During my defence, someone on my examination board asked me an interesting question.
What is an an authentic TCM?
The wonderful thing about the defence is the freedom and space to reexamine and reconsider issues you yourself may not have considered yourself. Answering the examiner’s question led me to put together an important part of my final conclusion.
The question of authenticity in TCM is recurring throughout this thesis. On a practical level, governments (wanted) to legislate and regulate TCM to assure safety and authenticity for public health. On a personal level, TCM users questioned the authenticity and efficacy of the herbal medicines they were purchasing and consuming. An authentic TCM in a greater global, historical context, however, is a more delicate matter and therefore problematic to define. Considering Schechner’s concept of “twice-behaved” behaviour, each reiteration of an act is a novel original; authentic from the first. This begs the question—what was the first “behaved” iteration of traditional Chinese medicine? Perhaps one could credit the 2,000 year old Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon or Huángdì Nèijīng (黃帝內經) as the first authentic record of TCM, but the book itself is based on nearly 4,500 years of practice.
Perhaps Nora would recognize this set of ancient, communal practices on which the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon is basedas acceptably authentic milieux. Scholars and TCMPs have termed the practice of TCM in pre-Cultural Revolution in China and preserved elsewhere in post-Cultural Revolution Chinese diasporas “Classic” Chinese medicine. However, this claim would negate the authenticity of translocal reiterations of TCM, which have morphed and adapted to regional environments in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Toronto, for example. In the same vein, my participants expressed a belief that TCM preserved in the peripheries is measured as more authentic than TCM in modern China, which has been systematically blended with Western medicine. Nevertheless, such comments disregard the periphery’s own disparate pathways to the westernization of TCM. Thus, this thesis argues that there is a singular ‘authentic’ TCM does not exist, as each iteration of the practice is as validly genuine as the other.
Debates about authenticity have implications for belonging and otherness in cultural identity and the construction of Chineseness. Claims to authenticity have been used by power-wielding entities to position TCM practitioners and users between legitimate and illegitimate, us and them. In early twentieth century China, various governments attempted to regulate practice and practitioners to carve and sculpt the populace into their vision of a modern China. Towards the end of the twentieth century in Ontario, the Ontario government regulated TCM in an effort to gently fit practice and practitioners cohesively into the larger Canadian medical system. Therefore, accepting that authenticity in TCM is amorphous, uneven, and in constant renegotiation, one could also postulate that Chineseness is similarly resistant to clear definition.
This post is Part Three of a five-part series, where I use a blog format to present and elaborate themes less-explored in my M.A. in History thesis.
If I had more time to write and more pages to fill, I would have liked to analyze the question of language in oral history in working with Chinese diasporas. Language was a notable point of contention and interest at various stages of my research project.
I should mention my capacities in Cantonese. I can understand Cantonese fluently. I can speak with advanced skills, but my Canadian accent makes me nervous and often causes words to slip my mind. I cannot read or write except for basic characters like me, you, numbers, and random trivia.
Bilingualism was a concern for me even as I was preparing to interview. I had to recruit and prepare information for my participants in both English and Chinese. In the interviews, my participants would switch between English, Cantonese, and very rarely, Mandarin. Their combination of languages — of “Chinglish” was familiar to me as the child of immigrant children.
For my interviews in Canada, my participants would prefer to use English, even if they were more fluent in Cantonese and they understood that I could understand them in Chinese. They would switch to use Cantonese when using TCM terms.
For my interviews in Hong Kong, my participants would prefer to use either English or Cantonese. They were mostly conducted in Cantonese, even though their English was fluent. They would switch to English to describe certain colloquial idioms or phrases to add colour to a feeling, emotion, or experience. Their preference for English was for my sake. My spoken fluency in both Cantonese and English was useful when conducting interviews with participants, especially when one idea could not be translated into the other, or in other characteristically Hong Konger ‘Chinglish’ moments. However, my inability to read and write in Chinese strained the subsequent transcription process.
