THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, JUNE 28, 2020 SR 7CHICAGO‘‘
T
HE motherland is by your
side,” read the message
printed on the plastic envel-
ope. The characters were set
in bright yellow against a crimson back-
ground, the same colors as on China’s na-
tional flag. “Genuine affection from 10,000
miles away.”
This spring, as the novel coronavirus
became a global pandemic, the Chinese
government started sending out care
packages to Chinese students abroad, dis-
tributed by its embassies and consulates.
They contained several face masks, disin-
fectant wipes, a pamphlet on how to pro-
tect oneself from the virus and two pack-
ets of “lianhua qingwen jiaonang” — lotus
flower plague-repellent capsules.
From my studio apartment in Chicago,
which I have barely left for weeks, I looked
up the content of the capsules. No fragrant
summer blossom; the drug’s name is just
a homonym for the two main ingredients,
forsythia and honeysuckle.
I smiled at the screen. “Hello there, old
friends.”
As a young child in China, once, twice,
sometimes three times a month, I would
come down with a cold that would develop
into a cough, and my mother would take
me to the city hospital for traditional Chi-
nese medicine. The friendly, silver-haired
doctor would write down a prescription to
be filled at the pharmacy on the first floor,
where the technicians used a bronze bal-
ancing scale to measure out the exact
amount for each ingredient.
I spent many hours studying those pre-
scriptions, spotting tiny differences be-
tween each visit: three extra grams of
this, a little bit less of that. I memorized
the names of the usual ingredients: gold
and silver flower, fish grass, grand yellow,
ruby sky. They read like a poem.
I admired the handwriting, the long ele-
gant strokes in indigo ink. “Much better
than those of doctors at Western-style
hospitals!” my mother would say. An ele-
mentary-school teacher, she saw penman-
ship as a reflection of character.
Standing in our kitchen, she would care-
fully pour the bag of dried leaves and roots
into a small clay pot whose dusky red ex-
terior had crusted into a grayish brown.
Water was added to just below the open-
ing. As the concoction simmered on the
stove, our apartment would be painted by
a sharp, earthy smell. I would take a deep
breath, swallow the thick, bitter liquid in
as few gulps as possible and clench my
teeth until my stomach settled.
My illness would retreat, slowly. Chi-
nese medicine requires patience, my
mother explained; it mediates opposing
forces in the body, restoring the natural
balance among the organs.
“That sounds like superstition!” I pro-
tested one day. My adolescent mind had
started to question the theory of yin and
yang. The sight of the clay pot brought on
deep shame, about my frailty and my
mother’s backward thinking.
My mother said Chinese medicine has
been passed down by our ancestors
through thousands of years. I pushed
back, citing the great writer Lu Xun,
whose essays and short stories I had read
in my government-issued textbooks. Al-
most a century ago, Lu Xun argued that
traditional Chinese medicine should be
abolished as a practice, though certain
drugs could be retained. He famously quit
medical school in 1906 to pursue litera-
ture: Instead of saving individual bodies,
he would work at rescuing China’s soul.
As the Qing empire crumbled under for-
eign invasions and internal upheaval, in-
tellectuals of Lu Xun’s generation looked
to the West for ways to heal their nation.
They thought that their own cultural her-
itage was terminally ill; modernization
demanded a radical break with the past.
After the Communist takeover in 1949,
traditional Chinese medicine was institu-
tionalized. Folk remedies helped fulfill
both a tangible need — credentialed doc-
tors were scarce — and an ideological
end: That system of knowledge is
quintessentially and uniquely Chinese.
Today, the Chinese government sees a
political opportunity in the continuing
emotional appeal of traditional medicine.
If Chinese people can embrace an Eastern
alternative to Western medicine, they
might also be more likely to accept the
Communist Party’s governance model
and reject liberal democracy and univer-
sal human rights as foreign impositions.
China’s National Health Commission
has included traditional Chinese medicine
as a treatment for Covid-19, despite little
clinical proof that it is effective against thedisease. Herbal formulas are also a potion
for national cohesion.
