An Encounter in the TCM Twilight Zone

For those of us Chinese medicine practitioners from the West who come to Asia to deepen our understanding of Chinese culture and traditional medicine, we are always living with the knowledge that no matter how much Chinese we learn, we'll be lucky, extremely lucky, if our Chinese gets to the level of a middle-school punk (a Chinese one, that is). And of course, once our Chinese gets to a certain level, we also know that there's a hell of a lot of Chinese Medicine we'll never be able to learn, either.

Nevertheless, we continue. We don't get any real recognition (besides daily encouragement from locals, who, god bless them, are impressed with "nihao" and "xiexie"). We study hard, writing characters late at night, reading books of Chinese idioms. A whole new world opens up to us, and this is what keeps us going. You do it because it is a passion, for the intrinsic rewards.

I walk into a TCM clinic near my house and I notice there's a "Weight Reduction Clinic for Women". I ask a secretary about it and she points me to the woman standing near the entrance to the room where they do the actual weight reduction. She's in her early 30s, pretty, but looks bored and a little tired.

So, I tell her that I have a license in the States and ask her to tell me about the treatment principles involved in helping people lose weight. She tells me more, mostly that they are using needles to do this, not herbs so much. The acupuncture reduces appetite. I'm actually not that interested in helping people lose weight with acupuncture, in the same way that I'm not interested in giving them "acupuncture facials" or "acupuncture breast-lifts" (they do exist, just ask Jolin, the famous Taiwanese pop singer). Just curious.

The doctor has some questions for me. She asks me about the licensing process in the States, about people's perception of Chinese Medicine there. I tell her how I changed careers to study Chinese Medicine, that there is indeed a lot of interest in the States.

She tells me how she finds it curious how others switch from mainstream careers into Chinese Medicine. She tells me of some Japanese classmates of hers who were corporate types in the 20s and then, after burnout, decided to study Chinese Medicine.

"It's so strange. I've been a doctor for ten years and I find it so boring. I don't make much money. And I don't have any marketable skills--I could never work at a big company. It's hard to understand why people would want to do this. I wish I could do their office jobs," she says.

I do not miss the irony of this conversation. Here I am in China, after a four-year program in Chinese Medicine and a year and a half of formal Chinese study, still struggling to improve my Chinese so I can learn more medicine. If I study Chinese for the next years and then study traditional medicine for another five or ten years, who knows if I will approach this doctor's level of medical knowledge. I've given up (with joy, you might say) the six-figure income nice house I would have had by now if I had stayed in the corporate world, and am living like a student halfway across the world to do this.

"I guess I've had the benefit of actually living that life, and then making a conscious decision to let it go and follow my dream of studying Chinese Medicine," I tell her. So, I don't have any regrets. I guess what a friend told me a long time ago is true: "We've all got to kill our own snakes."

I like to think I inspire people. So, who knows, maybe I've inspired this young Chinese doctor here in Shanghai to go to business school so she can pursue her dream of working at an office in front of a computer to make the big bucks.