Language was contentious during the transcription of my interviews. Because I was unable to read or write in Chinese, I first tried to transcribe my interviews using a third party referred to my by my father. The transcriptionist/translator was a university student in Toronto who was raised in Canada but was fluent in both languages. I paid them to do transcription, them translation of anonymous interviews. They were ultimately unreliable and eventually I begged my father to help me do the work with the assistance of Google Translate and Pleco.
During the translation process, which I worked with my father on, we had many discussions about what exactly a word or phrase would be translated into. This process really taught us both a lot about language and meaning.
During the writing and analysis portion of my project, I became interested in when and why participants would use English or Cantonese or both. Perhaps for a different paper I would focus more on the nuances of language and TCM.
For example, TCM is increasingly being learned, used, practised by people who have zero Chinese language skills. As I mention in my paper, there are many concepts in TCM that are not fully explained in English. The terms, while translatable, also come with particular etymologies. They are used in particular daily conversations and experiences, that add meaning to the TCM term. How does the untranslatable change the thousands-year-old practice? What is lost? What is gained?
This post is Part Two of a five-part series, where I use a blog format to present and elaborate themes less-explored in my M.A. in History thesis.
This post is adapted from my Master’s thesis, entitled “Negotiating Chineseness in Diaspora: Traditional Chinese Medicine and Memory in Hong Kong and the Greater Toronto Area, 1960-2018”. This post is Part One of a five-part series, where I use a blog format to present and elaborate themes less-explored in my M.A. in History thesis. Part One: Introduction
Migrant memories of traditional Chinese medicine
Imagine this. A small child with a head of thick, raven hair gets an annoying cough and a drippy nose. At five or six years old, they are a little over a metre in height—barely tall enough to see over an imposing object in the kitchen. If the child stands on the tips of their toes they might be able to make out the image of someone very dear to them labouring over an odorous pot of boiling herbs and water.
Source: Jenn Ko
Only a few hours ago, they were in a similarly pungent space with jars packed full of dried herbs, fruits, seafood, insects and more. Imagine this small child was sat down in a chair, or if they are particularly small, in their dear someone’s lap, and made to face a doctor. The doctor took their pulse. The doctor looked at their tongue. Then, the doctor weighed out what looked like a cacophony of dried things and gave it to the child’s dear someone. They instruct the child to take it to return to harmony.
Now, imagine the kitchen again. The child’s dear someone pours the dark liquid into a bowl. The child takes a sip. It is bitter, but their dear someone might have placed some sweet, round, pinkish thin crisps on the table to eat with the bitter liquid. Haw Flakes 山楂餅 (sahn jah bang). The child is told to drink it all, and so they do.Every participant in my study shared a version of this narrative about being a child and being sick.
It is a memory so ubiquitous, so obvious, as common as the common flu.
Source: Jenn Ko
From fall 2016 to fall 2018, I studied the construction of cultural identity through the microcosmic perspective of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as culture for Chinese Canadians between two localities, Hong Kong and the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) for my Master’s research.I was interested in subjective questions of culture and identity. The main questions guiding my research were: what role(s) does traditional Chinese medicine play in cultural identity formation in trans-Pacific Chinese communities in Hong Kong and Toronto? How is the notion of Chineseness perceived, experienced, negotiated, and narrated by TCM practitioners and users? How do their perceptions, experiences, negotiations and narrations of TCM relate to family, caregiving, and community? I conducted 11 in-depth, face-to-face, oral history interviews conducted in Hong Kong and the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), 8 of which I analyzed in my actual thesis. I argue that Chineseness is found in the liminal spaces of their narrative identifications of self, their performances and transmission of knowledge in family, and their negotiation of Otherness in the TCM community in the GTA.
Traditional Chinese medicine is a liminal space where Chinese diasporic communities practice and express hybrid narrative cultural identities. The history of TCM is religious, socioeconomic, political, and deeply personal. TCM is an ancient form of healing built on a foundation of over thousands of years of practice. Sources range in the age of TCM knowledge and practice — it is likely 2,500 years old, but some say it could be 4,500 years old. It is comprised of herbal medicine, acupuncture, massage, cupping, moxibustion, exercise (eg. tai chi), and dietary therapy. At its most fundamental, the concept of TCM aims to balance two opposing principles in nature—feminine and negative 陰 (yin) and masculine and positive 陽 (yang)—to maintain the flow of vital life energy or 氣 (qi). TCM is not a monolithic canon of medicine as much as it is a “multi-sited, multidirectional, and sociohistorically contingent” set of practices and processes.
