42. CHINESE CURES

I’ve looked at the online headlines in today’s Niagara Falls Review. The topics do not differ much from those in my own local newspaper – Victoria’s Times Colonist. The COVID-19 pandemic has captured attention worldwide.

Today is my birthday. It’s also the Ching Ming Festival weekend in China. I can’t help but reflect back and project forward.

I wonder what my parents would have thought, or done, if they were alive. Yet when I try to picture them coping with these difficult times, I don’t imagine them as elderly but rather in their authoritative roles when my brother and I were children.

Since my father spoke English, read the local newspaper, and listened to some news broadcasts he would have understood more about the pandemic conditions and would not have been entrenched in the folk remedies and beliefs that my mother subscribed to.

When I was about six years old and confined to bed because of a bad cold or flu, my father took time off work to come home. He went to the pharmacy on Erie Avenue and bought Vicks VapoRub for my mother to slather on my chest. I don’t recall what other treatment my mother gave me: likely because my father’s concern was so novel and the smell of the VapoRub was so terrible.

Having said that, other ointments such as Tiger Balm were equally offensive to my young nose. My mother often got headaches – migraines, perhaps. She would dab Tiger Balm on her temples. On one occasion, she was so ill, she stayed in bed. She had been vomiting, too.

She called me into her bedroom, rolled onto her stomach with her back exposed and asked me to put Tiger Balm onto it. She passed me a Chinese soup spoon and instructed me to hold the spoon handle and scrape the bowl part all across her back. Fear of snapping the ceramic spoon kept me from pressing too hard.

Mother had me switch the spoon for a silver dollar to use as the scraper. Red tracks immediately rose to mark the path of the coin.

Days later, my mother, still ill, made an appointment to see the doctor. As usual, I accompanied her as her translator. Dr. Mahoney was quite surprised by the condition of her back. Not until years later, did I learn that this procedure was a traditional Chinese medicine technique and not a random belief of my mother.

Scraping, or gua sha, called for a jade, bone, or stone scraper but not having any, my ever resourceful mother substituted for what she had on hand.

I don’t recall if she ever asked me to repeat this treatment on her. I can only wonder if having tried scraping, finding it did not work, and having to resort to a Western doctor, she no longer believed in its efficacy.

Chinese remedies prevailed during my early school years and seemed to diminish as I got older. 

For instance, Mother had on hand these little round pills. I don’t know what they were specified for but when you took them, you took a number: not just one or two. Through online searching, I think they were Po Chai pills – the “cure-all pills”.

The box looks familiar and they were originally manufactured in Guangdong Province so Mother likely had access to them when she lived there. According to the online info, Po Chai pills are good for tummy pain, colds, and menstrual cramps; although by the time I reached menarche, they had long disappeared from our home.

Other childhood illnesses called for a concoction that my mother brewed by double boiling. In the double boiling process, the indirect transfer of heat from water to the jar cooks its contents. The jar of my childhood had colours similar to those shown the picture below but the vessel was squatter.

It also had a metal cage with feet that kept the jar from touching the bottom of the pot placed on the stove. On the internet, the jar is called a dun zhong although what my mother called it escapes me.

Mother filled the jar with her secret mixture, closed the lid, deposited the jar into the cage and set the works into boiling water for an unknown period of time. Whatever the brew was, it was ghastly and as children we protested loudly about drinking it.

The last lingering memory of my mother’s cures came in a bottle of Hennessey Cognac. As a child, I understood from my mother’s words that the bottle held a type of liquor but my experiences with alcohol were limited. On the occasions that brought me into contact with alcohol, it was always Seagram’s Five Star.

Nonetheless, I could make out the words on the cognac bottle. What I couldn’t tell was what she marinated in the alcohol.

One again from the online images of Chinese medicines, I would guess that it was licorice root – but I can’t be sure. Anyway, whenever we had a bruise or scraps, out would come an application of the Hennessey brew to the injury. The mixture had a sweet fragrance and left a brownish stain. How I longed to be like my school friends who wore the red badge of mercurochrome instead.

By the time I became a teenager, these cures had disappeared from our house. Our medicines had become quite western: Bayer Aspirin, Phillips Milk of Magnesia, Alka Seltzer, and Vicks Cough Syrup.

Sure, my mother still had beliefs she clung to. The stresses of high school brought on my bruxism. After I fell asleep, I would clench and grind my teeth very loudly.

Mother was sure if I tapped a key against my teeth, I’d stop. I did it to please her. My grinding continues to this day but I wear a night guard on my teeth.

During my adolescence, I had shoulder length and at times longer hair. Mother was certain that if I went to bed with wet hair or if I went out in the rain without a hat, it would be the death of me. Although my noncompliance disproved her wet hair theory, perhaps what I should have heard at the time was concern for my wellbeing: what a parent wants for her child.

My husband Keith’s genealogy research notes that my mother survived through times of famine, smallpox, and cholera in Kwangtung province so I may be underestimating my mother’s grasp of diseases and their transmissions.

My own beliefs about what medicines work, and what doesn’t, have been challenged. When Keith and I visited a cousin and her family in Hong Kong in 2016, I was ill from travel and eating different foods: nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Cousin Wong Su gave me a couple of bottles of Hoe Hin White Flower Embrocation .

Although I was skeptical and resisted applying it to my temples and under my nose as she suggested, it worked. Now I take it with me whenever I travel. 

My father died in 1990 at the age of 88. My mother followed in 2010 – a few days short of her 98^th birthday. Brother Jack passed in 2012; he was 62. I’m 68 today. I wonder what the future holds for me – for us all. The pandemic vaccines/cures that scientists discover will carry us forward into that future.