Breathe Easy
Abstract
At first glance, she is a typical student. She looks up to doctors, argues with her mom, and has relationship problems. But when she develops an unexplainable respiratory illness, the doctors run out of answers, and she loses faith in what she always looked up to.
“Breathe Easy” is a vignette collection telling the story of a nameless young woman who has been pushed her whole life to pursue biomedicine but becomes disillusioned with it when doctors arbitrarily assign labels and prescriptions for her illness. Follow her as she looks for closure and seeks alternative healing to grapple with distrust in biomedicine, an overbearing parent, the loss of a loved one, and relationship violence.
This piece is inspired by my experiences with chest pain and difficulty breathing. Over six years, I have been given many different diagnoses and treatments, arbitrary labels that have rattled my faith in medicine. Although I have stopped treating my illness, my protagonist reflects who I wanted to be: someone who channeled her disillusionment into healing and liberation. While she also experiences distrust in medicine and the turbulence of young adulthood, she represents the possibility of an alternative path toward healing, for anybody who has been let down by people they were supposed to trust.
The form of this piece takes after Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House and Ian Williams’ The Bad Doctor, divided into short excerpts without any rigid chronological order. Other sources include Dr. Li’s Osher and Jean Jackson’s Camp Pain, which introduced me to integrative medicine and critiques of using biomedicine to view pain. I also draw from an interview with my mother, a biomedical professional who has both criticized and embraced alternative medicine in the past.
While I first intended for my piece to reduce disdain for alternative healing, it also helps me come to terms with my experiences, demonstrating that there are avenues, however “unconventional”, to heal and acknowledge my own pain and disillusion without being burdened by them.
Distance
You don’t know when it started. It starts as a seed in your chest, so the air that fills your lungs comes in with a small lisp. But then it becomes a sprout, and its leaves flutter and rattle as the air leaves. But then it becomes a sapling, then a stalk, and it shudders and sways as the air comes in and out until it’s hard to breathe and you can’t get enough air and your whole chest rattles every time you inhale or exhale.
You don’t know when it started. Maybe it’s when you were twelve, when your 外婆, your grandmother, finds it harder to walk to the market and the pharmacy, brew her herbal concoctions on the stove in the cramped kitchen, straighten her back and hold your hand. Maybe it’s a year later, when she’s wheeled into the hospital in a country she doesn’t know even when she spends months looking after her granddaughter there. Maybe it’s when she takes her last breath, and it’s shaky and shallow and you can’t help but breathe in the same way.
You don’t know when it started. Maybe it’s when your mother pushes you to put down the colored pencils and markers and the Harry Potter books and start looking at diagrams of DNA structures, the periodic table, the processes of photosynthesis and aerobic respiration. Maybe it’s when the TV turns off and the yelling turns on with the red marks on the test paper. Maybe it’s when the college admissions pamphlets come and you don’t know why a fourteen year old needs to worry about it but you’re forced to read it anyway and you can’t process the words without forcefully pushing the air in and out.
You don’t know when it started, and you tell that to the doctor. She says it’s just stress (how much stress is there in middle school, anyway?) and sends you home with an inhaler so that you feel better that there’s something you can do. You go again, and this time, she says it’s mild asthma and prescribes you another inhaler. I believed so much in medicine, you want to say. I trusted you. I wanted to be you. You build up your pedestal in my mind with your lab coat and the cell diagrams in the books I had to read. You can’t do anything, can you?
You don’t know when it started, but it gets worse. Your 外婆 is somewhere far, far away, somewhere you don’t know and can’t reach, and she’s not going to come back. The seed in your lungs grows branches so far that you can’t see them anymore, only feel them as they puncture your airways and strangle the oxygen that comes in. You go to college and suddenly you’re not doing as well as you thought and you heave before and after taking your exams as you grow paranoid that you don’t have the skills, or the faith in the field, to continue what you always thought you wanted to do. You get together with your first boyfriend, but he doesn’t listen to you when you tell him to stop and the breath hitches in your throat and you can’t get enough air to tell him to stop one more time and you just sit there as he shatters your boundaries over and over again.
Lights
She orders an X-ray for me, and even though I’m afraid and worried, there’s still that little bit of excitement to experience a new medical device personally for the first time. Not the X-rays at the dentist, not the X-ray one from the dislocated finger from middle softball, but the big machines I want to operate myself in the future. Radiation is a growing field, my mom says. It might not be as glamorous, but it can still bring in some money. It’s always about practicality with my mom.
