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!

Ah! Conflicted.

Our last grad classes are on – that means lots of reading and the end of my 92 day coffee fast. Is that long enough to make it Lenten? I don’t know. Anyway, after successfully proving to myself and the world for 92 days that I can choose to relinquish coffee entirely at any given moment, I had a couple cups. And even made it past the original end-date by a week. That’s not the problem.

I faced a dilemma this morning. Jessica – unrelenting coffee temptress in residence – made Starbucks (courtesy of Meredith).

I had to read for a while before work but was having no problem staying awake so I passed. I don’t want to drink it unless I need it or it’s a social occasion. But I don’t want to need it; drinking it when I need it seems like caving in. And if I wait for social occasions I’ll hardly get any. And in the meantime Jessica is going to be brewing Starbucks every morning for the next couple months.

This is compounded by a recent experiment involving Sunday mornings. Two Sundays ago (and coffee-free) I was nodding off bad during the sermon – a loooooong sermon – and I was nodding off the whole time. Not that I would have understood much if I’d been awake, but that’s not point. Last Sunday I had two cups before leaving the apartment and was wide awake the whole service and actually enjoyed the game of trying to decipher random words and phrases.

Ah! Life is so complicated.

We found this, and more, on a recent hike up Elephant Mountain in which I had too much fun with the macro setting on the camera (click for photos). Creeps me out though… felt like slapping the daylights out of every slightest itch for the next half an hour. But that hike was our one break in a very busy two weeks or so. The latest:

• Chou-chou had worms, that meant a trip to the vet, and that meant we discovered just how much Chou-chou hates rectal thermometers.
• Some obsessive parents at the school are driving us and our boss insane. First time we’d seen him mad, actually. Nice to know he feels he doesn’t have to hide it from us, and the ensuing process of dealing with said parents is great experience in negotiating disagreement in this context.
• Our research practicum is arranged. Weekly (or so) debriefing meetings with our practicum supervisor will include weekly cultural experiences. He invited us to accompany him on his upcoming visit to a traditional Chinese doctor this Tuesday. Traditional tea houses, museums, temples, and other stuff are all in the works – definitely our preferred kinds of classrooms.
• Hundreds of thousands of people protested downtown last night again, demanding that Taiwan’s president step down. The subway was packed with people in red. Even their dogs were wearing red.

Anyway, more later.

We’re starting our last (for now) semester of grad classes. We’ve got an anthropology course, a world religions course, and a China research practicum. So it should be interesting, and for better or worse, our brains will occasionally excrete something from our studies onto the blog. From one of the anthropology texts today:

…we may mistakenly assume that our own desires are love of the people… themselves. …Western people tend to divide their world into three categories: scenery, machinery, and people. The first of these includes mountains, trees, weather, and other parts of the environment about which they talk, but which they cannot manipulate. These are enjoyed in a disinterested sort of way. Machines are tools people use in their lives to get their work done. These include cars, refrigerators, computers, and farm animals. Westerners enjoy and value these highly, and take care of them so long as they are useful and do the job… [But] not all human beings are seen as “people.” Westerners often see people of other cultures as part of the scenery. [Tourism example.] … Moreover, westerners often see migrant labourers and subordinates as machinery whose value lies in their productivity. When their productivity drops they are discarded… Basically, westerners only see friends and relatives as people – as humans valued for their friendships.

I could rant and rave for days and then be harshly self-critical for days more regarding stuff this quote touches on. Relationships with friends and family can still be “machinery”; we may ultimately maintain certain relationships because they provide for emotional or psychological felt-needs (conscious or subconscious) rather than actually relating in unconditional love. We don’t value them, but what they do for us. That’s selfish whether we realize what we’re doing or not, and it’s treating people like machines. I’d better stop before I start and just say that treating all people like people is hard.

Sometimes we (people) legitimately become part of one another’s “scenery” (imagine a packed subway car) or relate as “machines” (like when we’re doing our jobs). Living in an “ultra-urban” environment, I can think of plenty of instances where we become one another’s scenery out of necessity. But even allowing for legitimate examples like these, I think we can and should still acknowledge one another’s “people-ness” – as in, one another’s uniqueness and unfathomable value – even if in the moment we are playing scenery or machinery roles. I don’t mean just in smiles and sincerely kind words at the checkout counter (though we don’t do enough of that), but in our lifestyles, how we spend our time and resources, whether or not our lives have room for people who aren’t providing something for us (material or emotional). I think this requires seeing people from a certain perspective.

The couple in the photo is Mr. Hou and Mrs. Cai (married women keep their names here). They make really good egg-hotsauce-sesame-pancake-things that we eat a lot. We don’t know anything else about them – I hope that’s only because of the language barrier.

Another assignment bites the dust. 13.5 pages in one day and a morning – about 17 hours of writing time. Approximately 2.5 cups of green tea per page. That’s roughly 33.75 cups of green tea in over a 36-hour time period. One of the books we read for the assignment, Overcoming the Dark Side of Leadership, suggests that I have tendencies toward compulsive leadership behaviour, that that’s a bad thing, and that I should do something about it. Fine with me. But if I do the exercises and address the personality issues, do I still get to drink the tea?

