Western vs Traditional Medicine

By Leslie Hsu Oh

Photo credit: http://arowantree.blogspot.com

“Yew, Mom,” I said, peering into the pot.  “I think I see a cockroach, some snake skin...”

“Les, please don’t look at it.  You’re not helping.”

We had driven from Southern California to San Francisco to see a Chinese doctor who, after examining X-rays of Mā Ma’s liver cancer, prescribed a soup made up of thirty-two ingredients. One of the largest Chinese pharmacists in Los Angeles prepared three bags for her to boil and drink each day. The house smelled of bitter licorice tinged with herbs for a month before Mā Ma decided she couldn’t drink a drop more.

Another Chinese remedy required boiling a long, weed-like grass with a blue duck egg. A friend who was cured of liver cancer gave us the name of an old school teacher who lived about an hour away. I yanked long strands of grass from this man’s yard, filling several plastic bags for Mā Ma. The teacher looked like those Kung Fu masters in old Chinese movies. He tugged on his long stringy beard while he gave us instructions on how to plant them in our yard.

Once a month, we drove to a duck farm where I combed rows of eggs for any that reflected blue. The owner of the farm was a kind man with a smile that seemed to disappear on the sides of his face and a bushy beard which shook when he laughed. He wouldn’t take Mā Ma’s money for the eggs, but accepted boxes of fruit and flowers. Then, one day, we started bringing fruit and flowers to a veteran’s hospital, where he lay on a bed looking weaker and smaller every time we visited. We stopped going to the farm after Mā Ma received a phone call. She cried all night long.

If it were up to Mā Ma, she would’ve tried traditional medicine only. She had her limits. She wouldn’t pay more than a certain amount of money on non-Western treatments. Drinking urine was out of the question. But her doctors and insurance company had limits that Mā Ma believed ended her life. The insurance company would not pay for anything but Western biomedical treatments. Bà Ba and I forced her to choose one Western treatment, even though we had watched my eighteen-year-old brother die from the same disease after aggressive Western treatments that included a liver transplant.  Finally, she selected chemo embolism, but still had doubts. She asked her doctor, “When you inject the alcohol around the tumor, won’t you be pulling out cancer cells into my abdomen through the needle track?”

Her doctor answered with annoyance, “Ninety nine percent I guarantee you that it won’t. Try to be a patient, not a doctor.”

In the end, she was right. About a year after her diagnosis, she died with numerous cancer cells clustered like grapes along her abdominal cavity.

Since Mā Ma’s death in 1994, I’ve dedicated much of my life to making it easier for folks to access traditional medicines. On the Navajo Reservation, a plan I developed in graduate school with Chinle Comprehensive Health Care Facility blossomed into an Office of Native Medicine where patients can see traditional healers and receive ceremonies performed in a hogan and a Native healing room. Alaska Natives can receive free services at Southcentral Foundation’s Traditional Healing Clinic. For non-Natives, most traditional healing services still remain out-of-pocket.

Living in Alaska allowed me frequent lunch dates, home visits, and medicinal plant harvesting trips with traditional healers such as the renowned Rita Blumenstein, whom I recently featured in a cover story in First Alaskans Magazine and offered our readers a sneak peak in “Native Traditions of Giving” and “Life Off the Grid.”

Rita Blumenstein talks to a plant before she harvests it.
Photo credit: Leslie Hsu Oh

On Mother’s Day in 2011, my kids and I drove Blumenstein to a secret spot where she harvests petrushki. My daughter Kyra, who was five, and my son Ethan, who was two, peppered Blumenstein with questions on the long drive. She blew them kisses and told me exactly what I needed to hear, that I am a good mother.

With sprinkles of water from gray skies cooling my cheeks, I followed in Blumenstein’s footsteps along the shore. Over a decade of being part of her life, I was still in awe that this internationally revered woman makes time in her packed schedule for me.

Tightening her bright blue hood around her face, she broke out into a mischievous smile and beckoned me close. She stretched out both hands, leaned down towards a round low shrub, and closed her eyes. Her lips moved and I wished I could have heard what she said.

