Confused about China? Having trouble making sense of Beijing and its people? Our guru, Auntie Wang, is here to bridge the cultural divide with candid answers to your most challenging questions about life in the capital.
Q: Dear Auntie Wang,
I recently heard my colleagues complaining they have shanghuo, the Chinese condition of suffering excessive internal heat that sometimes results in cold sores and dehydration. One friend complained that he can't eat spicy hot pot anymore because that was what gave him shanghuo. Is this a real "condition" that can be treated by traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), and why has it been overlooked by the Western medical profession?
A: One criterion to really prove you are Chinese is whether you believe in, have suffered from and constantly fear shanghuo. I don't quite know how to explain it. How does a child learn their mother tongue? We don't know what it means, but instinct allows us to identify it when we come across it.
Where does this "inner fire" come from? It seems to be directly linked to a wide range of symptoms. Constipation? Shanghuo. Pimples? Shanghuo. Inflamed nasal or oral cavities? Shanghuo. It's a vivid diagnosis when dehydration is so bad your throat is burning and you feel you can breathe fire.
I remember the ordeal I went through trying (and failing) to clear up my pimples. It might be seen as a normal phase of puberty closely related to growth hormones and genes, according to Western medicine. But in TCM, it's blamed on an ambiguous, intangible condition.
An old Chinese doctor once told me that my lungs and stomach were "too hot." Apparently, it caused my skin anomaly and an unwanted reemergence of my adolescence. I was told to avoid eating red meat, seafood and spicy food because they were, get this, fawu. Now, here's another Chinese term that doesn't lend itself well to translation. Basically, eating high-protein food (or fawu) can worsen acne or cause inflammation. I was also prescribed a bunch of TCM capsules that promised to put out my "inner fire" and cool down my "hot intestines."
So there I was, going almost vegetarian for years, missing out on all kinds of delicacies. As for my pimples, they seemed to come and go more in sync with my menstrual cycle, mood swings and stress than with the medicine I was taking or the food I wasn't eating.
One theory goes that TCM remedies don't really cause any harm, but they don't really do any good either. Most of the time, they just buy you time and patience for your ailment to run its course. That's why you often hear people profess that "TCM works slower than Western medicine." What a brilliant excuse for a placebo.
If Western medicine is backed by modern science and hard evidence, TCM is backed by hundreds of millions of stubborn Chinese people who firmly believe that something that can't be seen or even named is making them ill. Who says Chinese people lack faith?