TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 174

[Tobie Shapiro]

March 9, 200000000000007


Dear Favourite Things,

	In my dream I came across a pile of 
jackets that were supposed to be mine from 
another era in my life.  I looked at each one, 
trying to find a hanger for each (failing).  Each 
jacket was absolutely, definitively NOT something 
I would have chosen and bought.  They were 
little, so they must have belonged to me when I 
was still growing up.  But there is no way that 
they were mine.  Where did they come from, then? 
I called my mother over to try to solve the 
mystery.  I explained to her that I'd found these 
on the bed, but couldn't figure out where they 
came from.  "Would we ever buy something like 
this?"  I showed her a fuzzy woolen jacket with 
pictures of snow men on it, snow men and skiers, 
snowflakes and Christmas tree candy canes.  She 
looked at it and agreed that we never would have 
gotten it.  "How about this?"  I showed her a 
down jacket with pale blue rip stop cloth that 
had a little apron on it. "No.  We wouldn't have 
gotten that."  Each one, she agreed we wouldn't 
have purchased, but the mystery never got closer 
to being solved.  In fact, she thought of reasons 
that the pile of jackets had wound up on my bed 
that were congruent with my having owned them at 
some time.  I woke up frustrated.  What the heck 
does the jacket dream mean?





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The Eastern Cure

	While I was connected to Harry Lum, I was 
heavily influenced by things Chinese.  It was 
natural for me, actually, because of my great 
Aunt Anne and great Uncle Kuo, the family 
luminaries.  While Anne was living in China 
learning not to return the soup with the dead fly 
floating in it, she sent things back to San 
Francisco.  My grandparents' house was filled 
with Chinese art and handicrafts.  It was so 
pervasive that, as a child, I missed it.  It was 
just part of the background.  Then one day, for 
some unknown reason, my eyes would refocus on the 
little doily sitting under the telephone, and I'd 
see that it was an hexagonal piece of Chinese 
embroidery with the tiniest stitches you can 
imagine, a beautiful piece of artwork, lying 
under the phone.  Or a picture on the wall would 
suddenly wake me up and I'd realize it was a 
Chinese painting with calligraphy falling down 
the side.  Little figurines turned out to be jade 
sculpture.  I was surrounded by that, and Jewish 
artifacts like Mezuzot, Mennorahs, paintings of 
scenes in the holy land, Hebrew lettering in blue 
enameled metal saying, "Shalom".  We ate our 
matzo ball soup with chopsticks.

	So when Harry came into my life, I was 
already at home with much of his culture.  What 
was Harry's culture?  Well, he was born in 1930 
and was raised in Chinatown in tenements.  The 
whole family worked hard to keep themselves fed, 
clothed and with the substandard roof over their 
heads.  He grew up speaking English in school and 
the outside world, and Cantonese at home.  But as 
he left his family and pursued art school, he 
forgot much of his Cantonese, and spoke haltingly 
to his mother on the phone.  He'd be going along 
at a clip, then hit a word he didn't know and 
have to toss in some English:

	"Cantonese, Cantonese, Cantonese, 
Cantonese, mattress, Cantonese, Cantonese . . ." 
I picked up some language, but his English was so 
much more sophisticated than mine that I'd have 
done well to study English with him.  We'd go out 
to a Chinese restaurant and order from the 
Chinese menu, but he would have to ask what the 
characters said.  Then I'd use chopsticks and 
he'd use a fork.  I never knew whether he did 
that for the irony, or because he preferred it. 
He was chauvinistic about the Chinese culture, 
and no people compared well to his own, except 
maybe the Jews.  The sciences and the arts, 
invention and ingenuity were all superior in 
their Chinese element than anyone else's.  So 
when I had endometriosis and western medicine 
could do nothing for me, he suggested I see a 
Chinese doctor.  He called his mother to get 
recommendations.  If I were going to see a 
Chinese doctor, I should see the real animal, not 
some honky wannabee who took a weekend workshop 
and hung a shingle.

	His mother directed us to Dr. Wong who 
lived in the east bay, in Berkeley in fact.  Dr. 
Wong was operating illegally.  He had no western 
doctor supervising him.  He worked out of the 
basement rooms in a huge mansion on Arch Street. 
One got to Dr. Wong only by word of mouth.  His 
patients were mostly white: golden star struck 
believers in the ancient ways, desperate people 
who had exhausted all hopes in western medicine 
and sought out the cure to all their ails in the 
mysteries of the orient, people who had abandoned 
their faith in western ways and fell eastward, 
anything to the east.  According to the reports I 
had gotten, Dr. Wong had sat on a mountain top 
somewhere for twenty years, meditating, emanating 
a glow, and was a grand lama.  I hadn't the 
foggiest notion what that meant, but it sounded 
impressive.  He was no ingenue.  Dr. Wong was a 
diminutive man with puffy eyes and pointy 
eyebrows.  He looked directly into your eyes as 
he spoke in incomprehensible English.  His accent 
was so thick and his English so minimal that you 
got tired of saying, "What?", and after a while 
just said, "Okay."  "Yes."  "Doctor knows best." 
And he did.

	The first time I came to him, he motioned 
for me to present my arm to him.  He wrapped his 
fingers around my wrist and took my pulse, or at 
least that's what it seemed like he was doing. 
Then he reached for the other arm and took my 
pulse again.  Wisdom had it that he had actually 
taken my pulse four times, lightly and firmly on 
each wrist, and upon the information gleaned from 
that reading he would base his diagnosis.  He 
pondered my wrists, closed his eyes.  When he 
opened them, he had found out what he needed.  He 
didn't interview me and ask what seemed to be the 
matter.  He told me what my symptoms were, having 
heard not a word from my mouth.  He told me 
things about my body that I wouldn't even bother 
telling a physician because he (in those days, it 
was mostly he) wouldn't consider it a symptom 
worth bothering about.  Wong told me that my 
periods were irregular, that I didn't shit, that 
my skin was dry, my temperature and energy low, 
and I suffered from pain during menstruation.  He 
said everything was clogged.  Evidently he could 
unclog me.  I was to come twice a week.  He would 
accept me as a patient.

	Then there were those needles.  He 
practised a form of acupuncture that did not 
involve keeping the needles in and twirling them. 
Sounds good.  What he did was insert the needle 
and then pull it out, insert it elsewhere, then 
pull it out.  He did this until he was done.  The 
first time he treated me, I was all congested 
with a cold.  I couldn't breathe.  He had me lie 
still and worked his needles on my eyebrows and 
near my eyes.  I stiffened up.  It was all I 
could do to remain motionless.  Just don't get 
near my eyes.  Don't mess with my eyes.  After a 
minute or so, he stepped back.  He pantomimed 
breathing deeply through his nose and nodded at 
me to do so.  I did so.  All the mucus was gone. 
It had disappeared.  Where did it go?  I was 
amazed.  Another time, after he took my pulses, 
he asked when I'd last had a bowel movement.  I 
told him five days.  His eyebrows arched up and 
his eyes popped out.  He measured a distance with 
his thumbs from the widest point of my pelvic 
bone in towards my center, on either side.  Then 
he pressed his thumbs on those two measured spots 
and leaned into me with considerable force.  He 
said, "Better."  I went home and gave birth to an 
eight foot long turd that had the consistency of 
damp bread (sourdough French).  I began to have 
some faith in this weird little man.

	Harry commented that he expected as much 
of a good Chinese doctor, so far superior to 
western doctors.  He quoted a saying Chinese 
doctors had about their work.  "A good doctor 
prevents disease.  A fair doctor treats imminent 
disease.  A poor doctor treats disease."  He told 
me about the traditional respected instruction 
manual on Chinese medicine which was five 
thousand years old.  So?  This in and of itself 
was no argument in favour of Chinese medicine. 
But it sounded good.  The idea was that 
physicians were all pip squeaks, green behind the 
ears, their methods too young and crude to be 
trusted.  Well, no.  Western doctors had their 
five thousand year old instruction manuals.  They 
were just hacked into stone and involved a lot of 
amputation, trepanation, and applying mashed 
amphibians to the site of the trouble.  Five 
thousand years did not convince me.

	What did convince me was what worked. 
Wong would get out his array of needles that he 
cooked in alcohol, and he'd poke around 
precisely.  Then he'd write out a prescription 
for Chinese herbs.  I took this prescription to 
Chinatown and watched the herbalist pull out 
wooden drawers from the wall of a thousand 
drawers and fetch a piece of this and a handful 
of that.  He'd weigh it on a hand held scale and 
assemble the potion on a piece of butcher paper. 
There was actually less mystery to the Chinese 
herbs than there was to a physician's 
prescription.  With the illegible Rx you bring to 
a drug store, the pharmacist hands you a 
container filled with round white pills.  You 
don't know what the fuck is in them.  There are a 
lot of pretty evil white powders, after all.  But 
we go home and swallow these things, trusting in 
the illegible signature of the holy doctor.  With 
Chinese herbs, you saw exactly what you were 
going to ingest: the exoskeletons of bugs, 
pieces of bark, the skins of insects, dried 
vegetable matter.  It was obvious.

	The directions were easy.  Take home the 
bundle of herbs.  Put them in a pan and pour 
three Chinese soup bowls of water over it.  Boil 
the whole thing until there is only one soup bowl 
left.  Then do the undrinkable --  swallow it, as 
hot as you can stand it.  The elixir that 
resulted was vile.  No.  I mean really vile.  The 
taste cannot be described.  I will not try, 
except to say that my throat did not recognize it 
as anything edible and refused to take it in.  My 
throat actually closed up, said, "No," and I 
couldn't swallow it.  After several attempts, I 
finally persuaded my body to allow the poison 
into my system.  I gagged.  But damn, if the 
stuff didn't work!  My menstrual cycle evened 
out.  The pain lessened.  I shit on a regular 
basis.  My skin moistened.  Unfortunately, I was 
still a neurotic mess.

	It was eerie seeing Dr. Wong.  I just 
felt like I was part of some sneaky infomercial, 
a testimonial filmed to lure the gullible into 
investing their fortunes in a snake oil 
salesman's hands.  I'd sit there in the waiting 
room, reading a book.  The door would open, and a 
satisfied customer would come walking out saying, 
"Sure is nice not to have to use that cane!"

	Sign me up for the deluxe treatments! 
Here.  Take my money.  Cure me.  Cure me.



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                              ‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘
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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net