China’s the kind of place where you can ask a totally innocuous question:

“Hey, what’s that?”

…and get the most bizarre answers, like this one from last week:

“That’s Píxiū (貔貅). Businessmen like Píxiū because it doesn’t have an anus, so it can eat fortune but the fortune can’t ‘exit’.”

“… … ah.” (See Pixiu in Wikipedia.)

It’s easy for foreigners to get used to being surrounded by stuff we can’t name, can’t read, don’t recognize or don’t understand. It becomes so overwhelming that we don’t think to ask or even want to ask. But curiosity in China is worth it. There’s a lot of crazy-to-us stuff in Chinese culture, all around us, just sitting out there in plain sight. Píxiūs aren’t uncommon; these pictures are from the front desk of the gym where we exercise.

All you have to do is ask. Take, for example, the alcoholic drinks pictured below that are often seen at the front check-out counters of restaurants. They’re usually in big glass jars filled with all manner of marinated/preserved-in-alcohol animals like snakes and seahorses and turtles and who knows what else.

Sure, just peering into their interesting-in-a-bad-car-crash-sort-of-way depths is surprising enough for most lǎowàis that we don’t even think to try the labels. I saw these particular jars regularly for three YEARS before I finally tried to read/translate the outside of the container, and…

Red Ginseng Three Penis* Tonic Liquor
红参三鞭补酒
The nourish-kidneys-and-strengthen-male-virility type, Original “Folk Recipe”
滋肾壮阳型 来源《民间方剂》

This isn’t in some scuzzy adult store in a nasty part of town (if it was I probably wouldn’t be blogging it); it’s right up at the checkout counter of a regular neighbourhood family restaurant. Much like the menu of the dog meat restaurant near our old place, which I translated as a student just to get some vocab and ended up with way more than I bargained for.

I’ve encountered too many “No way!” “Way!” moments in China. I don’t know why they so often involve body parts. But I do know that next time I ask, the person could make up a completely bogus, far-flung explanation for whatever it is and I’d totally buy it.

*P.S. — You are undoubtedly wondering, “Which three?” Well, the ingredients aren’t listed on that label. However it turns out that there’s a famous, traditional brand of “three penis liquor” 三鞭酒 that can be found on the shelves of the average neighbourhood supermarket that does list the ingredients. I found this one at the supermarket closest to us, two minutes up the road. (Cost about $2.)

Zhang Yu’s Specialty Three Penis Liquor
张裕特质三鞭酒

The long list of ingredients begins with: “high-quality baijiu 优质白酒, edible alcohol 食用酒精, soft-ified water 软化水, seal penis 海狗鞭, deer penis 鹿鞭, dhole (Asiatic wild dog) penis 广狗鞭….” And, in case you’re also wondering, there’s a very good chance that those are Canadian seals.

P.P.S. – This is begging for a better title. How would you answer this question: “Curiosity + China = ______”?

The difference between bravery and stupidity is not so much seen in the action you take, but in what you allow yourself to realize before you act. It’s amazing what you will be “brave” enough to do if you simply don’t think about what you’re actually doing. It’s actually not hard at all to deliberately not think about what you’re doing because you know that if you do think about it you won’t do it.

That’s how I was able to tolerate a hot soak in a certain crowded 6元 bathhouse the other weekend — a bathhouse that easily had the nastiest water in the history of nasty bathhouse water. And I’m no germaphobe — I’ve eaten cockroaches in Thailand and danced around fresh, green cow patties to wade through a bathing heard of east African longhorns for a swim down a chocolate-milk-coloured river in rural Uganda — but that bathhouse water was thick with floaties, like watery oatmeal. It’s a week later I’m still getting shivers just thinking about it, which, of course, is something I didn’t do at the time.

We nixed the original 12元 bathhouse after discovering it was basically a brothel and moved to this cheaper one, but I’m thinking we have to scratch this one off the list as well. It’s too bad, cause the head 师父 who did my guasha (刮痧) and fire-cupping (拔火罐，拔罐子) was really nice and fun to talk to.