TCM is a system of knowledge of healing “made through—rather than prior to—various translocal encounters and from discrepant locations” (Zhan, 2009).
TCM arrived first in Canada with the immigration of Chinese workers in the mid-nineteenth century. In The Concubines Children, Denise Chong’s award-winning memoir about her grandmother May-ying’s struggle as an early immigrant in a Vancouver Chinatown, TCM was a consistent thread of daily life: “A line of pickle jars was her medicine cabinet […] For everyday use, to promote circulation, energy and vitality, were […] yuk choy, dong guai, ginseng and various grasses and tree barks” (Chong, 1996). In 1921, of the thirteen families among 2,035 documented Chinese in Toronto, three were herbalists (Chan, 2011). These early Chinese immigrants brought TCM with them in their suitcases, minds, and bodies in the form of texts, dried goods, seeds and more importantly—their rituals, practices, and memories. In Canada, herbal medicine and acupuncture are the most commonly practiced components of TCM.
Source: Jenn Ko
Today, TCM is no longer restricted to immigrants and a few rare believers—70% of the Canadian population has tried TCM at least once. In the GTA, dozens of TCM colleges and clinics serve Chinese and non-Chinese populations. The usage of TCM is also modernizing; consumers take capsules, tablets, and tinctures in lieu of the traditional process of brewing and drinking herbal tea.
Throughout its history, TCM has been used across socioeconomic identifications and demarcations. The rural poor of 1960s Hong Kong practiced TCM in daily life as affordable and accessible healthcare. The educated and more prosperous Chinese immigrants in present day GTA practice TCM as a part of their culture as they can optimize their health with the combined usage of Western medicine. The participants in my study use TCM as ritual health care in daily life and as medicine to address acute illness. In the GTA, immigrants connect to Chineseness through daily life performances of TCM for self and for family.
Source: Jenn Ko
The history of TCM in the GTA is intensely political. The evolution of TCM from those early ancient practices and texts has been affected by the geopolitical events in China in the early 20th century, from the conception of Chinese Western integrated medicine in the 1950s, to the abolition and persecution of TCM in the Cultural Revolution, to the modern system of combined traditional Chinese and Western medicine. It has been influenced by the politics surrounding the handover of Hong Kong in 1997, which would bring a ‘classic’ iteration of TCM to the GTA. It was influenced by Ontario regulation and the uneven negotiations of Chineseness within Chinese individuals and communities in the GTA. TCM has a translocal history influenced by capitalism, communism, movement and diaspora.
Traditional Chinese medicine is fiercely personal. It is a set of embodied practices rich with the subjective narratives of family and community, of personhood and identity.
TCM is embodied memory, affective practice, and transmitted knowledge—a basic part of Chinese diasporic life.
The heuristic examination of narratives of TCM practice in Chinese individuals in Hong Kong and the GTA opens a discursive space to explore diaspora, affect, and performance in their lived experiences. Hong Kong Chinese Canadian individuals living between Asia and Canada use their memories of TCM to perform, negotiate and transmit cultural capital. Chineseness is narrated in individuals, performed in familial roles, and negotiated in TCM communities.
People and practice are rooted in specific historical narratives influenced by real political, social, and economic events. They adapt as they traverse spatiotemporal routes. Both have the potential for healing and harm, flow multi-directionally, and are inscribed by generational memory. Like the Hong Kong Chinese diaspora in Toronto and Chinese Canadian diaspora in Hong Kong, traditional Chinese medicine also straddles constructed narratives of East and West. Placing these two elements—Chinese diaspora and traditional Chinese medicine—on either side of an imagined, conceptual mirror may coax out the interesting and meaningful differences and similarities in the myriad of reflections which comprise cultural identity.
This post is Part One of a five-part series, where I use a blog format to present and elaborate themes less-explored in my M.A. in History thesis.
References
Chan, Arlene. The Chinese in Toronto from 1878: From outside to inside the circle. Toronto, Dundurn: 2011.