“The motherland is by your side,” Chi-
na’s Covid-19 care package says. I frown at
the glaring propaganda, then instantly
feel embarrassed by my skeptical disposi-
tion. The slogan is meant to conjure up a
deep longing, a swell of passion. It evokes
intense unease as well.
I remember the moment I received my
first Chinese passport. It was 1998; I was 8
years old. The maroon booklet felt like a
pledge from the state that it would be my
protector. A decade later, I took my pass-
port to the American Consulate in Shang-
hai to apply for a visa to study in America.
I was eager to start a new life then, and
saw that proof of citizenship mostly as a
permit to depart.
By the time I renewed my passport
again three years ago, at the Chinese Con-
sulate in New York, I had started writing
essays critical of Beijing’s authoritarian
politics and was briefly worried, paranoid
or not, that I might encounter trouble with
the bureaucratic process.
Living outside China has allowed me to
gain access to parts of my country’s his-
tory that my government tries to erase —
and it has given me the freedom to ex-
press myself. My words have helped me
reclaim my Chinese identity as a cultural
and linguistic belonging, as an origin
story. I grow more in love with the land I
left as I become more estranged from the
state that represents it.
During a call this spring, my mother
asked if I had picked up one of those
“health bundles” the Chinese government
had been sending to students abroad. You
can buy masks and wipes yourself, she
said, but lotus pills are available only in
China.
I could hear the patriotic pride in her
voice, so I did not remind her that I am no
longer a student, a fact that never regis-
ters. Nor did I point out that if the drug is
at all useful in “opening up lungs” and
“ridding the body of toxins,” as the pack-
aging claims, it should be made available
to more than just Chinese people.
Is the Chinese government suggesting
that Chinese medicine works only on Chi-nese bodies? Or maybe efficacy isn’t the
point at all, if the main purpose of the lotus
pills is to affirm a collective identity.
At a public lecture in mid-April, Dr.
Zhang Wenhong, an infectious disease ex-
pert who led the effort against Covid-19 in
Shanghai, emphasized the importance of
a high-protein diet to boost the immune
system: Parents must prepare “plenty of
milk and plenty of eggs” for their children,
he said. “No congee in the morning.”
Drinking milk is not a Chinese tradi-
tion; online, some called Dr. Zhang’s dis-
missal of congee, our staple breakfast, an
act of “foreign worship.” Fresh dairy was
popularized only in the 20th century, with
the rise of industrialized agriculture and
the drive to build a strong, modern state
after the devastation of war. Milk became
a symbol of progress, and its consumption
an act of patriotism.
“A bottle of milk strengthens a nation!”
my grandfather used to say. “Look at Ja-
pan!” He told me stories about his child-
hood during the Japanese invasion in the
1930s, about ducking under his bed at the
first sound of sirens. In literature from im-
perial China, Japanese pirates had been
referred to as “wokou,” shortie bandits.
Then mass milk consumption lifted the
height of Japan’s people and sped up the
country’s recovery from World War II, or
so the narrative goes.
From as far back as I can remember un-
til I moved out to go to college, my mother
made sure I drank three bowls of milk a
day, one after each meal. She appealed to
my vanity: “Milk whitens the skin!” From
lingerie to sportswear, almost every fash-
ion campaign I saw featured European
models. Beauty products boasted the abil-
ity to bleach and brighten the complexion;
some claimed to contain milk extracts.
By the time I was a teenager, I was the
tallest in my family. Nothing in local cloth-
ing stores suited my oversized frame.
During one fruitless shopping trip, my
mother, exasperated among the racks of
jeans that barely grazed my ankles, asked
the store assistant, “What about Yao
Ming?!” Yao, China’s star basketball play-
er, had just finished another season with
the Houston Rockets.
“Yao Ming does not shop here,” the lady
deadpanned. She looked up at me and
said, smiling, “Study hard and go abroad.
Foreigners are tall.”
For many decades, while China was still
underdeveloped, the best of the country —
be that students, young professionals or
manufactured goods — would leave. Find-
ing a way out was in itself a badge of suc-
cess. The honor grew with the time spent
away. Returning could be seen as an ad-
mission of failure.