She pulled out a plastic bag from her backpack and said to me, “Take just a little from each.”

Then, she snapped off several stems and whispered to the plant, “Thank you.” She brushed the leaflets against my nose. I inhaled a cilantro-like fragrance. “Petrushki!” she hollered happily and hurried off to the next shrub with the speed of a child collecting candy that scattered from a piñata.

As we harvested, Blumenstein taught me about some of the other plants growing in the area. She pointed out the ones to avoid. She kept saying to me, “I just love you so much,” filling the emptiness that my mother’s death had left within.

Ethan says "thank you" to a petrushki leaf.
Photo credit: Leslie Hsu Oh

When my kids tired of digging in the sand, they each drifted towards me on their own time. I repeated what Blumenstein taught me. To respect the plants. Talk to them. Say thank you. Leave some for other animals and people.

Kyra approached each shrub with all her masculine energy. I warned her not to step on the plants, to be gentle. Blumenstein watched in the distance as I instructed Kyra not to grab fistfuls of petrushki but just a stem at a time.

“Like this Mommee?” she asked, waving three stems bristling with leaflets in my face. Her cheeks flushed pink from the past hour on the beach.

“That’s better. Now, what do you do?” I asked.

Kyra grabbed the plastic bag out of my hands and stuffed some leaflets roughly in. Then, she punctuated two pats on each shrub with “Thank You.”

“Ethan, your turn,” she grabbed her brother’s arm. Both Blumenstein and I watched proudly as she repeated my instructions.

Before we left the beach, I asked both kids to give Blumenstein what they harvested. Blumenstein told us that she couldn’t think of a better Mother’s Day gift.

Now living in the Washington, D.C. area, I worry that my children are being deprived of the myriad of ways that traditional medicine can heal spiritually, emotionally, physically, and mentally. For those of you who live in big cities, I’d love to hear how you access traditional medicine?

Love Food

By Leslie Hsu Oh

Lulled to sleep in the backseat of the car, I woke as Bà Ba swerved across five freeway lanes and exited on one of Arcadia's busiest streets. Chinese characters in neon lights blazed on a number of establishments populating strip malls. Bà Ba pulled into one of these where fans crowded in front of Din Tai Fung Dumpling House as if in anticipation of a rock concert.

Bà Ba’s ninety-five-year-old mother grumbled in the front seat. She had refused to ride in a wheelchair, even though her bound feet forced her to teeter precariously. I offered her my arm and she patted it, saying in Chinese that Bà Ba must love me very much to endure this hassle. She nodded at Bà Ba's wife and my half-brother, who both disappeared into the crowd, and whispered that Bà Ba rarely came here.

The wait for a table could be nearly two hours long. Nonetheless, this annual holiday tradition of eating at Din Tai Fung was perhaps one of the few things we agreed upon.

I lived in Alaska, while he lived in Southern California. We rarely spoke on the phone and I visited him only once a year, usually at Christmas. Mainly, I disagreed with the way Bà Ba grieved. After Mā Ma and Jon-Jon died, he immediately sold our house. He donated the cherry wood bedroom set that Mā Ma promised I would inherit. He replaced Jon-Jon as soon as he could with another son.

The more I wanted to preserve everything, hoarding boxes and boxes of Mā Ma  and Jon-Jon's belongings, the more he seemed to erase them from his life, gifting Mā Ma 's paintings to close friends, asking me to hold onto their wedding album, and mailing all of Jon-Jon’s toys to me. Sometimes I hated him for moving on, when I could not.

Bà Ba's wife pushed her way through a mass of bodies and returned with a ticket and a menu snapped to a clipboard. We browsed through 79 different kinds of dumplings and noodle soups printed in Chinese and English. The star of the lineup was Juicy Pork/Crab Dumplings, which failed to adequately capture the elegance of their Chinese name: Shea Fun Xiao Long Bao, Crab Powder Little Dragon Bun.