I read about how X-rays work. I learned about radiation, about electromagnetic waves and frequencies and periods, peaks and troughs. But I had never learned that it’s a little embarrassing, stripping yourself absolutely bare to don a flimsy excuse of a gown to be handled by a technician who clearly doesn’t want to be there because you somehow dropped in ten minutes before the clinic closes. She places a heavy, clunky apron over me and tells me to hold my breath, and the camera whirs and hums. When she’s satisfied, she tells me to exhale and shifts me around a bit, and the process continues. And in fifteen minutes, I have my sweater back on and I’m in the lobby again.
The technician comes back after I’m done aimlessly scrolling through my social media feed and tells me to go back to the doctor, who just got my images and will tell me what’s going on with them. So I drive two minutes across the almost desolate parking lot to the front of the main hospital building, pass the pharmacy with its neon lights on the way to the elevator, and take the walk to the end of the hallway to the physician’s office. If they tell me again to take the painkillers, I tell myself, I don’t know what I’m going to do.
The lights are too bright when I enter the room again. The doctor gives me her signature apologetic face, and I want to rattle her until it falls off. You don’t have to be sorry for me, I want to shout. You don’t want to be here telling me this, the technician didn’t want to see me, I don’t want to see any of you. I don’t want the anxiety, the nervousness, the embarrassment, the hang-in-the-balance. All I want is for you to tell me what’s wrong and what I can do, I want to say. I trusted you, I trusted you, I trusted you.
She shrugs and holds up the scan. My rib cage lays white stripes on top of the gray mass that is my lungs. “It’s normal. I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe try the inhaler again?”
Flags
You like the concept of boundaries. You liked drawing when you were little, you know. Coloring inside the lines, cutting on the lines, making things look nice and pretty. You like them when you talk about science. You either have this or this. Do you want me to keep this confidential? Take the pill three times a day for ten days. There’s a deletion here, a frame shift here. We start transcription here, translation here.
You go to the doctor the third time. I think it might be this, but it can’t happen for people your age usually, she says. Your X-rays are normal. We ran the screenings, we ran the tests. You can take the painkillers, you can keep your inhaler, you can leave it alone, you can exercise more. The boundaries aren’t there. The control isn’t there. It’s all just falling through your fingers and you can’t do anything about it because the person, the doctrines, the pillars you put your trust into just aren’t holding you up. I know how X-rays work, you want to say. I learned about radiation and how it damages DNA, I learned about the inverse proportional relationship between wavelength and frequency, I learned about how rays can diffract, you want to say. I could tell you the functional groups of the painkiller you prescribe, how it suppresses inflammatory responses, how it reduces the synthesis of thromboxanes and prostaglandins. Why is this not enough?
You like boundaries. But sometimes they don’t hold up. You can’t stop your parents from barging into your room when you’re taking an exam. You can’t stop your roommates from “borrowing” what’s yours. You can’t tell a boy no when he reaches his hand too far and tells you to relax. And X-rays can’t tell you what’s right or wrong, and science can’t tell you what’s going on.
They always say that when someone can’t respect boundaries, that’s a red flag. What about the green flags? What about the yellow flags?
Youth
Sometimes, my parents tell me that young people are just so idealistic. We were once like you, they say. We once had these lofty ideals and these dreams and so much faith that we could make our world better than this mess that we inherited. 理想，理想，都是理想。 Ideals, ideals, they’re all just ideals. But we’re older now, and we’re more practical. You’ll understand one day. You just have to put faith in what is the status quo because you have no other choice. Sometimes, they call themselves disillusioned. But they never thought of it as a bad thing. Disillusion just comes with growth and maturity. 这就是长大的过程。
I used to always say, why is it so bad to aspire to something better? Why is it so bad to strive for something at least a bit closer to our ideal despite its “impracticality”, if we all know that is what will make things better? When we know it’s better? Why do you look down at young people with those ideals as something lesser?
But there comes a time when the one pillar you’ve hung onto as “truth” turns to sand and slips right between your fingers. The pedestal upon which it once rested is just a sidewalk curb, your idol just an abandoned rag doll. And I thought of the tooth fairy, and Santa, and 外婆 going somewhere far, far way, and as they ran laps around my mind, I could only think, “这就是长大的过程。” This is just the process of growing up.
Roulette
It’s asthma, they say, or lack of sleep, or lack of exercise, or lasting effects of a bad cold, or poor diet, or stress, or anxiety, or nothing at all, but at the same time, it’s also the antiseptic, the stethoscope, the ever-changing wall decals, the q-tips and cotton balls, the old sharps container, the stepping stool, the crunch and wrinkle of the examination table paper, the Spongebob Band-Aids, the inhaler they prescribed you last time, the sushi print on the nurse’s scrubs, the blood pressure cuff, the lights in your eyes, the probes in your ears, the wooden train set on the ground left by the last kid who left crying after his flu shot, and it’s also the I don’t know what this is, I can’t think of anything else, I’m not sure, the X-ray came back fine even though I hear your rib cage rattling, I can only give you the same thing as I gave you last time, have you tried taking any painkillers, and finally, it’s the courtesy green apple lollipop on the way out, on the walk of shame to the hospital parking lot.