Anyway, this post isn’t actually about how I’m still cringing at the memory of that dead-skin-soupwater even as I write this. It’s about a traditional Chinese health problem called “getting wind” (受风), and what your fire cup hickey dots (印) look like a couple days later if you’ve “got wind” really bad:

When the guys in the bathhouse saw how dark my marks were, they said, “Whoa, you’ve really got wind.” The darker the marks, the more “wind” you have in your body, and having wind in your body is bad. I wish I’d taken a photo that night when they were darker; this photo is from two days later after it’d started to fade.

The “wind” of Chinese medicine isn’t exactly the same as the wind you’re thinking of. You can “get wind” (受风) and “dispel wind” (祛风). (When people talk they mean 祛 but usually say “qù”, so it’s often written “去” because that matches their pronunciation, even though it’s technically not correct.) Fire-cupping (拔火罐，拔罐子) is supposed to help dispel “wind”. Another very common ailment is having too much “fire” in your body (上火). You’re supposed to have some “fire”, but you have to keep it balanced and under control. You can get guasha (刮痧) to lower your body’s “fire” (祛火).

See our Chinese medicine category for other adventures down the mind-bending rabbit hole of traditional Chinese medicine.

Didn’t set out to get punctured today. I successfully avoided acupuncture for three years in China, but I suppose it was just a matter of time before someone stuck me. Here’s how it happened.

I’m waiting outside the gym this morning with a small crowd of people. The worker has forgotten their key, and at this point they’re half an hour late opening up. A guy starts chatting with me to kill time. Turns out he’s a Chinese traditional medicine doctor from Korea. I mention that my back has been really messed up lately and that’s why I’ve skipped my last three workouts. So he grabs my wrist and feels my pulse, as traditional Chinese doctors always do. Then he does the same with my other hand.

Then he starts rummaging around in his gym bag, finally producing a zip-lock bag containing a very fancy flat metal case that looks like the kind of thing many East Asians like to keep their business cards in. I assume he’s going to give me his info so I can visit his clinic. But then he opens the case.

Hey, those aren’t business cards. What is that in there? They’re little packages of… needles? And he’s opening one. Am I gonna let some guy I just met at the gym stick needles in me? Huh, I guess so… After asking which side of my back is sore (left), he grabs my right hand and sticks two needles in my palm, one below my ring finger and one below my thumb. They hurt less than a shot, but the thumb needle gives me a weird feeling for a second, like I can feel the nerve twinge half-way up my forearm. He says my back is sore due to my lungs; apparently my breathing isn’t deep enough or something. (I decide not to bother telling him that shallow breathing is a survival technique practiced by many of us who spend daily time outside in Tianjin.)

He immediately wants to know if my back is still sore. Honesty it’s hard to say; I’d come to the gym that day because my back was feeling almost totally normal anyway after being extremely sore a week ago. I try to give him appreciative, positive feedback without actually lying. Then we stand around chatting for another 20 minutes, with needles in my hand. A Chinese lady sees what’s going on and tries to get him to give her some free treatment, too. It’s been an hour and the gym isn’t open yet. We both have to go. Back down on the first floor he pulls out the needles before we leave the building.

And that’s how I let a nice stranger stick needles in me in China.

I’ve had other, perhaps more exotic, adventures with what for locals are common health care practices. See the links below, or click here to browse all our Chinese medicine posts.

• Tianjin bathhouse guasha: OWW!!!
• Getting guasha’d (刮痧) and octopussed (拔火罐) in a Tianjin bathhouse
• Getting fire cupped in a Tianjin bath house (or) Losing a wrestling match to a giant octopus
• Chinese Doctor Visit

“…she’ll get diarrhea.”

That’s right: diarrhea. :)

(This message brought to you this evening by our friendly Tianjin neighbourhood dumpling ladies and traditional Chinese medicine.)

More about free Chinese advice and ‘compliments’:

• 关心-talk: so offensive it’s funny
• No offensive

More about having a foreign baby in China:

• Foreign Baby in Tianjin Pt. 2 — a rock star in the family
• Diary of a Worm in Chinese! (an English / 汉字 / pīnyīn online read-along)
• Foreign baby in China essentials: FRIENDLY STRANGER FINGER SHIELD
• A Foreign Baby in Tianjin Pt. 1 – is this our future?