Chong, Denise. The Concubine’s Children: Portrait of a Family Divided. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.
Zhan, Mei. Other-worldly: Making Chinese medicine through transnational frames. Durham, Duke University Press, 2009.
This is a short audio story about the entrepreneurial spirit of Catherine Chambers, soap maker/social worker extraordinaire, that I put together for a job application. She’s the owner of Let’s Make It, a company that offers collaborative experiences and teaches DIY skills. On top of being a business owner, Catherine is also a mother and a graduate student at OISE.
Thank you to Catherine for speaking to me on such short notice (1 day!). Thank you to my good friend Alicia, also a future teacher, for introducing me to Catherine.
I wonder why my partner and roommate of one year wrote a love letter to an ex of two years prior, and let me read it. This word .docx populated with rosy memories, gentle language and subversive desire for response was my eviction notice. His words for her pushed me from our shared apartment, my relationship with a beloved cat, and eventually, from the muffled sadness that was our life. Muffled and ‘ours’ no more.
I wonder why I resisted the sinking feeling for two months. Perhaps it was a fear of being regarded in emotional inferiority that led me to mask the misery of love lost in jolliness to my friends, my family, my self. Public, digital personas of the online universe— the near and dear and the faraway and famous— shouted happiness at me. A synesthesia of sorts translated their bright, carefree smiles into a heard command: Do Not Sulk! It took two moons and two bottles of wine with a waxing crescent until I told them to fuck off.
I wonder for how long my sense of freedom and relief will be speckled with longing for the past. These days I desire to be only mine, but if I were honest with myself, I also desire to be desired. Moments flush with opportunity seem to be bookended by me staring at a notification-free phone. I should keep busy. I should read more. I should work more. Maximizing productivity is considered medicinal in this state of the heart, but my research into traditional Chinese medicine teaches instead of the healing effects of optimizing balance. The irony.
It is a wonder how the unspooling of these words have calmed me. Many have said wise words on the act of writing. The English playwright David Hare said, ‘The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.’ I believe I am fortunate that the end of my relationship coincided with the end of the data collection stage of my research. It is a life-event of boundless bounding, an in-between rich with creative force. This is the sense of wonder and these are the affects I am approaching with as I embark on writing the first draft of my M.A. thesis.
“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair–the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.”
—Stephen King
The search for truths continues. Thank you for indulging me!
“Slaves, once sold as chattel, can become gradually humanized, personified, and reenchanted by the investiture of humanity.” – Arjun Appadurai
Appadurai first introduced the idea that the distinctions between persons and things oscillate and undulate throughout various temporal spaces in 1986 in a collection of essays titled The Social Life of Things. This idea, mentioned in passing in my previous blog post, dissolves the perceived binaries between commodity and singularity; person or thing.
Take for instance, the ethnographic museum’s relationship with indigenous peoples. Over time, the social trajectory of these peoples has shifted from being ethnographic material to source communities, as we call them today.
However, this discourse is not on the question of whether indigenous persons and human remains should be objects of entertainment or education in a museum. That question has already been answered with a clear and resounding “NO.” This discourse is on whether animals should be objects of entertainment or education in a natural history museum. This question tries to look for a similar negative affirmation that society can work towards for a distant temporal future.
As a caveat: this argument is in no way attempting to reduce indigenous peoples to the cheap commodity level society currently attributes to animals. Rather, my argument attempts to raise animals to the level of singularity enjoyed by humans. Obviously and most importantly, colonial institutions needs to first engage every available mind and dollar to foster reconciliation with Inuit, First Nations, and Metis peoples living on the land our settler society today calls Canada.
Observing the Museum of Nature in Ottawa as a critical museum visitor, as described and theorized by Lindauer, I found myself repeatedly examining the relationship between human curator, human visitor, and animal body and comparing it to the relationships of recent past between white curator, white visitor, and minority body or image.
The taxidermied and live animal displays, or as the museum calls them, live specimens are presented and received as indisputable fact. There were no obvious counterpoint discussions that explained the supposed ‘welfare’ or ‘ideal treatment’ of the encased animals.
