EPISODE 49: NEEDLES, HERBS & TRADITIONAL CHINESE MEDICINE WHILE GROWING UP
SHOW NOTES
In this week’s episodes, we explore the topic of traditional Chinese medicine, including conversations around acupuncture, herbalism, biracial identity, and even code switching. We look at how much Asian culture that’s passed down generation after generation inform each family’s preference in medical treatment, and how to bridge the gap between east and west, where we begin to realize each individual – children especially – have the right to protect their own bodies, to express personal choices, and to have a say in the kind of treatment they’d want to receive.
We also cover:
Erin Wilkins’ upcoming interview and her Herb Folk Medicine practice in Petaluma, CA
The Very Complicated Chinese Family Tree video to learn about how to address different relatives by name in Mandarin
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Episode Highlights:
01:46 The medical culture in our family tree
03:45 A taste of gross medicines
05:26. Not having a personal choice in medicine
08:17 Family inclination to acupuncture
10:00 Towards the traditional ways
Judy Tsuei 0:06
Welcome to the F*ck Saving Face podcast. I'm your host, Judy Tsuei, and together we'll explore mental and emotional health for Asian Americans, especially breaking through any taboo topics. Life may not always be pretty, but it is indeed beautiful. Let's make your story beautiful today.
Judy Tsuei 0:24
Hello, hello! This week we are exploring a topic that I truly love. It's going to be about traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture, herbalism, and also code switching, which is not something that I talk about in today's essay, but it will be something that I talk about on Wednesday when I interview Erin Wilkins.
Judy Tsuei 0:43
Erin’s work is rooted in traditional Chinese medicine and Japanese energetic medicine. And she really connected to her own ancestral healing traditions in order to empower others to restore health and prevent illness. So we'll talk to her on Wednesday. She's super fascinating. The second that I met her I fell in love with her and absolutely planned to go visit her in Petaluma, California.
Judy Tsuei 1:03
Also, if you haven't yet rated or subscribe to the podcast, I highly encourage you to do so you know how those algorithms work, when you hit like or when you rate something, then it helps other people to find it. And if you believe in this content, which I truly do, then I hope that you will share it with someone in your life or support me by going to rate and review the podcast on your favorite listening platform.
Judy Tsuei 1:25
Also, if you're simply scrolling around on your phone, if you want to send me a message Hello[at]fcksavingface[dot]com or go to the website fcksavingface[dot]com, then you can stay up to date. There are some really great things that I'm planning for everyone who's listening. So I'm excited to be able to share that. Without further ado, let's get to the story.
How my traditional Chinese family approached acupuncture & medicine
Judy Tsuei 1:46
I always thought my aunts and uncles were scary. My aunts in particular were diminutive in size, but they were fierce and they're shouting and their facial features which always look like there was this perpetual scowl pointed in my direction. One of my aunt's Da Gu Gu is my father's eldest sister, she's the second in the family behind the chosen son.
Judy Tsuei 2:06
And we actually were never able to call uncle by his manner name because I actually never learned it. His name was just uncle, the eldest of five. It's as though he were ultra special because he got a PhD and he was living in Chappaqua, New York, this far away sounding place from where we were in California. All of his other siblings lived on the west coast.
Judy Tsuei 2:26
My father is the fourth of five children. And the second son, my grandmother, my father's mother came to live with us by both duty and choice. It made the most sense, our family had the youngest children. My father's two older sisters had children who are now young adults, and they didn't need Puo Puo the way that we did.
Judy Tsuei 2:45
Incidentally, Puo Puo is also not what we were supposed to call her because by the detail Chinese lineage of monikers based on how they're related to your family. She was my father's mother, my Nai Nai. But everyone else came from the female side of the family that we live with in California. So all of my cousins called her Puo Puo. And we just joined too.
Judy Tsuei 3:02
Also, there was a joke that nobody really wanted to call her Nai Nai because that's another word for both milk and breasts. And so it was a little bit awkward to think about calling her that.