More about Chinese medicine:

• Don’t eat that! You’ll get ‘wind’ in your ‘stomach’!
• Fire-Cupping & Guasha for Dummies
• Chinese Medicine: Getting a Clue (Part 1)
• Chinese Doctor Visit

So I unwisely agreed to “translate” an interview with a Chinese doctor for the magazine this month. Translating simple Chinese about normal everyday topics — fine, no problem, especially with dictionary tools and Chinese coworkers on hand. But a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine talking TCM-speak about how to stay healthy in the summer? Not a chance. Half of what he said doesn’t make one lick of sense in English and they weren’t paying me near enough to justify sweating too much over it anyway. But I want to share one section because it’s a great example of how translation involves much more than words and grammar; translation involves culture, and culturally-defined and culture-bound ideas.

No matter how skilled the linguist is (and I’m not claiming to be skilled or a linguist… or a translator, for that matter), some things simply will not make sense in another language; some things cannot be conveyed outside their native cultural-linguistic context. In order to make the translation have any actual meaning that approximates that of the original, you’d have write paragraphs for each sentence explaining the underlying philosophical assumptions and worldview differences. And even the long explanations still don’t make much sense because they’re talking outside of the worldview of the language that they’re written in.

Here’s part of what I translated:

On Summer Nights Avoid the Wind to Avoid the “Arrows”
Cool wind blowing on summer nights and feels really comfortable, making the night not as hard to bear. Thus, a lot of people sleep with the windows open, and even move their beds to the hallway where it’s drafty. A proverb says, “On summer nights avoid the wind to avoid the arrows”; pathogenic wind can cause many kinds of ailments. In the summer the body’s skin pores expand, and after we fall asleep our immune resistance drops. Additionally, in the latter half of the night the wind is colder, and at this time it’s extremely easy for the body to suffer an invasion of pathogenic wind. Getting wind can lead to a heat cold, facial paralysis, joint pain, sciatic nerve pain, shoulder inflammation, stomach pain, diarrhea, etc. Therefore one should enjoy the cool air in limited amounts and put a blanked over one’s abdomen before sleeping. It’s inadvisable to choose to stay in a drafty room, and one can’t just spread a summer sleeping mat and sleep on a cement floor.

Here’s the Chinese:

夏夜避风如避箭
夏天夜里刮着清爽的风，感觉非常舒适，夜晚也变得不那么难熬了。于是不少人都开窗睡觉，还有的把床搬到居室的过道风口处。俗话说“夏夜避风如避箭”，风邪能引起多种疾病。夏季人体皮肤汗孔张开，入睡后抵抗力下降，加之后半夜的风会更凉，人体此时极易遭受风邪的侵袭。受了风邪，可引发热伤风、面瘫、关节痛、坐骨神经痛、肩周炎、腹痛、腹泻等疾病。因此，纳凉应有节有度，睡前应用一条毛巾被盖好腹部，在室内不宜选择过堂风口之处，不能只铺一张凉席就睡在水泥地上。

“Wind” in Chinese medicine, for example, is very different from what we think of when we say wind in English. Wind (English) still counts as “wind” (TCM), but not vice versa. “Pathogenic wind” and capitalizing “Wind” are two attempts I’ve seen to indicate TCM’s Wind in English. That’s how it goes with much of TCM’s terminology. For example, here’s how the book for explaining TCM to Westerns puts it:

Obviously, the Blood of Chinese medical terminology is not the same as what the West calls blood. Although it is sometimes identifiable with the red fluid of biomedicine, its characteristics and functions are not so identifiable.
…
Blood moves primarily through the Blood Vessels, but also through the Meridians. Chinese medicine does not make a clear distinction between Blood Vessels and Meridians. The Chinese rarely concern themselves about precise inner physical locations — the Stomach Qi “goes upward,” or the Blood “circulates,” but it is seldom entirely clear what internal paths they travel or where, precisely, they go. The physical pathway is less important than the function. This tendency not to fix sites for things is contrary to the Western approach, but it is inevitable with Chinese medical theorizing, which emphasizes process over fixed entities.