A director of content for the museum discussed the evolving relationship between human and nature as one of the key focal points to integrate into the visitor experience, in accordance to evolving museum theory and societal norms. Humans as nature, she said. Nature as value — and not the sense of economic value, but that nature in itself has value. From my perspective this statement was a stark contradiction of the blissfully ignorant museum displays.
Lindauer, Margaret. “The critical museum visitor.” New museum theory and practice: An introduction (2006): 201-225.
“Artists, like curators, work on their own, grappling with their attempt to make a world in which to survive…. We are lonely people, faced with superficial politicians, with donors, sponsors…. I think it is here where the artist finds a way to form his own world and live his obsessions. For me, this is the real society.”
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about language, ideas, even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense.”
This summer, I was lucky to be working with the Canadian Tulip Festival as a curatorial assistant to create a small exhibition for the World Tulip Summit in October 2017 and the next Canadian Tulip Festival in May 2018. It was my job to research the history, search for artifacts, and write the exhibit text. The contract was only nine weeks long. If I’m being honest, I felt a little like a fish out of water. Off the stove and into the oven? I’m not great with idioms.
Most of the time, my student job looked like this:
There were few historical materials available to me at the beginning of my contract, as The Festival had recently moved into a small office space at in the Horticulture Building at Lansdowne. I spent the first week reading through a previous archive student’s notes and emailing local museums in hopes they may have some tulip-related artifacts in their collection. There was a noticeable void of material. In desperation, I decided to think out of the box and put out a call on Reddit Ottawa…
“To all tulip festival goers past and present: Do you have any old knick knacks, posters, pictures, or artifacts from past Tulip Festivals that I can use for a project? I’d give you full credit for your items. Putting together an exhibit of sorts.”
Redditor and local historian Dave Allston replied with a clue that would lead me on a journey to the Reid Farmhouse on Sherbrooke and Reid, just off of Carling Avenue, and to some difficult curatorial decisions. The Farmhouse is a dusty, forgotten-in-time structure slated for demolition built in 1865, and at one point, it was the only three-story home in Kitchissippi. This makes the farmhouse one of the oldest buildings in the Ottawa region. Astonishingly, it also happens to be the storage space of a decade’s worth of Canadian Tulip Festival materials!
The Reid Farmhouse has been renovated and reconstructed so many times, it was unable to attain a heritage designation.
One room of materials. An historian’s wildest dream/nightmare!
Unfortunately, because the building has been modified at various times, the structure could not attain a heritage building designation. The Reid farmhouse will maintain a small portion of its first floor and be revamped to better fit the needs of the Kitchisippi community. Moreover, because the Canadian Tulip Festival experiences a high staff turnover, the artifacts in storage were almost entirely forgotten about.
On two separate occasions, I swallowed my vehicular fears and got behind the wheel of a coworker’s old pick up truck that has neither air condition nor interior car lights. Together, we sifted through dusty photo albums, financial reports, posters, objects and rat-droppings; selected the most important materials; and hauled boxes and boxes of them to back to headquarters. Today, our little Horticulture Building office is pressed for elbow room.
I was also faced with (what I think is) the classic curatorial dilemma. My original problem of not having enough materials was now the inverse — I had an enormous excess. How to go through it all?
After consultation we decided to write a story about the tulip as a symbol of international friendship, using images and objects that were shared between Canada and our friendship countries around the world. My favourite object is a wooden Japanese flower vase, a gift from the Japanese delegation in 1997. The vase will be shown with a fresh ikebana flower arrangement, created in collaboration with the Ottawa Ikebana Chapter.
UPDATE:
Here’s a sneak peak of a couple of interesting finds. See the finished exhibit at the World Tulip Summit at the Westin Hotel in Ottawa October 4-7, 2017.
I can hardly thank the Canadian Tulip Festival enough for giving me the space to learn independently and trusting me to take on this project. After these short nine weeks, I have a renewed appreciation for the tulip, and the kind people who take their time to ask people to stop and smell the flowers.
Promotional posters from the 80s when the festival was called “Festival of Spring”.
A carved sculpture from Skagit Valley in the United States. 1999.
Jenn Leah Ko 