填鸭式教学 means, “stuff duck style teaching” or “force-feed duck style teaching.” “Stuffing the duck” is a well-known description of traditional (and widely used) Chinese teaching methods, sort of the Asian equivalent to our “drinking from the firehose.” It’s where teachers try to cram inhuman (and inhumane) amounts of content into their compliant unquestioning students. The students try to absorb as much as they can for the purpose of regurgitating it on college entrance exams. There’s precious little creative brain activity involved.

“Stuffing the duck” also aptly describes what I’m about to do to myself from now until April 9th. In the process of making a weekly time-allotment calendar (so that the time and place in my life that I give God, Jessica, and other priorities actually reflects my beliefs… what a concept!), I also made a little reading calendar, parceling out the remaining assignments and readings for this semester. And a dark cloud descended upon Yonghe.

The upside is that the schoolwork shouldn’t supplant my relationships with God and Jessica, since the time needed to nurture those is already set aside. The downside is that this duck is going to drink from the firehose from now until April 9th.

Why is it that you can flounder for two weeks in an agonizing, frustrating, debilitating stew in which the primary ingredient is lack of creative thought, and then the sudden rush of inspiration and clicking-into-place-of-ideas doesn’t hit you until 12:26am of the morning the paper is due?

Why does my brain wait for the GPA-destroying weapon of Due Date to be loaded, aimed, and cocked before producing anything I want to turn in to a prof? Who cares about the GPA!

I mean, I’m thankful that this happens at all, I’d just like to adjust the timing.

Is it bad if, hypothetically speaking, a foreign English teacher expects his students — who come to his school late at night after already sitting through a full day in their regular school — to do their homework, yet at the same time that teacher is also an M.A. student who is already falling behind in his own studies? I’ve just turned in two weekly assignments late and my first two major papers are due this weekend — papers for two different classes, one with the due-date already extended.

What happened to the days when life was an add-on to school? Adding school onto life is a whole nother deal. Working a job to help you get a degree (the ‘professional student’ days) was way different than working a degree to help you get a different job (Ni hao, China!). C-c-c-rrrunch! (down-shifting from keener gear to survival gear). And I really need to get back to work…

We had our first two classroom skypings today: dad (and then mom and Julia) caught us just starting the morning lessons, and later Brian H. almost won the “Hey Cow!” competition, except Skype for Mac apparently doesn’t do video yet.

It was the first time for the kids and they were a little intimidated, but once they do it one or two more times they’ll be really into it (if the first day of class is any indication).
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Had the webcam aimed into class all day. During nap time (even working adults take ‘siestas’ here) the students were goofing off but thinking they were getting away with it. They were getting out of their seats, looking at the webcam stashed in the corner, and making funny faces. What they didn’t know was that I was in our office doing homework, and recording everything. After nap time I said, “Time to watch a movie!” and they were all excited (we use powerpoint and video a lot). “We’re going to watch a movie called ‘Nap Time at P.E.I.’” They weren’t really listening (also happens a lot) because they were all excited about the movie. It was soooooo funny to watch the realization hit their little faces. (In the end it was all a big joke and we scored some major cool points.)
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We’re leaving for two nights in Hong Kong on Sunday, travel and lodging compliments of our employer… Happy Valentine’s Day to us! (We have to apply for our work visas from outside Taiwan). That’s also when our first two major papers are due for our online component of our grad classes. We’ll try and crank them out before we leave, but at that’s gonna rough… it’ll probably boil down to getting an extension or just taking the grade.
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We found the ‘wet market’ in our neighbourhood (open during the day for fresh produce, meat, and seafood) and… wow. Let’s just say they don’t let anything go to waste. We didn’t take pictures because we were just passing through and didn’t want to get all up in people’s business. Once we’re regular grocery shoppers and they recognize us we’ll get some photos.

We spent several hours at the park today, reading and doing homework. It was so nice outside that we couldn’t bear being cooped up in the apartment or the school. There were lots of interesting things to see, including about 200 people doing tai chi exercises (check out the video page!) and lots of little yappy dogs. One dog even had little winnie-the-pooh barrettes on it’s ears. I’m so glad that we have this park right outside the front door of our building. It’s no Tynehead, but it’s got Nelson park beat by miles!!!(=

I also wanted to share this poem that was part of my reading today. It’s from Eugene Peterson’s “The Contemplative Pastor” and it gave me goosebumps. Here goes…

The Tree
There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. Isaiah 11:1

Jesse’s roots, composted with carcasses
Of dove and lamb, parchments of ox and goat,
Centuries of dried up prayers and bloody
Sacrifice, now bear me gospel fruit.

David’s branch, fed on kosher soil,
Blossoms a messianic flower, and then
Ripens into a kingdom crop, conserving
The fragrance and warmth of spring for winter use.

H*ly Sp*rit, shake our family tree;
Release your ripened fruit to our outstretched arms.

I’d like to see my children sink their teeth
Into promised land pomegranates

And Canaan grapes, bushel gifts of God,
While I skip a grace rope to a Christ tune.