Burning
The splotches scared me. My 姑姑, my dad’s older sister, had some deep magenta circles on the back of her neck, peeking through the low collar of her blouse the last time I saw her in China, and as a young, impressionable pre-teen, I swore off fire-cupping on the spot. Just the thought of doing something like that made me flinch and shudder. My mother, adamant on me following her footsteps into biomedicine, jumped on the opportunity to shock me away from Chinese medicine.
My mother says if Chinese medicine works at all, it’s just luck. She would sometimes chat with her colleagues on the phone, middle-aged Chinese men who, like her, shake their heads laughing at the people who jump at any chance to dismiss traditional herbology and cupping techniques. There’s no viable demonstration of efficacy, they’d say. That one guy who thinks it works? It must be luck. “You know those Chinese medicine practitioners?” she’d tell me. “They don’t even record their formulas or their methods because they want to keep it as a secret. They don’t want to develop it to educate others but instead hold it for themselves. Isn’t that against the idea of medicine in the first place? No transparency, no informed consent. They just tell the patient to trust them! This can’t fly here, you know. There’s a process.”
I once tried to tell her that for a project, I learned that “scientists” used to alter skull measurement data in an attempt to prove white superiority, but she’s stubborn. And then I stopped trying. And maybe I started believing her.
I threw myself into excelling in my math and science classes, shadowing clinicians, doing clinical research, working with rats in the labs on weekends, closing my eyes when the grad students euthanized them. I wanted there so badly to be a process, and I wanted so badly to believe that I could one day be a part of it. But when they tell you over and over and over again that they have no answers, I sometimes think that I’d rather have a process that I can put all of my trust into without thinking otherwise, just like what my mother said about Chinese medicine.
But they always ask, why do you want to go into medicine? How can you sacrifice your youth, your relationships, your time for something that fails you over and over again? How can you lie through your teeth and ramble on how inspiring your pediatrician is?
It makes the back of my neck burn.
Caffeine
it’s hard to wake up today, just like every other day, because you keep laying curled up in a fetal position in the bed, under the sheets you haven’t bothered to wash for the past month or two, trying to catch your breath and struggle to inhale after you’ve done nothing except sleep through the night (maybe you were running from something in your dream, or maybe you were falling, or maybe you were just living like you normally do). you vaguely remember sleeping on a tear stained pillow as you try to scrub your skin, trying to feel less disgusting as he reaches down, down, down, over and over and over again in your memory, as you get too tired of pushing against him and telling him to stop. you remember seeing your 外婆 trying to make you smile as she tries to get you to eat your noodles but in the next moment, she collapses and she’s in the hospital and her face and hands look and feel like paper and she chokes out her final breath and all you can do is watch and copy her. you were cursing the doctors, the nurses, the x-rays, the painkillers as you drifted off to sleep.
you somehow manage to lift yourself out of the bed, but you don’t even remember brushing your teeth, washing your face, tying your hair, or putting on the clothes because it might as well be a mindless routine coded into you. the cheap coffee you make is bitter and tastes burnt but you drink it so much that the caffeine doesn’t even kick in anymore and you go around all day feeling tired from doing nothing anyway. the inhaler is running low because you use it so much, but to no avail because it doesn’t help you breathe better and you don’t like the people that study next to you in the library staring at you when you use it either. the painkillers are painfully orange and painfully mediocre, granting either temporary relief or none at all. but you look down at your mug today and the coffee grounds stare back up at you, speckled, inklike, almost black and endless, and you realize just how tired you are. how tired you are of convincing yourself of your chronic sadness, waking up fatigued, passing through each day without thinking, feeling ashamed for the lack of respect you’ve been given, crying over a boy who shattered every fiber of your confidence and sense of boundaries, wishing for a little old lady to stay on an earth where she was isolated and in pain. feeling bitter about the health professionals you once looked up to so much toss you aside and make choices for you on a whim, putting more pills and chemicals into your body just to have something to do.
you remember your uncle bragging about the miracles of chinese medicine and you think that you might just need a miracle. the chinese pharmacy is a few blocks away, the acupuncture clinic only a twenty minute drive.
you toss the orange pills and the empty inhaler into the trash. the caffeine kicks in.
