I’ve known my friend Geri for over 40 years. Our friendship dates back to the mid-1960s
when she came from Taiwan to the west coast to study biochemistry at the
University of California Medical Center at San Francisco.
My parents had signed up for a program to host international
students. I’ve no idea which one. I was not involved. Their charge was to befriend this young female
doctoral student and provide a temporary home for her until she could get
settled on campus. Naturally, their
first task was to meet Geri at the airport.
But there was a back story. It was awkward and confusing. I still wince when I remember it, at least the
parts I can recall.
I had just left home.
Two college girlfriends and I had rented an apartment in an old
Victorian house, the three of us resolved to share these digs for our upcoming
senior year. Like school girls holding
hands, we embarked on our road to independence by setting up house.
Not a big deal,
really. I was twenty, after all. Just part of the process of working out my
timid---by ‘60s standards---rebellion from parents, the middle class, and a
small Catholic college. Still a school
for women and as yet untouched by student activism.
An only child, loved and cossetted, I had exhibited moderate
promise in high school. Adept, but alas, absent some overriding talent or
single-minded passion. Now I was adrift
in the liberal arts and close to college graduation.
This apartment announcement alarmed my Mother and Dad. Three years of private school tuition
payments suddenly jeopardized. My grades had already dipped. And they did not
know, I think, about the chilly interview I’d recently had with the college
president---called in privately after some protest statement I can no longer
remember.
Even more disturbing for them was the shadow of the young
man whom I was dating. He was five years
older than me, involved in the civil rights and anti-war demonstrations. They supposed (correctly) that my apartment
idea was bolstered by romance. The lofty
moral tone of “the movement” already pervaded my language in family apartment
discussions.
Still, along with parental confused disappointment, there was the vacant bedroom I’d left
behind.
Geri was about my age and, as things turned out, she helped
fill the void my move created.
Deeply absorbed in my modest rebellion, I have no memory of
my parents’ preparation for their student guest. But I was on hand at their house that first day when Geri
arrived after a twelve-hour flight from Taipei.
In contrast to the recent months of family tension, this day
my parents were upbeat with anticipation. Smiles all round. A relief for me, but tinged with a creeping sense
of my outsider position.
Conversation was animated, arms gesticulating and eyebrows
rising like commas to assist communication.
Moments of mutual comprehension eliciting bursts of elation. Getting
accustomed to Geri’s accented English.
By late afternoon, Geri was exhausted; she had a headache. My Mom’s offers of aspirin (in these pre-Tylenol
days) were politely declined. Geri
retreated to her suitcases and boxes deposited in my old bedroom. She delved into her pharmacopeia brought from
home and produced a small hexagonal jar of a glistening, milky salve. She rubbed it on her forehead and lay down to
rest.
Tiger Balm had entered our lives. It never left my Mother’s medicine
cabinet. Decades later, when moving my
Mom to an assisted living apartment, I found three jars in different strengths.
Geri completed her PhD and then worked in research labs. She too shared an apartment with her campus
girlfriends. She met her future husband,
also from Taiwan, who had come to the US to study engineering.
With longtime friends of my mother and dad as surrogate
family, Geri was married in my parents’ garden.
My father gave her away. I was a
bridesmaid along with her Chinese girlfriends.
The Taiwan graft onto my family brought many joys to my
parents in later years. Photographs show
visits with two little boys born in America bringing afternoons of boisterous
family life to my parents.
I was not there. I had
married the unapproved young man. The
anti-war movement and the counter culture swallowed up the next three years of my
life.
But that was long ago.
Geri and I are retired now.
When we meet our main topic is health.
It is time for TCM, traditional Chinese medicine.
At the computer, Geri rolls through screen after screen of
Chinese text. After much searching she finds it: a picture of ten hand exercises to stimulate
the body’s meridians. You know, she
says, gets the chi going in the channels that govern our internal organs: the
small intestine, large intestine, stomach, liver, spleen, kidney, heart, lungs,
bladder, and gall bladder. Then there’s “the
triple warmer” (cavities of thorax, abdomen, and pelvis) and the governing and
conception vessels through which yin and yang flow. Of course.
The simple, black and white thumbnail sketches on the left
side of the page are easy to follow. The
Chinese characters on the right? Not a clue.
It looks like this:
Every morning you firmly tap parts of the hand, punch the
palm of the hand, and tug the earlobes and press the palms to your face. And whatever else you can figure out from the
pictures.
Geri advises: “You
can just do it when you first wake up, when still lying in bed. Gets you ready for the day.” Your chi will decline in late afternoon. No exercise after 7 pm.
Several times a day Geri lies down for twenty minutes on a
contraption to stretch her spine and legs.
It looks like a padded ironing board attached to a second board at a
right angle. Keeps the hip joint flexible and extends the lower back. We compare notes; my yoga poses have a
similar effect.
My partner Dennis is hugely skeptical. Geri---a scientist---smiles subversively. “You have to believe,” she says.
I understand.
My own inherited health traditions have returned to me in
later life. Advice remembered from my southern
grandmother. Use cold pressed castor oil
for all skin irritations. Wear a
broad-brimmed hat in the sun. Choose an
“osteopathic” physician over a medical doctor. Remedies from her Kentucky childhood and her
experience of married life in frontier Idaho. She had a midwife for childbirth---three
times.
Not much compared to over two thousand years of TCM. But it brings me closer to my forebears. My grandmother was just a few years older
than I am when she repeated her remedies to me---who ignored them.
So I do the hand exercises and use the castor oil. And think about traditional medicine. I’m in another phase of change now. Just one year short of 70 and once again things are awkward
and confusing. Funny thing, though. I’m beginning
to look back more gently at my youth. I think it must
be TCM.
Read more essays like this one at like this one in East Village Magazine at http://eastvillagemagazine.org/