We just now had a big discussion in the office with my Chinese coworkers trying to figure out how to translate what I’ve rendered “heat cold” (热伤风) — they looked up a bunch of dictionaries and discussed it and came back with nothing (in TCM, the name of the cold depends on how it is caused, so summer colds and winter colds are different). But reading this interview and hearing my coworkers explain how you get “heat colds” makes me realize that there’s a whole lot more to Chinese people’s apparent fear of good air conditioning than just wanting to save a few bucks.

The article assignment was to give foreigners tips from traditional Chinese medical theory on how to be healthy in the summer. How would you present stuff like the above paragraph to foreigners? What other concepts have you found that are really hard to convey in another language?

Other traditional Chinese medicine stuff:

• Chinese Medicine: Getting a Clue
• Don’t eat that! You’ll get ‘wind’ in your ’stomach’!
• Fire-Cupping & Guasha for Dummies
• Q&A with an American doctor who practices TCM
• Chinese Doctor Visit & Geeking out

So I’ve just got off work and I’m about to leave the building for the ten minute walk to the subway. One of my upper level English students sees that I’m planning to eat a pear on the way and she’s immediately concerned.

“You’re going to eat that outside?”

“Of course!”

“But it’s cold and windy! You can’t eat that outside!”

“Why not?” I know exactly what’s coming.

“You’ll get wind in your stomach!” The other students voice their agreement.

I know what she’s talking about because I’ve heard this before. Fear of getting cold “wind” in your “stomach” is considered at least as reasonable as covering your mouth when you cough to avoid spreading germs. But this time, instead of having the same old predictable conversation about how foreigners don’t know anything about getting “wind” in their “stomachs” or our “fire” going up and down, I decide to have fun with it.

“It’s no problem. Foreigners can’t get wind in their stomachs. Only Chinese people can get that disease. Getting wind in your stomach is a special disease only for Chinese people.”

She doesn’t believe me, and gives me an annoyed look to boot, like she’s not sure if I’m making fun of her/China/Chinese medicine or not. And I’m not, mostly; I’m just curious to see what will happen if I appeal to inherent biological differences between foreigners and Chinese (something that’s not uncommon for Chinese people to do in other situations) instead of chalking it up to cultural differences that affect how our respective societies understand health.

When Tianjiners wear face masks (口罩) in public it’s not because of air pollution or swine flu. These are cloth face masks, not medical face masks, and people wear them because it’s cold outside and they don’t want to get “wind” in their “stomachs” (受风 — to receive/suffer wind). I put quotes around those words because in Chinese medical theory they both carry important nuances and added dimensions that don’t correspond exactly with what we normally mean when when we say wind and stomach. (I borrowed this image from a Chinese website. It’s supposedly from Tianjin.)

For more about Chinese medicine:

• Chinese Medicine: Getting a Clue (Part 1)
• Q&A with an American doctor who practices TCM

That’s TCM as in Traditional Chinese Medicine, not transcendental meditation (TM), though they do that, too, here. I’ve been told that many Chinese people assume that Western medicine is better for things like surgery and that Chinese medicine is better for colds and flu and diarrhea. It’s flu season the last couple weeks, lots of people have been sick, and they were passing around the most common and famous packaged Chinese flu medicines in the office. They didn’t taste bad, but do they do anything? I was surprised how clearly they were able to explain things in this little Q&A: Chinese Medicine & Flu: A Q&A With TCM Doctor

TCM-related posts:

• Tianjin bathhouse guasha: OWW!!!
• Fire-Cupping & Guasha for Dummies
• Chinese Medicine: Getting a Clue (Part 1)
• Getting guasha’d (刮痧) and octopussed (拔火罐) in a Tianjin bathhouse
• Getting fire cupped in a Tianjin bath house (or) Losing a wrestling match to a giant octopus

The first time I tried guāshā (刮痧), the traditional Chinese scraping/rubbing therapy for having too much “fire” in your body (which can make you get a cold), a Chinese friend told the shīfu to do it a little lighter than usual (轻一点儿) and it only got uncomfortable at the last two or so strokes on each line. The second time I told the shīfu the same thing and barely felt anything, which kind of seemed like a rip off. This time I’m ready for the real deal so I don’t tell the guy anything.

