Saw this on the walk to work (I live and work in the same neighbourhood). These guys are out most mornings. Kicking myself for not having my real camera on hand and having to take these with my phone.
Chinese shadow boxing is actually called 太极拳 (tài jí quán).
More like this here: [Photo Gallery:] Daily tai-chi & morning exercise in Yonghe, Taipei, Taiwan
When we first arrived in China it was early spring, and we quickly discovered it was standard for people to wear three or more pairs of pants. Indoors. I assumed it was because they had to, because they couldn’t afford decent heating or the facilities and infrastructure were just too old. Haha, silly foreigner… that’s “using Western thinking to understand China”! This is China — there’s more to it than that.
I want to switch out this picture for one showing my coworkers in the office, wearing their winter clothes, scarves, everything, next to a heater that’s not on and a window that’s not closed, complaining that it’s cold, while a guy walks by outside with a cloth mask over his mouth and nose because he’s protecting against the cold wind.
To my Western sensibilities, the scene is mildly insane. It’s cold and windy, people! Shut the windows and turn on the heaters that are in every single room, and we won’t have to wear our outside clothes inside! If you’re afraid of cold wind outside, why are you inviting it inside? Why did you deliberately turn our workspace into a near-freezing wind tunnel?
I’m all for creative responses to culture stress, so I’m conducting an informal and surreptitious sociological experiment. On my Chinese coworkers.
Now that winter is officially over but it’s still cold, during most of March at work we play the passive-aggressive window game. They open the windows wide — of course you should open the windows wide on cold and windy days. Parents will complain if they don’t. So we’re all freezing. But when no one’s looking, I walk by and, with numbed fingers, shut the windows. And after a couple classes, someone’s opened them again. So I wait until no one’s looking and shut them again. Just to see what will eventually happen. Will they catch on? Will I get caught in the act? What will they say? It’s exciting, no? :)
I can see not turning the heat on as a practical thing: everyone has to wear several layers just to survive the commute to work and changing would be inconvenient, homes might not be well-heated, heating costs money for the school, and the wiring can’t handle even half the heaters at one time. But none of that explains opening the windows and deliberately creating a draft in every classroom and office.
To someone with no understanding of traditional Chinese medicine, what Chinese often do for the sake of health makes absolutely no sense; it’s maddeningly contradictory. And one of many areas within this health disconnect that we perennially encounter involves temperature and “wind.” For example, “wind” and “cold” are bad. Do not serve a Chinese person a glass of refrigerated water — that’s practically criminally negligent; give them hot water, even (especially) when it’s hot outside. If you drink cold water you’ll get diarrhea, unless it’s winter — then you can eat ice cream outside. But I don’t care if it’s summertime: if you don’t put socks on that baby she’ll get diarrhea!
And do not eat an apple outside on a windy day, unless you want to be guānxīn-ed about your health: “You’ll get ‘wind’ in your ‘stomach’!” Unless you’re provoking your local friends on purpose, like one foreign coworker I had who once faced the wind and opened her mouth wide to deliberately swallow as much wind as she could just to get a reaction from our adult students. But don’t expect a comfortable temperature indoors, even when it’s possible and affordable. Like fearing cold water, they also fear still air. Air must move, or else when we get old, we’ll die, or something. It doesn’t matter if it’s single-digit Celsius outside and windy; they will deliberately turn your school hallways and classrooms into wind tunnels. And then they’ll wear their winter coats and scarves inside and talk about how cold it is. It’s healthier.
If that seems like a deliberately disorganized jumble of anecdotes, that’s because it is. That’s how you first encounter traditional Chinese healthiness when you move over here. You don’t get a systematic introduction to traditional Chinese medicine; you get random comments at meals (“No thanks, my fire’s up”), coworkers who keep turning off the air conditioning in summer (空调病！), and unsolicited advice about not wearing shorts in the spring (you’ll get arthritis when you’re old). Sorting that all out and making sense of it is your job.
People usually don’t do things for no reason. Maybe you don’t agree with their reasons or don’t understand their reasons, or maybe their reasons are objectively bad. But most of the time their reasons make sense, at least according to their own terms. The deliberate early spring wind tunnel even makes some degree of sense to foreigners: it’s flu season, especially in a school, so they want to keep the air indoors fresh by ventilating 通风换气。Anyone who’s crossed the ocean in an airplane shared with sneezing coughing snuffling people should be able to appreciate this.
But health is often one of several huge areas of cultural disconnect between China and its resident laowais, of total misunderstanding and mutual scandalization. How wide is the disconnect? One coworker, after observing our daughter and how we handled her, theorized in all seriousness that the reason foreigners don’t care about their kids’ health as much as Chinese parents is because foreigners can have as many kids as they want. If we mess one or two up, no biggie — we can always have more! (To be fair, the other coworker in the conversation disagreed. Plus, it’s not uncommon for foreigners to basically make the same kind of accusation against Chinese. Remember: we’re mutually scandalizing.)
“Chinese medicine” 中医 as “the general Chinese understanding and approach to health” (rather than meaning “Chinese herbs” 中药 like ginseng or “techniques” like fire-cupping) is near impossible for Westerners to understand. The concepts are extremely difficult to express within our languages and worldview because they are so thoroughly tied to Chinese worldview, philosophy and thought categories. The Web That Has No Weaver, a book that attempts to explain Chinese medicine while appreciating the difficulty, begins with Chinese philosophy, not biology. If you read a description of Chinese medicine that you understand right away, then either you’re Chinese or what you’re reading is not a description of Chinese medicine; the meaning was lost in translation.
P.S. – “ventilating the air” to help combat flu season is the reason our youngest and most cosmopolitan employee gave me. But there’s another reason that’s probably at least as relevant: avoiding drastic changes in temperature. It’s not considered healthy to move from cold to hot or vice versa, to put cold things in your body when you’re warm, etc. People’s body temperature stays more consistent when they bundle up inside rather than making inside warm. This thinking is behind eating ice cream outside in the winter, and behind the story a friend told us yesterday explaining why she has bad cramping every month: when she was around 13 she got hot and sweaty from sports one day and went to take a shower. But the water came out really cold, suddenly dousing and chilling her over-heated body. She was on one of her first periods at the time. And that’s why she now has bad cramping every month.
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.
“…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’:
More about having a foreign baby in China:
More about Chinese medicine:
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 Wind Like You’d Avoid 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 wind as if it were 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: