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

On our second-to-last night in Tianjin before an extended stay in Canada, two friends and I went back to the Same Fortune Bathing Garden (同福浴園) to get dizzy in the hot tub and guāshā‘d (刮痧). We ended up getting fire cupped again, too.

Last time we tried the fire suction cups, so this time we thought we’d do guāshā, which is another common Chinese treatment for I’m not sure exactly what… something about your body’s inner fire being too hot or there being too much cold wind in your body. Anyway, for 10 kuai we figured hey why not.

For a description of the bathhouse see the octopus wrestling/fire cupping post. Here I’ll skip straight to the guāshā.

There are three plastic tables in between the hot tubs along one wall and the showers along the opposite wall. That’s where five minutes earlier some older middle-aged guys were getting massaged and soaped down. Me and a Chinese friend come straight out of the hot tub and lay down on two tables, which first get covered in a fresh piece of plastic. The attendant takes my dish towel-sized Chinese towel and wipes down my back before spreading oil on it. Then he starts repeatedly scraping lines into my skin; each line gets maybe ten or more strokes. He doesn’t need the towel while he’s scraping, so he just folds it up and drops it on my butt, which I guess is just convenient.

It doesn’t start to hurt until the last one or two scrapes on each spot. I never saw what he used to scrape with. After he’s made stripes down the length of my spine and rows of stripes across each side of my back, he without warning gives me a quick soap down with the now soapy towel (once down the left side head to toe, once down the right side, and then right up the middle… could have done without that!). Then he rinses me off with a bucket. It only takes ten or fifteen minutes.

While they were guāshā-ing the two of us, the guy suggested we both go get fire cupping (拔火罐儿) since our inner fires were too hot (or something like that). So after a shower to cool down, the three of us all went and got fire cupped. It was like last time, only he used twenty cups this time and stuck them everywhere from the bottom of my neck to the top of my butt. This video is really bad, but you can see his big matchstick and at 0:45 you can hear the suction cups squeaking:

All this happened after a dinner with friends at a superb and inexpensive Sichuan restaurant. Not bad for a second-to-last night in Tianjin (at least for a few months). The hot tub and the just-been-massaged feeling you get after the fire cupping makes you feel really nice and relaxed. The next day it feels like you have a slight sunburn.

PS - added some more photos to Jessica’s birthday karaoke post!

I’ve wanted to spend an evening at a local bath house ever since getting a peek inside one in Tianjin’s doomed hutongs. Watching the movie Shower made we want to go even more. Tonight we finally got around to it, and the “Same Fortune Bathing Garden” (同福浴園) didn’t disappoint! It’s not every day that you return home feeling like you’ve just lost a wrestling match to a giant octopus.

There are three public bathhouses in our area that I know of: the two neighbourhood bath houses and one full-on for-profit business. Everyone, and here “everyone” means Mr. Lu the bike repairmen and Mr Chang the sidewalk barber and their friends, said they don’t go to the 5 kuài ($0.75) neighbourhood ones because they’re too dirty. They all recommended the one that’s a step up from the poor-apartment-plumbing-compensation neighbourhood bathhouses. It’s bigger and costs 4 kuài more. So me and two friends (one American and one local) took their advice and went to the 10 kuài ($1.50) one after dinner tonight.

Tianjin’s Same Fortune Bathing Garden (同福浴園): the Good, the Bad, and the I-Can’t-Believe-I-Just-Saw-That

The three of us met for guōtiēr (锅贴儿; pot stickers) before heading to the “Same Fortune Bathing Garden,” which was next door to the restaurant. We exchanged our shoes for locker keys and flip flops. Paying 12 kuài ($1.75) meant we got a new towel that we could keep; 10 kuài would get you a public towel that you would have to leave behind. We stripped down, stowed our stuff, and walked in our flip flops into the bath area.

The bathing area
There were showers and a bathroom along one wall (each shower had a plastic stand with public soap bars and pump shampoo), three massage tables in the middle, and two pools along the other wall. Each pool was the size of a large public hot tub in North America. One pool was warm, and the other really hot. A sign on the wall listed all the different services you could have: different kinds of massages with different kinds of lotions (using Chinese medicine, green tea, etc.), fire cupping (see below), toothpaste (who doesn’t love brushing their teeth in the shower?), and stuff like that. The most expensive massage used some kind of Chinese medicinal stuff and cost 40 kuài ($5.85). There were maybe six or seven customers in the bath area, and three attendants in briefs manned the massage tables, which were kept pretty busy. Seemed the most popular thing tonight was to get slathered head-to-toes in some sort of soapy-looking lotion. I was surprised — though after almost two years in Tianjin I probably shouldn’t be — at how the masseuses soaped their patrons everywhere. This was no sissy drape-a-towel-over-your-mid-section kind of soap down.

The bath house crowd
The bath house patrons were all middle-aged and up, and true to Tianjin form, they were happy to chat and were a lot of fun. Some said they go there every weekend, others said once a month. Some of them knew the staff and other patrons by name. This is one of my favourite aspects of Tianjin: people love to chat. You can sit naked on the side of a tub with people you’ve never met before and have a grand old conversation all evening long if you want. And in every group there’s always a couple of real characters to who love to joke around and have fun. We decided we definitely want to go back to this place.

I’m including this next paragraph only because it was a notable part of the experience. In addition to the “xiǎo jies” in another section of the bath house, there was another aspect of this public bath that I wasn’t particularly impressed with. There is a very handy squatty potty right next to the showers, but guys standing in the middle area where the massage tables were didn’t seem to feel the need to use it, as if taking the four seconds to walk over to it weren’t worth the effort. I suppose since we’re all wearing flip flops it doesn’t matter? Also, exfoliation is a popular aspect of going to public baths. The side of the tub has a pumice stone for people to use, and if you look in the water you can easily see that it gets a lot of use. The water doesn’t have any chemicals in it, at least not any that I could smell. We noticed all this when we first got in, but just instantly put it out of our minds for the rest of the evening and had a great time.

Getting a little sketchy…
Once we were dizzy from the heat (and still bloated from all the guōtiēr), we took showers, dried off (big towels provided), and put on some boxer shorts and a shirt (also provided). Then we walked out of the bath area into another section of the bath house. It was a large, very dimly lit room with booths of two beds each, all facing two big TVs on the front wall that played Chinese soap operas. Maybe 20 or 30 beds total. Middle aged men were chatting, smoking, or getting foot massages from young pretty girls. The second floor was rows of private rooms that ringed the main floor, like in a hotel. Hanging greenery obscured the view from the main floor. When Mr Lu and his buddies were discussing this bath house, they mentioned that there were xiǎo jies (小姐; “little miss” or “little sister,” also a euphemism for prostitutes).

Fire Cupping — 拔火罐儿 — bá huǒ guànr
Imagine losing a wrestling match to a giant octopus who pins you on your stomach for 15 minutes. That’s the best way I can describe what it feels like to bá huǒ guànr (拔火罐儿) — get fire cupping done to you. A guy lights a match under a class bulb and then sticks in on your skin. The heat creates really strong suction and it stays stuck to you until he pulls it off with a big sucking noise 10 minutes later. I’m not totally sure what it’s all supposed to do for you, other than give you a bunch of really big hickeys, but it’s a really common East Asian health treatment. It’s not uncommon to see people with red marks showing above the back of their collar, especially in the gym. It cost 10 kuài ($1.50) to have it done.

I waited on one bed and my Chinese friend waited on the other. Rob, the American, came in from the bathing area just as an older guy brought a plastic tub full of glass bulbs and a lighter. I laid down on my stomach and he stuck seventeen of them to my back, each time lighting the lighter inside right before he pressed the rim of the bulb down onto my skin. It wasn’t painful, but the suction was really strong. Once they were all on he put a heavy blanket over top. Ten minutes later he removed the blanket and pull the cups off one by one, leaving seventeen big puffy red welts behind.

The swelling has mostly gone down now (about three hours later), and some of them feel like a slight bruise. They’re still really red; don’t know how long that will last. Jessica’s on the way home from the night out a some friends’, so I’ll get to show her in a few minutes!

[PS - It snowed in Tianjin tonight!! So instead of showing Jessica my new hickeys when she got in, we went right back out for a little romantic midnight walk through the snow. See how much fun Tianjin is??]

Related Posts:

• Tianjin bathhouse guasha: OWW!!!
• Getting guasha’d (刮痧) and octopussed (拔火罐) in a Tianjin bathhouse
• Fire-Cupping & Guasha for Dummies
• Chinese Medicine: Getting a Clue (Part 1)

When Jessica was sick a while back, I went to the vegetable market and asked the lady who sells tea what Jessica should drink for her cough. She gave me this:

It’s more interesting than drinking water, and it looks cool, too. The little brown nut-looking thing turns into the big see-through brown blob in the cup. The top photo is one cup’s worth of stuff, and how much of each thing you should put together.

In My Country and My People, 林语堂 (Lín Yǔtáng) contrasts Chinese and Western thinking this way: Westerners are more inclined to logic, reason, the scientific method, and analysis; the Chinese are more inclined to intuition, reasonableness, and common sense. Here he gives a historical example of what happens when you apply an intuitive approach to, say, human biology and comparative religion.

…the logic of common sense can only be applied to human affairs and actions; it cannot be applied to the solution of the riddles of the universe. One can use reasonableness to settle a dispute but not to locate the relative positions of the heart and liver or determine the function of the pancreatic juice. Hence in divining nature’s mysteries and the secrets of the human body, the Chinese have to resort largely to intuition. Strangely enough they have intuitively felt the heart to be on the right and the liver to be on the left side of the human chest. An erudite Chinese scholar, whose voluminous Notebooks are widely read, came across a copy of Human Anatomy translated by the Jesuits Jacobus Rho, James Terrence, and Nicolaus Longobardi, and finding that in the book the heart is placed on the left and the liver on the right, decided that Westerners have different internal organs from the Chinese, and deduced therefrom the important conclusion that since their internal organs are different, therefore their religion must also be different — this deduction is in itself a perfect example of intuitive reasoning — and hence only Chinese whose internal organs are imperfect could possibly become Christian converts. The erudite scholar slyly remarked that if the Jesuits only knew this fact they would not be interested in preaching Christianity in China and in making converts of half-normal beings.

Such assertions are made in perfect seriousness and in fact are typical of Chinese “intuition” in the realms of natural science and human physiology. One begins to believe there is something after all in the scientific method … He could have at least felt the palpitation of his heart by his own hand, but evidently the Chinese scholar never descended to manual labour.

Thus free from the stupid drudgery in the use of his eye and his hands, and having a naive faith in the power of his “intuition,” the Chinese scholar goes about explaining the mysteries of the human body and the universe to his own satisfaction.

[from pages 90-91 in my 2002 edition.]

We’ve kicked off our research practicum and anthropology readings, and that means a lot of cultural study. It’s one thing to read about East Asian worldview and thought process, but being able to read it and see it in action at the same time makes for an infinitely richer learning experience. The people and this place are starting – ever so slowly – to make sense. It’s such a blessing that our practicum supervisor is willing to invite us in to areas of the culture like this.

Observing Traditional Chinese Medicine
As part of our research practicum we have weekly debriefing interviews with our on-site supervisor to discuss our readings, research, and experiences. Tuesday he had an appointment scheduled with a traditional Chinese doctor and suggested that we come to observe the proceedings. We really appreciate him inviting us to something like this; aside from doctor visits being personal, he knows that Westerners typically look down on this kind of thing. It was also his suggestion to debrief over a hot-pot lunch afterward. That’s my style of education!

First Impressions

Walking in off the sidewalk, the smell of the medicine was the most immediately noticeable thing. It wasn’t bad at all, but it is distinct. We walked past the counter where they mix the various herbs and ingredients to a waiting area. The walls and doors were wood-paneled with a few calligraphy works here and there. A large TV was playing the Discovery Channel (it just happened that the one about the infamous penis-gourd tribe was on when we walked in). There were some nice woodwork designs in various places, beautiful orchids, a few technical-looking medical reports showing the effects of certain traditional medicines on patients’ organs, and a testimony board of people his treatments had healed – some that the western-style doctors had given up on. Judging from the appearance, this guy seemed to be doing pretty well. He’s been practicing for about 30 years and is considered a master.

Maybe 15 people were waiting. Everyone except for one teenage boy was grandparent age or older. Our supervisor was easily the youngest and strongest-looking patient. Pretty much all of them noticed us and our supervisor got some funny comments about coming in with wài guó rén. We ended up waiting for about an hour, so we had lots of time to ask questions and have him explain things. All of it fit with our readings.

Check-in

There are four aspects of a traditional doctor exam: observe, “smell” (in a multi-sensory kind of way), ask, and 切, which he couldn’t translate. First, at a desk in the waiting room, the doctor had him hold an electrode while touching another electrode to various places on his hands, wrists, feet, and ankles that correspond to internal organs. The readings from the machine were recorded on the form you see above – the columns indicate organs while the rows mark the reading. Feet, hands, and ears especially are said to contain these corresponding points: it’s not uncommon for people to address internal complaints with foot massage (apparently rather painful), or to walk barefoot on small stones in the park for health. Some parks have diagrams describing which parts correspond to what. It took the doctor about one minute to gather the readings he wanted and check his pulse (using both hands).

Contrasting Eastern and Western Medicine

After this the three of us waited for about an hour, during which time we saw a woman pay $11,000 NTD ($375 CDN) for a bag of herbal medicine. Our supervisor explained that unlike Western medicine, which seeks to isolate and treat a specific problem (“attacking the one place only”), traditional Chinese medicine is more concerned with addressing the environmental imbalances both inside and outside the body that are causing the problem in the first place. The substances within the body must be brought back into proper relationship, or balance, with each other, the body as a whole, and the daily environment of the person. Western medicine is more specific, discrete, “tunnel-vision”-oriented; traditional Chinese medicine is more contextual, holistic, and “big picture”-oriented. He mentioned that for surgery people will go to Western-style doctors, but for most everything else they want the long-term fix of the traditional approach. Traditional medicine prescriptions are slower to take effect, but are considered less harmful (more natural) and better in the long run.

I asked about a man there who was wearing a bracelet – a “niàn zhú” (sp?) – around his wrist that I knew to be a sort of talisman (he was the only one in there that I noticed had this sort of thing). Our supervisor drew a distinction between those kinds of things, which he referred to as accessories and religious business inventions, and Chinese medicine. You couldn’t buy things like that at the doctor’s office; that kind of thing comes from the folk-remedy shops in the night markets.

In the Doctor’s Office

His number finally came up. We followed him past everyone (and their stares and good-natured comments) and through the office door. Inside looked more like a regular office than an examination room. There was a desk to the left with an extra chair beside it, and two chairs off to the right backed by a large-ish atrium filled with plants and flowers. More orchids, too. Two thumbs up for atmosphere. We waited off to the side.

The doctor checked his pulse again with both hands. They talked and our supervisor said something to him about sleeping (so much for our listening comprehension!). The doctor had him stand up and turn around. While holding onto his leg, the doctor pushed with his thumb really hard along his spine. More questions and answers. He checked his blood pressure. After saying some more things and writing a prescription, we left.

The diagnosis? “The fire in your heart is too strong.” Chinese doctors have a bank of descriptive terms like this for specific conditions. Our supervisor described this as, “not overheating” but basically just too stressed and exhausted.

The visit cost $1,200 NTD ($41 CDN), and with the medicine (which he would pick up later) the total could easily hit $5,000 NTD ($170 CDN).

From there it was off to a hot-pot lunch before Jessica and I split for the 3pm English tour and the National Palace Museum.

Geeking out
Don’t you wonder how the heavily Confucian Tang dynasty (618-907 A.D.) could not only produce art depicting noblewomen playing polo but also China’s only female emperor? How can you be big on Confucianism and push women’s lib at the same time? Anyway, we made our second trip to the National Palace Museum in time for the English tour. There were four of us plus the guide, an Aussie, and we had a fascinating two hours. Doing that two or three more times should cement the general order Chinese history into our brains. And they change the exhibits every month!