About the size of a dollar coin at its base, a translucent wonton-like skin kneaded into a twist at the top contained a bite-sized morsel of pork swimming in a pool of soup. A dash of crab powder to tease your senses. Served on a spread of lettuce in a bamboo basket, it arrived steaming at the table beside a dish containing strings of ginger soaked in black vinegar. Although other restaurants on occasion served this dish, Din Tai Fung (the only branch to open in the United States) in our opinion, made the best Shea Fun Xiao Long Bao. Perhaps it was because you could see the dumplings being made with metronomic precision. In tall white chef hats, one man spun a rolling pin, tossing rounded flour medallions to another, who twisted the dough, and laid them gently like jewels within bamboo baskets.

The cooks were so quick that I never saw them stuff each dumpling. I suppose that made the dumplings taste even better, especially after Bà Ba taught me the art of savoring them. He said the first challenge in enjoying Shea Fun Xiao Long Bao is to pick it up gently with a pair of chopsticks without poking holes in its paper-thin skin. Place a few strands of vinegar-soaked ginger on top, perhaps to cool it down or enhance the flavor of the soup sliding like silk down your throat. Then, patience is required. You must know exactly when to pop the dumpling in your mouth. The soup has to be at the right temperature; otherwise, like a dragon's fiery breath it could sear tongue and throat, stripping away a complexity of salt, sweet, and sour flavors rippling across taste buds.

***

Photo credit: http://travelerfolio.com/yue-fei-hangzhou/

Bà Ba and I pulled apart a pair of deep-fried You Tiaos, a deep fried Chinese breadstick that is served only on weekends and sells out by eleven a.m. in select Shanghainese restaurants. He folded his You Tiao into a Sao Bien, a flaky sesame seed sprinkled pita. I dipped mine directly into soy sauce.

We listened to the crunch of You Tiaos between our teeth. We welcomed Chinese chatter from neighboring tables because there was nothing easy to discuss this Saturday morning. My grandma was not sitting at her usual place beside Bà Ba. She had died several days earlier at ninety-six. 

Sipping some tea and smoothing my long black hair in place, I swooshed the grease down my throat and began, “How are you doing?”

Bà Ba seemed to age within the wool red and black checkered shirt Mā Ma bought before I was born.

“When they dig my mom's grave, I think that it might be a good thing if they cover up Mā Ma and Jon-Jon’s tombstones.” Bà Ba had slimmed down over the years, maybe for his young wife, whom he’d started dating not more than a few months after we buried Mā Ma. I could see the hard lines of his bones.

“I think that would be disrespectful. We should make sure that the gravediggers don't do that. For some of our relatives, it will be the first time they have ever visited Mā Ma and Jon-Jon's resting place."

Bà Ba finished his Sao Bien You Tiao sandwich before explaining to me something that I never understood and still don’t. Bà Ba had asked me years ago not to tell his son, my half brother, about Mā Ma and Jon-Jon. Now, he admitted that this had always been his wife’s request. He felt that obscuring Mā Ma and Jon-Jon’s tombstones might not be such a bad idea, for her sake.

Photo credit: http://thehealthygourmet.wordpress.com

I balanced my You Tiao on my plate, deliberately wiped my mouth, folded the napkin neatly on my lap, and told him calmly that last year his son asked me whether we shared the same mother, and I couldn’t lie.

Bà Ba swore at me. And I swore back. Our meal ended in a torrent of words we will try hard to forget. I had always thought You Tiaos were comfort food, meant to be shared with a loved one. Recently, I discovered that they originated from a legend about a corrupt official and his wife, and that some Chinese folks believe You Tiaos represent a tool in expressing contempt.

Over the years, I’m learning there’s an art to understanding Bà Ba. I saw a man who grieved in a way that insulted me. In refusing to tell my half-brother about Mā Ma and Jon-Jon, I felt he preferred if I disappeared too. But maybe, our grief stemmed from the same source. One person found it too painful to see them as part of his life. The other found it equally agonizing not to see them as part of her life.

Adapted from "Love Food,” originally published in Rosebud Magazine, Spring 2009, and soon to appear in the Tao of Parenthood anthology.