. When they put a pile of it on my sheet, it wasn't really identifiable as anything, most of it was powdered or at least crumbly, though you could make out small pieces that looked very faintly spiky or shell-like. After looking up the character, I learned my mistake - crab is 'xie' pronounced with a fourth tone, starting high-pitched and sharply going done, while scorpion is 'xie' pronounced with first tone, at a very even, relatvely high pitch (oh, and second tone can mean shoe and third tone write, by the way).

But back to the pharmacy. Once the ingredients have been double-checked, they're bagged up in a black plastic sack and you're given a ticket, sort of like a coat check, which matches the ticket attached to your bag of goods. Coming back in a few hours, the piles will have been processed by this machine, which whistles and whirs and looks like cinnamon toast crunch should pop out:


But out comes a brown liquid that is distributed and sealed into 15 packets, to be drank hot three times a day for five days half an hour after meals.


Does it work?? After my first treatment phase, I'm still not sure. I feel fine - good, even, and perhaps with extra energy. It's hard to say, just yet. I'm thinking I'll go once more, a 15 day cure for my qi.

Space

Being gone for over a month gave me new perspective on my life here. It's funny how taking time away from something can actually make it clearer, make you more perceptive. You get lost in day to day routine, in day to day exposure to the exact same things. You forget that what you eat is spicy, because you don't sweat anymore. You forget that it's unnatural for you to agressively yell out your lunch order and that you can never get to the front of the crowd if you're still trying to wait in a nonexistent line.

I got an abrupt picture of my progress. Coming back on the exact route I took over a half year ago when I first moved to Lanzhou, I could feel my cluelessness reawaken like deja-vu. But this time I could suppress it - I knew what I was doing. I knew how to check in at the airport, get to the University, how to find food and groceries, how to talk to my roommate and classmates. Returning to Lanzhou after having been away for a while I was startled to realize that I did actually live there. Last semester I struggled with making my life coherent in my mind; it felt like a bunch of pieces, made up of things I did in disparate places with very different intentions, almost like I was a new person each place I went. And it doesn't help that all the people who don't know me, no matter how long I live here, will look upon me as a visitor. But as I welcomed the newcomers, recommended places to eat and buy clothes, shared stories from the holidays, and picked up my old routines, I got a bigger picture of the life built here. I don't know everything, by far - the city holds many unexplored corners and I'm still constanty learning new secrets from friends and strangers. But I live here, I know here. I can see when things change. I can make plans for weeks ahead and I can talk about last fall. This isn't travel, this is life.

I can see my Chinese improvements a little clearer too, and since that's a big reason I'm here, that really is big. I was a little scratchy at first, having not spoken much at all back home, but it came back swiftly and smoothly, again in stark comparison with my first arrival in Lanzhou. Even writing characters flowed more fluidly than I remembered, easier and more natural.

The weather changed immensely since I left. In January I was wearing long johns and using an electric blanket; in March I was back on the tennis courts and sleeping in shorts. Construction projects were finished (a new cafeteria has opened right next to my class building!), and new ones were begun (the pavement has been destroyed between where I live and the nearest gate to the street, with scraps piled 10 feet high. this segment had also been of interest to me because it previously was broken or chipped in many places such that you could see evidence of at least 5 layers of different cement or tiling patterns. Now they've all been removed by workers sledgehammering them to bits).

Having that gap in space and time was nice - I discovered that I live in Lanzhou and that I speak Chinese, even if both in a rather strange, abnormal way. Things aren't perfect, and after a few weeks some of that shock has turned back to the view of the road ahead, which is still steeply uphill. Maybe we need to take vacations and weekends more seriously.

One Child

Talking about brothers and sisters with Chinese peers is not always a comfortable topic. I avoid asking directly if my friends have siblings, though I am happy to talk about mine when asked, and it can lead to a very interesting conversation. Often, my counterparts make a comment like, ‘we are all only children, you know.’ They don’t seem bitter about this, mostly objective, or even a little proud. This is a unique policy, evidence of the prominence/dominance of the Chinese (there so many Chinese that if uncurbed they’d probably take over the world). And, being among those who did get the chance to be born, they feel very lucky.

I know that a few of my friends do have siblings (though it’s sometimes hard to be sure because people often refer to cousins as brothers or sisters, and sometimes even childhood friends). Last week, a guy I met on the tennis court from Shaanxi province, where he said his parents were ‘peasants,’ admitted to 5 siblings, topping mine. What is the actual population policy in China, and why does everyone claim that all are only children when it’s not true??

I reread an article I remembered seeing in China Daily, which I’d gotten in Beijing on my way to Lanzhou a couple weeks ago, about a decision to leave the one-child policy unchanged in the foreseeable future. It mostly quoted reasons of stability and ‘it’s working,’ and that changes would create more problems than they would solve (though admitting issues of gender imbalance and an aging society were problems). It gave the current birth rate as 1.8 children/woman (a strict one-child policy would be 1 child/woman, or less). Contrary to what seems to be the popular notion of the world (including China itself, it seems to me) that everyone in China is limited to having one child, only 36 percent of the population is strictly affected by this law. These are mostly people who live in big cities. Then, 53% of the population, living in more rural areas of most provinces, can have a second child if the first is a girl. That leaves about eleven percent of the population unaffected by the law, mostly minority groups, according to this article. I checked the figures with a few sources, which all more or less agreed, though most wouldn’t quote such concrete figures as this article. Additional children can be had so long as fees are paid. This kind of population policy was first implemented in 1979.

Interesting. This must affect population dynamics quite a lot – some sectors, sorted by various factors, will be increasing faster than others. Also, it creates rural/urban and ethnic divides about whether you have siblings or not. I’m not sure of the reason why some of my friends have siblings - some may be because older siblings were born before 1979, at least one has a half brother (no idea what the law says on that) and another definitely comes from a very rural area.