Instead of using a coin or an animal horn to do the scraping/rubbing he uses a small-size fire cup; it feels like having a magnet on your back that’s attracted to your skin. It also means I’m getting suctioned and scraped/rubbed at the same time. And he does 30 strokes per line — I know because I’m counting… oohhh, am I counting! I’m grinding my teeth by the time he gets to 24 or 25. It hurts the worst on the sides of my lower back (where it’s soft) and on the back of my neck, I guess because there’s less flesh there. But I’m determined, and try to make conversation to distract myself from the pain. The shīfu is a southerner who came to Tianjin from Anhui province in the early 90′s. Ow! Rrrrr… uuugh! The photo is from the morning after.

This bathhouse is a different kind from the first one we tried a few times. That first bathhouse was the lowest-level business/recreation-oriented kind that charge 10-12 kuài to get in. Last night’s bathhouse is a step below that. It was originally built as part of the neighbourhood either in 1980 or just before — one old man peeling off his callouses on the edge of the tub said he’d been going there since 1980. It’s 5-6 kuài to get in. Back then most people used public baths as much out of necessity as for recreation. Indoor plumbing and heating in these 30-year-old neighbourhoods is poor and back then people didn’t so much want to shower at home, especially in the winter. Many still don’t, because even though household gas or electric hot water heaters are now common and more affordable, the government-controlled heating is often virtually useless in these older places. Thankfully this bathhouse is too small for xiǎojiěs; there’s no back room or private rooms to put them in. Plus there’s a women’s side, too; when I entered the lobby a mother and her happily excited 11-year-old daughter were just receiving their locker keys for an after-dinner shower. This is the one (the only one in that area) that Mr. Lu said “doesn’t have any funny business” (没有乱七八糟).

It’s definitely a step down from the first place in terms of facilities. I’m glad I brought my own towel, because otherwise it’d be a public towel that has already been used by several people that evening. Same with the shower shoes. For soap and shampoo you’re also on your own. Signs on the wall overlooking the tubs list what kinds of skin, venereal, and other transmittable diseases are forbidden in the tubs. Next to the signs there’s a picture of puppies sitting on heart pillows, and next to that a 1970′s-looking pin-up drawing of a woman who would be considered too fat by North American pin-up “standards.”

It was definitely great for language practice, and relaxing, but I don’t know if I’ll go back. It was over a half-hour bike ride home straight on into heavy wind in sub-zero temperatures. There’s gotta be a similar place closer to our apartment. Plus, it was pretty dirty. Ideally I’d find a closer and cleaner place for around the same price without xiǎojiěs where I can return multiple times — that way I don’t have to have the same conversations (“What country are you from? blah blah blah…”) every time I go because I’ll see the same people. Maybe that’s a tall order, but it’s worth keeping an eye out, I think.

Other bathhouse & Chinese medicine/therapy posts:

• Dark side of a Tianjin bathhouse
• Fire-Cupping & Guasha for Dummies
• Chinese Medicine: Getting a Clue (Part 1)
• Getting guasha’d (刮痧) and octopussed (拔火罐) in a Tianjin bathhouse
• Getting fire cupped in a Tianjin bath house (or) Losing a wrestling match to a giant octopus
• Shower (洗澡)

A Tianjin bathhouse introduction to two popular traditional Chinese therapies.

I’d wanted to visit a local Tianjin bathhouse ever since getting to peek inside one that was located in some of Tianjin’s doomed hutongs. Watching the Chinese movie Shower gave me a glimpse of the charm and community these places provide in some older Chinese neighbourhoods. Two recent bathhouse trips with friends were the perfect opportunity try out two different forms of popular Chinese therapy: fire-cupping (拔火罐; báhuǒguànr) on the first trip and guāshā (刮痧) on the second.

