TCM story in the LA Times

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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-chinese8oct08,1,5975332.story

 

The wisdom of another culture

 

Exhibit offers 'a window for the mainstream public to try to

understand traditional Chinese medicine.'

 

By Mary Engel, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

October 8, 2007

 

To step into the Gin Herb store -- or Wing On Tong, as it is known

to its Cantonese-speaking patrons -- is to enter both another

country and another century.

 

Behind a long counter fronting a wall of wooden drawers, fourth-

generation herbalists in the family-owned store measure and mix

leaves and roots, mushrooms and minerals, perfuming the air with the

aroma of musty ginseng and sweet licorice.

 

The small shop on the corner of North Spring and Ord streets is the

oldest continuously operated Chinese pharmacy in Los Angeles.

 

Opened around 1900, it moved to that location, in what many locals

still call New Chinatown, after the city condemned and razed the

original settlement in the 1930s to build Union Station.

 

From the turn of the last century through today, Chinese immigrants

and their descendants have tended to other immigrants and to curious

non-Asians with teas and herbs, needles and massage. An exhibit

opening Saturday at the downtown Center For Healthy Communities uses

photos and video from Gin Herb and two other Chinatown shops, plus

other exhibits, to illustrate the imported tradition's history and

evolution in Los Angeles.

 

The exhibit offers " a window for the mainstream public to try to

understand traditional Chinese medicine, " said Lan Ong, whose family

runs one of the featured shops, Wing Hop Fung Ginseng and China

Products on North Broadway. That window shows how a tradition is

practiced in ways as varied as the waves of immigrants that brought

it to these shores.

 

Wing Hop Fung -- the name means " Together Forever Prosper " -- is

three blocks and a century apart from Gin Herb. Ong's parents opened

the store in 1985 after arriving in the United States six years

earlier as part of the influx of Chinese Vietnamese " boat people. "

Their own parents had settled in Vietnam after fleeing Communism in

China.

 

Wing Hop Fung has the same musty-sweet scent as Gin Herb and a

matching wall of wooden drawers fronted by a counter and scales.

 

But the two-story, 20,000-square-foot Chinatown emporium and a

second huge facility in Monterey Park are modern one-stop department

stores where locals can also shop for clothes, dishes and housewares

and tourists can find trinkets and antiques. The company's mail-

order business ships teas and herbs throughout the country and

overseas and exports American-grown ginseng to China.

 

The third shop featured in the exhibit -- CHA, or Chinese Healing

Arts -- is at Chinatown's North Broadway edge but could as well be

in Silver Lake or Santa Monica. Co-owner Sora Lee, who emigrated 15

years ago from Korea, opened the shop in 2006 as a tea house that

also offers tonics, acupuncture and reflexology. In contrast to the

clutter and clamor of both Gin Herb and Wing Hop Fun, CHA is spare

and serene, as much New Age spa as ancient apothecary. Its customers

tend to be whites or English-speaking Asians.

 

" A lot of people these days know about alternative medicine, " Lee

said. " It's trendy. "

 

When Wing Hop Fung opened in 1985, its customers were for the most

part other Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants, said Ong, who was then

5 years old. But in the 22 years since its opening, Ong said, the

number of non-Asian customers has risen, as has the breadth of Asian

customers.

 

" It's huge in the Korean community -- they're asking for medicines,

even [using] their Chinese names, " Ong said. " We have a lot of

Japanese coming in. Even a lot of Southeast Asians -- from

Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore. "

 

A 2005 report by the national Institute of Medicine estimated that

15 million adults in the United States take herbal remedies or high-

dose vitamins. Regardless of nationality, customers seek relief from

chronic pain or insomnia, fatigue or strained muscles. They want to

lose weight and rejuvenate aging faces.

 

Different as they are, each shop follows the basic tenets of

traditional Chinese medicine to treat such complaints.

 

Where Western medicine is focused on symptoms and diagnoses, Eastern

medicine looks for an imbalance among the body, mind and spirit,

said Suellen Cheng, a curator for the Chinese American Museum of Los

Angeles and an advisor to the exhibit.

 

At a first visit, a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine

will frequently spend 45 minutes to an hour -- a luxury by Western

standards -- talking to a patient to figure out what herbs or

treatments will restore balance.

 

" It's a gradual way of healing, and takes a little bit longer, "

Cheng said. " You brew teas to drink three or four times a day. "

 

Traditional Chinese medicine also focuses on prevention. During a

recent visit to Gin Herb, Cheng said many customers were there

before the flu season started for astragalus, ginseng and other

herbs believed to boost immunity.

 

The exhibit does not examine controversies surrounding traditional

Chinese medicine, such as its use of bear bile, tiger claws and

other animal and plant parts banned by international treaty but

available on the black market. Nor does it delve into how many

ingredients are unregulated and how many therapies untested, at

least by Western standards.

 

The exhibit is meant to be less a policy debate than a social

history, said co-curator Sojin Kim, an anthropologist who works for

the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo.

 

Sabrina Lynn Motley, a folklorist who co-curated the exhibit and

oversaw an earlier one on Latin American botanicas, agreed. " It's

about creating and regenerating a sense of community, through

healing and wellness, " she said.

 

The Center for Health Communities, at 1000 N. Alameda Street, was

created by the private nonprofit California Endowment to build

coalitions between nonprofit health groups and local communities.

The exhibit, " From the Abundant Pharmacy: Traditional Chinese

Medicine in Los Angeles' Chinatown, " is part of the center's Healthy

Neighborhood Festival, which will run from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and

feature health screenings and information as well as performances

and global music.