Tragic but funny

Further Blogservations:

Or, Why the US is Fat and Sick (Compared to the Rest of the World).
Everyone in the office in Shanghai has been coughing up a storm, myself especially--who wouldn't, the air is basically brown and the tops of the skyscrapers are shrouded in a haze of *something*. Last Monday I asked Xi, the head of marketing who's desk is closest to mine, what she'd done over the weekend. "You know," she replied, "stayed home...tried to get rid of my cough." Xi lived in the UK for a while and her English is exceptional.

"Oh," I ask, "What did you take?"
She hesitates for a moment. "You know, in China, we use some food as medicine. My mother made me special drink...it has...pear...mushroom....some sweet (candy), and a, how do you say, a type of medicine juice. Chinese cough syrup!" Then yesterday, around the end of the day someone starting handing out sweets around the office (Xi keeps a seemingly neverending supply of cough drops that appear whenever I start coughing), and on the packet I noticed, written over and over in big letters, VITAMIN C. Melinda, the other Western Intern and Larry's niece, said, "doesn't this company make cough drops? Is this candy or cough drops?" They were lime flavoured, soothing on the throat, and doubtless great for the Vitamin C levels.

And it got me thinking back. In Costa Rica, when one of the staff was sick, they made him drink something whose main ingredient seemed to be cinnamon until he got better. In Korea last summer, the Jim Je Ban, the public bath, was not a luxury or just a way to keep clean but a health institution that you would visit weekly for the same reasons you brush your teeth each day. Likewise, acupuncture and massage have health connotations. And when we order into the office, I've twice now pointed at a picture on the take-out menu only to have Xi say, "I do not think that will be good for cough, it's too spicy."

Colonial Brian goes "Ah, how quaint! Folklore!" while Sceptic Brian makes unfavourable comparisons to homeopathy and remembers the words of Robbie, my chemist roommate from first year: "I don't understand people who are against taking pills but drink all these teas. It's all the same at a chemical level! The pills just distill them and give you more of the same good thing." But I can't help thinking there is more than that. Somehow, there is a world of difference between the hippy who drinks green tea (for the polyphenols and catechins! totally good for your health!) and eats Big Macs and the Chinese office worker who tells me I shouldn't even order something spicy because I want to look after my cough. It's a difference of categorization, or a nominal difference or a question of norms or somesuch structural BS that I normally dismiss as impractical and academic but does actually affect the way people act. Here, it's a question of how people relate to their bodies and to their health.

Ken Robinson says of academics, "they view their bodies as a way to get their heads to meetings" and that we "educate from the waist up...then above the neck...and slightly to the left." This slots in nicely with Descartes dualism, the idea that the body and mind are categorically different and that our bodies are mostly useful as vessels for our minds. And I would argue that this conceptual separation manifests itself in the way we treat our bodies. They probably need some sustenance and some exercise, yennow, at least a base level, but beyond that we'd really rather be watching TV or typing away at the laptop. But in China it's a common sight in offices and even just in the street in the morning to see people in groups and alone exercising and stretching as part of their daily routine--again, like brushing your teeth. It's team-building and it's brain-awakening and generally 'good for you'. I think there is a lot more of a sense, not only here but outside of the 'West' in general, of the delicate balance of our bodies (did the Greeks and medieval scholars have this with the idea of 'balancing the humours'?) and the fact that EVERYTHING we do affects them. It's a two way street--certain medicines are foods, but all food is medicine--you don't want to eat anything too spicy if you've got a cough!

What could be the cause of this? Moving from rampant speculation to rampant speculation, I'd hazard a guess that generally harsher conditions, harder living, and a greater closeness to manual labour, as well as just the sheer LACK of ability to fix something if it does go wrong, all contribute to the sense that anything you plug into the body's equation will come out the other end. We have weight loss pills and anxiety pills and cold pills, indoor gym memberships and holidays to help us 'relax when we get too stressed' and paid sick leave. All of these wonders of the modern age allow us, somehow, to be lenient, to be lax when it comes to taking care of ourselves on a day-to-day basis. For us, the very meaning of the word 'medicine' focuses on 'treatment' rather than 'prevention'.

Which isn't to say that everyone in China doesn't smoke (universally considered healthy for you, by the way, until maybe 150 years ago) and have horrible health problems, just that the way in which they CONCEIVE of their problems seems somewhat different to a Western mindset. And sure, we are starting to see, with food especially, the (re?)emergence of smoothies and health food stores and organic movements--but even look at the rhetoric for these! They market themselves as 'good for you', sure, but its not just 'good for you', its 'good for you COMPARED TO xyz'--still the rhetoric is of treatment, though in this case maybe of a more society-wide ill, rather than simply 'harmony within the body' detached from any movement or stigma (F***ng vegetarians and hippies! Get off my lawn!).

I'm sure a lot of this is wrong, but hey, it's a theory! I'd love to hear thoughts from people who know what they're talking about. And, in my own defense, I'll leave you with the words of UK comedian Eddie Izzard: "There was Socrates, he was great, he invented questioning. Before Socrates, no questioning. Everyone just sorta went 'yeah, I suppose so.'...and Aristotle, Aristotle said the sun goes around the Earth--wrong! Wrong...But in his day you didn't have to prove a theory...they went 'well done! That's a theory! That's fantastic. Just a few photos, alright...'...and Leonardo da Vinci invented a helicopted that *did not work*--and so did I! "