Fire-cupping — 拔火罐儿 — bá huǒ guànr

It’s not every day that you return home looking like you’ve just lost a wrestling match with a giant octopus, but being pinned on your stomach by a sucker-wielding octopod is about what fire-cupping feels like. In the simplest terms, fire-cupping involves getting a bunch of really big, round, dark hickeys all over your back, or stomach, or wherever you want to get them. It doesn’t really hurt, and it’s good for you – kind of it like a massage, only in reverse.

Octopus Wrestling
After getting dizzy from soaking in the hot bathhouse pools for too long, we shower, dry off, and put on some shorts and shirts provided by the change room attendants. They lead us into a large, dimly lit room containing dozens of booths of two beds each. Some older middle-aged men are sleeping, some are smoking and watching T.V., and one or two others are getting foot massages from pretty young ladies.

A shīfu (师傅) arrives at our booth with a plastic tub full of what look to me like glass candle holders. I take off my shirt and lay down on my stomach. With a large flaming matchstick in one hand, the shīfu begins applying the glass cups to my back by briefly sticking the flame up inside the cup before quickly pressing the rim down onto my back. I can’t feel any heat, but one second of flame is enough to change the air pressure inside the cup and create strong suction against my skin. It takes him less than two minutes to apply them all. He says he’ll be back in a few minutes and leaves me lying there with my bulging skin turning various shades of purple under each of the seventeen glass cups. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s an odd, strong sensation.

Ten minutes later he comes back and begins pulling the cups off one at a time by sticking his finger under the rims to break the suction. They come off with a shklop! and leave seventeen big puffy red welts behind. Before letting me go he throws a blanket over my back and gives me a quick massage. The red dots aren’t sore; it feels like having a very slight sunburn but it’s not uncomfortable to put on a shirt or lean back in a chair. The entire procedure takes less than twenty minutes.

Guasha —刮痧 — guā shā

Despite what it looks like, guāshā doesn’t have too much in common with road rash. It can be a little more painful than fire-cupping, depending on hard or light you ask the shīfu to work, and people’s experiences range from comfortable to somewhat painful. Guāshā might be literally translated “to scrape fever.”

Playing Zebra
It’s our second trip to the Same Fortune Shared Happiness Bathing Garden (同福浴園 – across the road from the Sheraton Hotel on 紫金山路) and two of us are going to try guāshā. When the shīfu tells me and a Chinese friend that it’s our turn, we step out of the pool toward two of the three plastic tables lined up in the space between the hot pools along one wall and the showers along the opposite.

My table has just been vacated by an older middle-aged man who’d received a full-body soap down. The shīfu spreads a large sheet of thin plastic over the table and tells me to lay down on my stomach. I’m a little more nervous about getting guāshā’d than I was about getting fire-cupped because I’d heard guāshā can hurt -– that, and laying around naked on a table in a public place isn’t something I do every weekend.

The shīfu takes my dish-towel-sized Chinese towel (provided by the bathhouse) and wipes down my back before spreading oil on it. He doesn’t need the towel while he’s scraping so he wads it up and drops it on my butt, I guess for convenience. Then he starts repeatedly scraping lines into my skin; each line gets maybe ten or more strokes. I can’t see what he’s using to scrape; there are rounded instruments made for this purpose, sometimes polished buffalo horn, a soup spoon, or even old-style Chinese coins with the square holes in the middle. “Scrape” is actually too strong a verb for what he’s doing because he’s not breaking the skin or even rubbing it raw; there’s no scabbing. Still, glancing over at my friend on the table beside me I can see that it takes less than a minute for angry red lines to start appearing on his back.

It’s not uncomfortable except for the last two or three strokes on each line; those burn a little and I’m glad each time he moves to a new spot and starts a new line. After he’s made five stripes down along the length of my spine and a row of eight stripes along each set of ribs, he gives me a quick soapdown head-to-toe with my now soapy towel. Then he rinses me off with a bucket. The entire procedure only takes ten or fifteen minutes. After evaluating the colour of my guāshā stripes, he decides he’s not impressed with the state of my health and suggests I get fire-cupped as well. That night I return home both striped and dotted.

