Most of us living in the Urban China nowadays do not go for Traditional Chinese Medicine anymore. When one get sick, one go to the hospital to get things fixed as quickly as possible. We only think about the old China therapy when we need a massage or acupuncture for our chronicle neck and back problem or when winter set in, we will be awakened for our needs to take various kind of tonic supplement.
And this winter, I found myself picking up the old China therapy. Things started fairly simple. I have been trying to grow my hair long, but it grew really slow and I thought I should take some Gou Ji. I remember at one time my father was losing hair fast due to his age and he took Gou Ji in Chinese rise wine and he actually grew back a lot of black hair! I don't drink Chinese rise wine so I adopted a common practice in the office: throw in a couple of the orange colored small dried fruits in the hot water and drink it for the day. I have finished a whole bottle of Gou Ji but my hair is not growing any faster. Anyway, Gou Ji should be good for my kidney at least.
When the weather got colder and one's appetite for afternoon snack picked up, I decide to take some sesame and walnut: in the food store around the corner, they sell bottles of crunched sesame and walnut mix and it's a popular winter snack for your health. Sesame is widely known for the blackness of your hair and walnut is good for your brain (some say because of its shape!) I bought a bottle without sugar coz I don't want to gain weight but then it isn't very taste without sugar. So the winter is almost gone and I still have half a bottle sitting on my office desk.
The third remedy I tried on was dates. One of the colleagues started to take dates regularly and she gave us some too. Dates in the Chinese medicine term, is good for the production of blood, so especially good for women. And this is no ordinary dates, it's been emerged in the glue from donkey's skin, another classic remedy for woman. The dates actually tasted good. But I have too many remedies going on so I often forget about it and now I still have two more packs somewhere in my office drawer…
Around the time of Dong Zhi (literally "the arrival of winter", the official winter starts at this Chinese solar term), advertisement banners starts flapping above all the traditional Chinese medicine pharmacy as well as TCM hospitals, announcing the arrival of the ultimate tonic supplement weapon: traditional Chinese herb paste! This is the only time during a year that TCM doctors will be busy prescribing for herb paste and the TCM pharmacy busying making them, because winter is best time of the year to take in supplement and it's best to start at Dong Zhi. And if you take it right, you'll be much healthier the next year.
Long Hua hospital is one of the most famous TCM hospitals in town and some of my colleagues decided to go to a renowned doctor there. Our sales manager sent a junior rep to get "appointment number" for us and on the big day, three colleagues plus the whole family of our sales manager gathered to wait for the call of the number at Long Hua hospital. The wife of our sales manager went in first and she came back to tell us: I have been seeing this doctor for five years now, I don't understand why I'm growing older every year and the doctor is not! Well, the doctor must be really good, at least, at maintaining youth for himself… The process is the same for everyone, you go in there, the doctor checks your pulse with his index and middle fingers on your wrist, he watches your complexion and asks you to show him your tongue. Then he asks a few questions and then he started writing the prescription. I enjoyed his writing a lot. Although he's using a pen, but he wrote from above to the bottom, from right to the left, the way of traditional Chinese calligraphy, and his writing is beautiful, it's almost a grass-root, everyday life artwork of traditional Chinese calligraphy. After a brief statement of the problem which employs the phrases such as "insufficient liver and kidney", "Chong and Ren imbalance", he would write the names of two dozen or so herbs and the weight of the herb prescribed at the foot of each name. I liked the square characters in the calligraphy writing, Bai Shu, Fu Lin, He Huan, Tian Ma… you could almost smell the subtle scent of the herb from the white paper. In all formal ritual, the doctor would press his personal chop in red ink at the end of the writing.
Now you take the prescription to the pharmacy in the hospital, or other famous TCM pharmacy in town, they calculate how much your prescription cost (and it's not cheap, mine this year cost RMB1200/Euro120 plus RMB500 for the pharmacy to make it into a paste, and btw the doctor's prescription fee is RMB250, the most expensive I've ever paid in any hospital in Shanghai, Western or Chinese). In a week or so, you went back to the pharmacy and got your magic herb paste in a big bowl. It looks almost black, but smells of a nice, almost sophisticated scent. You take one spoon each morning, dissolve it in hot water and drink it for two or three months and … you'll be several degrees healthier in the new year!
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