Judy Tsuei 3:13
By the way, if you want to know how crazy detailed and complicated familial naming in Mandarin can go, I'll link to an episode in the show notes. That was the most hilarious video that I had seen about describing who is called what in what order of your family.
Judy Tsuei 3:29
Da Gu Gu decided to become an acupuncturist. While I was in elementary school, her house would constantly be brewing what seemed to be this muddy, witchy concoction that smelled like Earth and bitterness and rot. When it became a thick tea. That's when you knew it was ready, and that's when you had to drink it.
Not like Mary Poppins — take your gross medicine
Judy Tsuei 3:45
I had these white splotches on my dark tan skin when I was an early teen. They weren't really that noticeable, but you could probably see it more because I was so tan and the splotches were white, but she said that there was something wrong with my digestion. She said that I had worms that I had to eat what look like harden colored triangular, curly mounds of whipped cream merengues kind of that they were not at all delicious and actually tasted horrible.
Judy Tsuei 4:08
We were never allowed to have treats growing up. Sweets was not a thing in our household except for the cake that we got on our birthdays. And even then it was very Chinese style dessert where the topping was like a cool whip light with fresh fruit and sponge cake. I hated that my mother would serve it the next day for breakfast as though she thought we would want it when throughout the year we didn't have anything sweet. So that always tasted icky and too much especially to start the day.
Judy Tsuei 4:33
So these worm removing merengues look like French desserts, and I thought it tasted all the worst because you assumed it would taste sweet like candy. But it tasted bitter and chalky and I had to eat multiple bits of these a day until the quote unquote worms went away and my complexion improved. Thinking that I had worms in my body was terrifying. But there was no adult to help me address or alleviate my fears other than eat the strength.
Judy Tsuei 5:01
I also remember once when I was in junior high, and Da Gu Gu’s middle son had gone to medical school. So he was getting praised for his choice and career. And my father, my sister and I were starting to suffer a little bit of a fever, a little bit of discomfort. So of course, we asked the person who we thought would know the answer to what we were going through.
Are you allowed to have a personal choice when it comes to your body?
Judy Tsuei 5:26
He gave us some suggestions, but nothing in particular. And then we went to Kaiser, in which case, the doctor told us that we had hand foot and mouth disease, which is pretty common. Once you have a child and you realize how often they spread certain germs. But this cousin of mine, when I told him what we had, he said, Do you know why you have that? It's because you're dirty. So this mix of guilt and shame over things that I seemingly had no control over made medicine, a very terrifying field to me.
Judy Tsuei 5:56
As my aunt began to practice with needles, my mother would drop my sister and I off at her house, we'd be then expected to become human pin cushions. My aunt's children, these three older cousins would corner us and get us to stay still so that she could stick a needle into the top of our head. And then my sister and I would go sit on the pale peach couch covered in plastic, and sit there and wait with needles in our head staring out into the open.
Judy Tsuei 6:21
Worse was when my mother would sometimes take us to the clinic where my aunt was being mentored. The shop was dark, the rooms were windowless, the glass jars on the counters filled with what look like bark and twigs. My younger sister and brother had breathing problems. So once they also came to this clinic, and the acupuncturist came after them and stuck needles up each of their nostrils, they screamed, they resisted, they cried, and all I could think was, thank God that doesn't have to be me.
Judy Tsuei 6:48
They had more needles inserted into the backs of their hands, and they sat in folded chairs, sullen and sad with wet faces until the 20 minute timer went off. I remember my aunt used to love to laugh at incidents like this, where it seemed that someone one of us children was miserable. I still remember that there's a Polaroid photo of my sister and my brother staring at the camera showing the needles in the palms of their hands on the crown of their head and up their noses.