‘Healthiness’ with Chinese characteristics

Despite what it looks like in the photos, fire-cupping marks aren’t the same thing as a bruise, and they don’t hurt like a bruise. A doctor friend explains the difference:

When you get a bruise it is usually from some type of traumatic impact which has shredded the vessels and allowed blood to leak into the surrounding tissues. The blood can go to different layers of the skin and when it gets near the surface its purple color can be seen. That is why, depending on the injury, you don’t see a bruise till it’s starting to be spread out and taken away by the body a few days later. In contrast Cupping brings the blood up right away to the surface where the body easily breaks it down. If any damage is done to the tissues it is usually surface only, and not deeper. This is actually one of the beneficial effect of Cupping as part of its design is to pull out the stuck blood that may be left in a muscle which is not in a relaxed state (contracted, knotted, stiff, etc.) Its like wicked hickey designed to get the old, stuck blood out of the muscles.

Fire-cupping leaves marks because the suction causes the capillaries (minute blood vessels) to burst under the skin, but unlike a bruise there’s been no blunt trauma done to the tissues or nerve endings. The red discolouration caused by guāshā is also the result of blood from burst capillaries under the skin. In traditional Chinese medicine, moving the blood in this way can be a very good thing; hickeys are healthy.

Part of the idea behind treatments like fire-cuppping and guāshā is that there is a lining or layer in the body, which includes the connective tissues. Qi (something like ‘vital energy,’ but not exactly), blood, and other important substances need to flow and circulate through this layer so that deeper parts of the body, like internal organs, are properly connected with the rest of the body. Proper flow of these things allows the different parts of the body to live in proper relationship and balance with one another and for organs receive the nutrients they need and the immune system to be invigorated. Health problems develop when blood becomes congested and stagnant in this layer because this hinders the circulation of qi, blood, and other fluids and nutrients, thereby preventing the different areas of the body from properly relating to one another. This throws the body out of balance and can result in a myriad of health problems. Guāshā and fire-cupping pull this stagnant blood up closer to the surface, allowing qi, blood, fluids, and nutrients to begin circulating properly throughout the tissues and allowing the stagnant blood to be properly reabsorbed.

Regardless of how poorly I understand the basics of traditional Chinese healthiness, an evening at the neighbourhood bathhouse after dinner with a little fire-cupping or guāshā is a fun and relaxing way to spend time with a few good friends. I’ll be back for more!

(Haha – I really hope I didn’t totally mess up the Chinese medicine section, since this is one of the published pieces. Too late now! :D )

Other Chinese bathhouse and Chinese medicine-related posts:

• Tianjin bathhouse guasha: OWW!!!
• Chinese Medicine: Getting a Clue (Part 1)
• Getting guasha’d (刮痧) and octopussed (拔火罐) in a Tianjin bathhouse
• Getting fire cupped in a Tianjin bath house (or) Losing a wrestling match to a giant octopus
• Shower (洗澡)

After three years of:

• Our Chinese friends blaming everything from sore throats to acne on their bodies’ ‘fire’ being too hot,
• Discovering that they’re afraid to drink chilled water,
• Walking past acupuncture and reflexology charts in storefronts,
• Coming across medicine for apparently common ailments that I’d never heard of (like “receiving wind” and getting an upset stomach from going out in the cold?)
• Noticing how therapies like fire-cupping are normal and popular but being unable to imagine how giant hickeys could possibly be good for you,
• etc.,

…I’ve decided I want a basic understanding of Chinese medicine so I can at least have a clue about where our Chinese friends are coming from.

They all believe that traditional Chinese medicine and treatment works more or less, though they sometimes don’t believe in the theories behind it. One Mainlander I know in Vancouver says the explanations are nonsense, but that years of observation have led to some effective treatments. A friend in Taipei let us observe his visit to a traditional Chinese doctor and gave us a full debriefing afterward; he uses both Western and Chinese medicine.