In the summer of 2008, a food safety
scandal shook the nation. Products from
China’s major dairy brands were found to
contain melamine, a toxic compound used
to fake a higher protein content. Some
300,000 infants were sickened. Six died.
Chinese parents with means rushed to
purchase foreign-produced milk formula.
I had just finished my third year at col-
lege and was preparing to apply for gradu-
ate school in the United States. Watching
the crisis unfold in the lead-up to the Bei-
jing Olympics carried a particular incon-
gruity: China, for all its flashy splendor,
couldn’t safely feed its babies. Sometimes
emigration is as much about wanting un-
tainted milk as about yearning for a place
to belong.
My mother has agonized over the slow
and frayed response to the coronavirus in
the United States. “White people must
have a stronger immune system. They
drink milk and eat cheese,” she has said,before reminding me to always put on face
covering. “Chinese people wear masks.”
In the first few months of the pandemic,
many in the West saw Covid-19 as a for-
eign disease in a distant land. While some
of us overseas Chinese had started prac-
ticing social distancing and were stocking
up on cleaning supplies, it was business as
usual for almost everyone else. If any-
thing, our precautions seemed to confirm
a pre-existing bias — that the virus af-
fected only Chinese bodies.
“Jiren lixia” is a Chinese idiom that
means to live under someone else’s roof.
When I was little, my mother would men-
tion it to scare me into submission: It was
a warning that were she to abandon me, I
would then endure horrific abuse in an-
other family. When I was about to leave
China, she used it to remind me that I, aChinese person, would never be fully ac-
cepted by a white society. I would have to
live at the margins, begging for scraps.
My life in America has been a record of
proving my mother wrong. I put ice cubes
in my drinks, and the chill does not make
me sick. I completed my doctoral pro-
gram; my female brain does have the ca-
pacity for physics. I sit at tables where I
am the only Chinese woman: I do not
blend in, and I do not want to.
Yet these days “jiren lixia” comes to my
mind often without any prodding from my
mother. The president of the United States
wants to wall in the country against immi-
grants. Relations between my homeland
and my adopted home keep deteriorating.
In the name of national security, the White
House is restricting scientific collabora-
tion with China; in every Chinese student,
it sees a potential spy.
China has become a superpower, and
that has brought not confidence or magna-
nimity, but menace and insecurity. The
country’s expanding wealth and hawkish
posturing conceal a shrinking civic space.
Lu Xun’s writings are disappearing from
textbooks.
Select symbols of traditional culture are
hailed as sacred, even as their historical
context is hollowed out. The government
has been cracking down on religious prac-
tices and ethnic customs, and it is tighten-
ing its grip over Hong Kong. There is only
one politically correct way to be Chinese.
In April, a white reporter eating at a Mc-
Donald’s in my hometown was accosted
by a young man who called him “foreign
trash.” When I read that story I felt inun-
dated with guilt, as I often do when I read
news about China. I know it is egotistic to
assume the moral burden of a nation. I
also know that there is no other place
whose actions I feel both so responsible
for and so helpless about.
Last month, the municipal government
in Beijing announced plans to criminalize
the “defaming or slander” of traditional
Chinese medicine. Bad-mouthing
acupuncture or herbal remedies could
amount to “picking quarrels and provok-
ing trouble,” an offense in the penal code
that covers neighborhood brawls as well
as political dissent.
“The motherland is by your side.”
But what is left of a person if she doesn’t
have a country? And what is left of a coun-
try that cannot accept foreign bodies or
unruly minds? The China I carry in me is
not only the country as it is, but also China
as it was, has never been and could still be.Lotus Pills and Other Gifts From China
ILLUSTRATIONS BY INA JANG; PHOTOGRAPHS BY GETTY IMAGES.OPINIONBY YANGYANG
CHENGA particle physicist
and a postdoctoral
research associate
at Cornell
University.
Herbal formulas are also a potion
for national cohesion.