Appropriation & Context in Chinese Medicine & Martial Art
“Are you a fairy or are you a mosquito?”
I was asked this in a hand conditioning seminar via Zoom, learning a set of exercises to benefit both my Kung Fu and Tui Na (Chinese Medical Massage) practices. Coming on the heels of the story of how these arts survived trials such as the cultural revolution, with teachers risking execution for practicing and passing on their skills, the message was clear: you can either be the fairy, using these arts to sprinkle pixie dust on every person you come into contact with, including your teachers, enriching and honoring the martial and healing arts themselves. Or, you can be the mosquito, simply taking, taking, receiving benefit but not cultivating the soil that has grown the food you are being nourished by.
As someone who 2/3 of their work is comprised of traditional arts, taught, evolved and embedded in the East Asian American community, I have been obviously taking a lot of time to reflect on how our industries are (or are not) giving back to our predecessors and the communities that have brought us not only an improved well-being, but even our paychecks. And I hate to say it, but I cannot sit here and say that we are the fairies. I’m not sure we are the mosquitos either…but we could be doing a lot better. To promote cross-culturall understanding, rather than, in some cases, profiting off of exotification. Whether you agree with my ideas or not — if you work in acupuncture, qigong, or Chinese martial arts, we should all be taking more time to reflect on our place within the bigger picture of belonging and safety in our society.
What’s the Problem?
Many Acupuncturists are aware that in 1974, a famous Chinese-American Acupuncturist named Miriam Lee was arrested for practicing acupuncture. I always had wondered why we only heard of acupuncturists getting arrested in the 70’s when Chinese immigrants had been coming to the United States in large numbers for over a hundred years at that point. Thanks to @pokeacupuncture for doing a bit of digging — we now know that in 1913 she was arrested under a law related to treating the sick without a license, which had never been applied to acupuncture before. Why then, was it applied at that time? On the heels of an NY Times article that helped to popularize acupuncture in mainstream America, a group of (White American) UCLA dropouts who had been studying acupuncture for 2 years positioned themselves as the face of acupuncture in America. How did they do this? They created and elected themselves to a “National Acupuncture Association”, and used their connection to a senator to “pass new legislature in CA–AB1500–which stated that acupuncture could be practiced, but only for scientific research, in an approved medical school”. While acupuncture schools, if they mention this, often teach this AB1500 landmark law as a positive thing, in reality they subjected actually-trained acupuncturists from China and other East Asian countries to criminal charges and took full control over the acupuncture licensing process. Even Ju Gim Shek — the teacher of the cohort that named themselves the NAA — was arrested. While charges were eventually dismissed, the cohort that was responsible for the arrest of their own teacher created the original curriculum for acupuncture schools in America and the licensing process that has evolved into what it is today. This fight for control over Traditional East Asian Medicine continues today, with physical therapists fighting to license cupping and “dry needling” and Graston technique copy and pasting Gua Sha therapy and selling its licensure for thousands of dollars. Is this anything other than appropriation?
Problems with Appropriation
The most obvious problem here is, of course, fairness and exploitation. But even if we put that down for a moment, what else could we see as a potential issue with this sort of appropriative behavior?
Context
One of the biggest problems in Westerners taking a limited understanding of East Asian Healing or Martial Arts and attempting to profit off of it is that being a Westerner, we lack context in a few ways. For example, the concept of Qi. In the West, acupuncturists are commonly asked for a definition of Qi, and many of us try to give one. However, Qi is not one thing — as explained before, to even speak of it as a “thing” may be altogether wrong. If you listen to a Chinese acupuncturist speak about Qi, or Yin, Yang, and many other concepts as well, you’ll notice that they’re using Qi to describe several different things. Schools teach a definition of Qi, because it’s easy to digest for a student, but in reality there are different types of Qi, different characters for Qi, it can mean anything from the vital energy running through us all to the amount of air in a tire. If we are missing that context, we might be thinking that the secret of enlightenment can be found in a bike pump (just looked; didn’t see it).
As Westerners, because of our language and cultural differences, we get a small slice of the giant pie of these arts. This isn’t inherently a problem. If we take someone with limited understanding of Western nutrition science — also known as your high school track coach — them knowing that their athletes need to eat some balance of protein and carbs, veggies, fats, etc. is a good thing. They can pass this information along and everyone wins.