I was running some questions past some medical friends while writing a “Fire-Cupping & Guasha for Dummies” article, and one of them put me on to Ted Kaptchuk’s The Web That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine. This is supposedly the classic explain-Chinese-medicine-to-Westerners book, and I’ve started reading it.

I’m a couple chapters in and it’s definitely illuminating, but it’s not what I’d call an easy read. It’s not poorly written or too academic, but the author is trying to communicate concepts that are difficult to express outside of Chinese languages and worldview, especially using English within a Western worldview. Depending on the presentation, Chinese medical theory in English can either sound like total nonsense, or it can seem too easily understood and just look like a trendy, exotic branch of Western medicine. Neither does justice to Chinese medicine; they both miss the spirit of it.

For Westerners to “get” Chinese medicine, we have to think outside of our thought categories. But that’s not easy, because anything outside our thought categories naturally sounds like nonsense.

Our background in intercultural studies makes us sensitive to the cross-cultural dynamic where ideas can easily become “lost in translation,” and Kaptchuk seems to appreciate that as well. He starts his 500-plus page introduction to Chinese medicine by discussing basic Chinese philosophy and general worldview fundamentals.

Chinese and Western medicine are different at their respective roots, and highlighting points of contrast is helpful, as is explaining how Western medicine would interpret what Chinese medicine does in a given situation. Kaptchuk starts this process early on in Weaver:

To Western medicine, understanding an illness means uncovering a distinct entity that is separate from the patient’s being; to Chinese medicine, understanding means perceiving the relationships among all the patient’s signs and symptoms in the context of his or her life [p.6].

A Chinese physician examining the same patient must discern a pattern of disharmony made up of the entire accumulation of symptoms and signs.*

*From a biomedical [Western] standpoint, the Chinese physician is assessing the patient’s specific and general physiological and psychological response to a disease entity [p.7].

I suspect that a decent understanding of Chinese medicine — for a layman, at least — is something “better caught than taught;” you absorb the meaning and understanding implicitly over time through exposure to the ideas and practices, rather than only by reading a well-categorized explicit explanation of what everything means and how everything is supposed to work. Chinese medical theory seems by its very nature to resist the kind of definition and clarity that Western medicine considers essential to the entire medical enterprise.

Particular body parts and fluids like kidneys or blood can’t even be translated directly across. Kaptchuk capitalizes words like “Blood” to indicate when he’s writing of them in the distinct Chinese medical sense. For example (p.53):

Obviously, the Blood of Chinese medical terminology is not the same as what the West calls blood. Although it is sometimes identifiable with the red fluid of biomedicine, its characteristics and functions are not so identifiable.
…
Blood moves primarily through the Blood Vessels, but also through the Meridians. Chinese medicine does not make a clear distinction between Blood Vessels and Meridians. The Chinese rarely concern themselves about precise inner physical locations — the Stomach Qi “goes upward,” or the Blood “circulates,” but it is seldom entirely clear what internal paths they travel or where, precisely, they go. The physical pathway is less important than the function. This tendency not to fix sites for things is contrary to the Western approach, but it is inevitable with Chinese medical theorizing, which emphasizes process over fixed entities.

As a Westerner I hear ‘Chinese medicine‘ and I’m automatically subconsciously expecting, assuming, and looking for all kinds of things, like chemicals and cells and body parts and discrete, well-defined categories. But Chinese medicine apparently doesn’t care so much about that stuff, at least not in the ways that Western medicine does. Maybe rather than hear ‘Chinese medicine‘ I ought to think ‘Chinese medicine.’ This is less about medicine and medical stuff in any sense that I’m familiar with, and more about Chinese culture and worldview. I’ll see how my impressions change as I continue reading.

Related Posts:

• Fire-Cupping & Guasha for Dummies
• Getting guasha’d (刮痧) and octopussed (拔火罐) in a Tianjin bathhouse
• Getting fire cupped in a Tianjin bath house (or) Losing a wrestling match to a giant octopus
• Chinese Doctor Visit & Geeking out