Judy Tsuei 7:17
If we were lucky, we were done in 20 minutes and could leave. If we weren't the acupuncturist would come back in, adjust the needles by twisting them left and right, causing my siblings to wince. And then we'd have to wait another 20 minutes.
Judy Tsuei 7:31
At home, I'd open the cabinet in the kitchen to look for a snack and see a flattened dried lizard skewered by a stick stuck on a shelf. When I asked what that was, my grandmother said, I need to boil that into some Chinese medicine.
Judy Tsuei 7:44
As unwelcoming as these experiences were, I think that what was really difficult was just feeling pricked and pinned without a choice without being given a voice to stand up for ourselves and our bodies. Now with conscious parenting, it's become abundantly clear that it's vital to help your children establish healthy boundaries, to use their voices, to not have to hug someone when they don't want to in order to understand that they have a right to the privacy of their own bodies. But back then your own body your own space. That wasn't even a thought on the radar.
Family inclination to acupuncture
Judy Tsuei 8:17
My mother began to suffer arthritis in her 60s to the point that she couldn't get out of bed. She saw every Western doctor who only wanted to prescribe her more medication that she seemingly would never be able to stop taking. But then she went to see a new acupuncturist in Rowland Heights. This man who placed three fingers on the side of your wrist and could diagnose you completely. He had big bushy eyebrows, and he didn't say anything as his fingertips were there moving them ever so slightly forward and back up and down until he looked up, open his eyes and told you exactly what the treatment plan was going to be.
Judy Tsuei 8:49
She ended up getting up out of bed after a while. After a few of these sessions. She started dancing again. I couldn't believe the transformation. She told me to see the same acupuncturist when I would come back for visits from college and after I moved home. Once I took my Latin friend Augustine who I met in eating disorder therapy, he was going through massive back pain that was virtually debilitating.
Judy Tsuei 9:10
He lay down on the table and the acupuncturist worked on him after I translated into Mandarin what he was suffering from. to his amazement, Augustine felt exponentially better by the time that we left as the acupuncturist was working on him. He had a student biocide, the two of them heard me cough. The acupuncturist looked at me, then told the student in Mandarin to go get a tool for him. He came back gave one either so he said, What bus Oh son, so I reach out your hand.
Judy Tsuei 9:39
Okay, and then with a flick of his wrist quicker that I could even see he used a scalpel like tool to slice the side of my thumb. Oh, I shouted. He pressed around the wound, squeezing a small amount of blood out. Now, try swallowing he said I did. My sore throat had vanished and it didn't come back.
Leaning back into acupuncture and TCM traditions
Judy Tsuei 10:00
When I became a yoga teacher, I was reintroduced to traditional Chinese medicine. I happened to start dating a man who was an acupuncturist. And during our breakup, the only thing I wanted to keep was his copy of traditional Chinese medicine by Lani Jarrett.
Judy Tsuei 10:12
And it was the spiritual art of the science that I had no idea about the ways in which you treat each patient as though they are a world unto themselves. The ways that we resemble the nature around us with peaks and valleys and entire ecosystems, the way the practitioner inevitably becomes part of the treatment.
Judy Tsuei 10:31
I loved learning that prior to being born, the first thing that develops within any of us is the heart. The head is the last. So for the first almost year of our existence on this planet, we are powered by our hearts, yet when we are born, it switches and our minds take over. For the rest of our lives. We are seeking to remember that the head is the servant to the heart, and not the other way around.
Judy Tsuei 10:57
I hope that in this week's interview with Erin Wilkins, an Asian American herbalist and Japanese style acupuncturist, that you'll glean a bit of this magic of Eastern and Western medicine, I believe that the combination of the two can lead to remarkable healing. I've experienced it for myself for everything from hormonal challenges to severe back and shoulder pain. There is beauty in the subtlety of medicine. There is beauty when you bridge things together. I hope you have an opportunity to explore different sciences and find what works for you.
Wilder 11:29
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Judy Tsuei 11:49
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