So why might it be a problem in the case of knowledge from a different culture? It is when that small slice of the pie is mistaken for the whole thing. Or, that small slice of the pie is copy/pasted into a different pie, which does not give the same results. I am reading articles by medical qigong doctors or even acupuncturists who talk about raw food supplements and drinking x number of glasses of water per day — we can explain some of the problem with this later, but sorry, they’ve missed the bigger picture here if that’s their angle. It just shows a limited understanding of applied Chinese Medicine, in context. I heard a podcast this morning with a practitioner hawking Qigong as thousands of years old — some practices in your set are, perhaps, while some are probably invented in the past few decades. The term wasn’t even around until the 50’s! It drives me NUTS when people talk about the Wu Xing as 5 elements — as if static elements representing seasons and channels in the body? They are movements! Phases! Maybe that’s another article…there is a reason, I do not start my own business teaching alchemy or other deeper aspects of meditative and martial arts — I know a couple things, due to some amazing teachers and practices to reflect on the teachings I’ve learned from them. But I’m also exquisitely aware that I have blind spots because I lack cultural context. This is true for ALL of us who aren’t fluent and haven’t spent time abroad in Asia. We do not have a big enough seed from the contextual tree to plant these arts in North America on its own — we NEED cross cultural interaction in order for our arts to grow. But, if you have a small slice of the pie and think you have the whole thing — would you know any better?
Safety
Ah, safety. Maybe it is easiest to explain how safety is impacted by cultural appropriation by the following story:
The first martial arts school I ever attended was led by a passionate man we’ll call Instructor C. C was again, very enthusiastic, so when I showed up looking to learn a bit of Qigong to soften out my body from all the hard track & field training I was doing at the time, he also showed me some fundamental martial art drills — I was hooked, so I signed up. 6 months later, we were practicing something called iron palm for the first time. For those that don’t know, iron palm is pretty much what you’d think. Slamming your hand against a bag for an hour in order to eventually strengthen it to be as hard as iron, the practitioner may start with rice or beans and then move to progressively harder mediums to eventually be hitting a bag filled with the practice’s namesake. In most schools, ours being no exception, the practitioner usually uses an herbal formula called Die Da Jiou (“hit-fall wine) after practice in order to prevent bruising, and our instructor was sure to emphasize that it was his “secret formula”. For the hour, I really enjoyed it, however, that night and the next day, I noticed that my hands had swollen up so bad that, as a differently-abled student in my first period PE class the next day said, my hands “looked like tomatoes.” On top of that, I was peeing straight blood for 48 hours and felt horribly sick for that time. So, a new experience for me.
On coming to practice the next day, I mentioned the effects of last night’s practice to our instructor. He told me that urinating blood was “because the herbs move blood”. His remedy? “You should practice this more often.” Not really trusting this answer — he did not respond when I asked if he or any other students had had a similar result — I asked an acupuncturist, herbalist and martial artist what they thought of the answer — all three called BS. As an acupuncturist and herbalist now, the herbs definitely move blood, but I have never seen a blood moving formula cause bloody urine. It is far more likely that the accumulation of trauma and broken blood vessels in the hands had to find a way out of the body. Usually, an impact needs to occur closer to the kidneys to cause this unpleasant surprise, but in my case I guess enough blood in the hands and it’ll pass that route as well!
So, I don’t think I have to elaborate too much on why this is problematic — his answer was either completely misinformed or attempting to gaslight me. And could have led to some serious injuries if I had followed his wishes to keep practicing that next night. So what are the signs of appropriation that made this situation dangerous?
- “Chinese Martial Art” School with no connection to Chinese community, whether martial or at large, thus no herbalist or Chinese Medical practitioner for this instructor to actually seek out advice from if he didn’t know an answer to a medically-related question.
- No humility, in the face of limitations of his knowledge. A man with a small part of the aforementioned pie, answering questions as if he understood the whole scope of Martial/Healing Arts. Just making it up as he goes.
- Exotification of the arts — by labeling this a “secret formula” he was taking it out of its natural context as a common selection of herbs. Any kind of Die Da Jiou recipe has very effective, but not magical, properties, and like any healing tool it has its limits. However the whole branding of the school was that “these practices can heal anything”, devoid of any context. This marketing makes the rest of our martial arts and even healing world look like the hack that he projected into the worl. In some ways it kind of fetishizes the entire culture, making what is really practical, grounded wisdom into this completely esoteric woo-woo stuff. I’ve found that most teachers that portray their teachings as magical only do so because they lack the practical understanding to communicate their methods and subsequent effects directly.
Although this is the tip of the iceberg, similar lack of humility moments have caused plenty of accidents and coverups in the healing community, as well. Why does this story fit in with cultural appropriation? “The act of taking something for one’s own use, typically without the owner’s permission”…and the “without permission” part leads to the lack of humility and guidance that is the root of the tree, so that the art can no longer flourish and grow.
Do our industries play a role in perpetuating racism and violence?
That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? When we see the incidents of the past year, as Westerners who benefit from these gifts passed down from people who people literally risked life and limb to keep them alive, how do we relate to violence, prejudice, and hatred towards people who look like them? I’m not sure I have answers yet — but I feel quite certain that we should be asking questions, of our industry and ourselves. This blog post is late — perhaps it should have been written last March, when hospital staffers would literally run off of the elevator when our (predominantly Asian-American) acupuncture wing would step on. However, since hatred, ignorance and greed are not going to disappear in our lifetimes, I suppose it is better late than never.
Part II of this article will focus on common (mis)appropriations, exotifications and over-mystifications we see in Chinese Medicine, Martial Arts and even Daoist practices, and how to spot them.