Soul
It smells like the cabinet my 外婆 liked to keep, full of herbal cough syrups, mosquito bite remedies, ginseng from the T S Emporium down the street. Why do you keep all these things? Mom would ask. You know that these don’t work. My daughter would know, since she wants to go into medicine. My 外婆 would laugh it off and rub more ointment on the mosquito bites swelling on my calves. 中国用了中药这么多年，应该还是有点儿用的, she’d say to me with a smile. China’s been using traditional Chinese medicine for so many years, so it should at least have some benefit.
A woman walks out the door, her neck sporting a dark purple-red circular blotch, and I can feel the hairs on my own neck raise in response. I’ve seen my aunt with these every time I visited her, but the sight doesn’t get less surprising. It’s a pseudoscience, my mom would scoff. My aunt would laugh and say, 啊，真的变成美国人了。Ah, you’ve really become an American now.
The woman at the front cocks her head when looking at me. “We don’t see people your age come in here too often,” she quips. I shrug. “I guess I’m desperate.”
She shrugs. “You just learned the hard way sooner than they did.”
I’m not sure why I decided to first stop by the pharmacy. Perhaps it’s because I at least have some experience with holding my breath while downing herbal concoctions for a bad cough. Perhaps it’s because it’s the closest thing to my 外婆, or maybe it’s the most acceptable by my mother. Perhaps it’s all of those.
She scrunches her eyebrows as she listens to me talk about my symptoms. I force myself to breathe more slowly so I don’t start gasping for air in the middle of my answer. Shortness of breath. Difficulty breathing. Chest pain, rattles during inhalation and exhalation. Most severe during times of stress or anxiety but also occurs spontaneously even during times of relaxation. Been prescribed an inhaler, but didn’t work. Took painkillers to no avail. X-rays all normal.
When I’m done rattling off what’s wrong with me, she cocks her head to the side and hums quietly before she stands up from the wooden stool she was sitting on. “I’ll be right back.” She disappears behind a ceiling-high shelf of glass jars and plastic bags of various roots. I stare at the rows and rows of wooden drawers that line the walls, presumably full of medicinal plants, while listening to her fiddling with what seems to be a scale behind the shelf.
She reappears later with a small bag of herbs, crushed and molded into a tablet of sorts. I don’t understand much about what she tells me is in the concoction and don’t comprehend much about the instructions she gives me. There is some talk of how the herbs will help with any inflammatory symptoms and with constriction in my airways, how they’ve seen success with these herbs in asthma patients. She guides my hand to the tablet and holds a glass of water to my lips, watching intently as I swallow. It’s bitter, softened only by a muted, lingering sweetness. I can feel myself grimace and, for a split second, wish I was still taking orange ibuprofen pills like the doctor had told me. But the bitterness of leaving the hospital over and over with hands empty and the sweetness of the pity candy the nurses handed me on the way out resurface from my subconscious, and I stomach the herbal tablet as best I can.
The woman looks at me, silently asking my thoughts. I don’t feel much different, save for a growing derision for the nurses’ almost comical scrubs, printed with sushi rolls, that I had left behind at my last hospital visit. The aftertaste sits on my tongue, slightly unpleasant. I must have made a face because she looks down with her lips pursed, so I ask her for some more tablets to hide my lukewarm opinion toward them. She perks up, smiles lightly, and sends me away with a small paper bag and a “Come back soon!”.
When I leave, the bells on top of the door jangling behind me, the breath still catches in my throat a bit before filling my lungs and exiting in a full exhale. It’s a little easier to breathe in now; it doesn’t feel like I can’t get enough air. It could be a placebo, though, I tell myself. I would know. I want to go into medicine. My mom’s voice rings in my ears.
As I begin the drive home, I think, Mom, it might not have undergone those clinical trials. Maybe it wasn’t a double blind experiment, with your negative and positive controls. But there is some kind of freedom, for believing even in a moment, in that placebo. There is some kind of liberation in realizing there is another avenue to take, to risk, even if it goes nowhere. Even if it just takes me to where my 外婆 is. There’s that bittersweet taste of letting go of what has been and reaching out to what can be. The desperation, the… what did she say it was?
Ah, learning the hard way just a bit earlier.
Bloom
Anxiety? Yes. Chest pain? Yes. Trouble breathing? Yes. Shortness of breath? Yes. Have you ever had acupuncture before? No.
Well, I don’t think we’ve seen a situation like yours, but people who’ve had pain said acupuncture helped. So we’re going to try and give it a shot.
Ah, that seems alright. When I was younger, my mom would tell me about it and how traditional Chinese medicine was kind of baloney. Because they don’t do well designed clinical trials or they don’t have as much transparency as the drug trials she oversees through her work or something. And when I saw all these needles going into somebody, it kind of freaked me out, so I never really considered it at all.
Quiet laughter. We get that. Now, what we’re trying to do is to zero in on the source of the pain. Pain isn’t something you should fear. It’s telling us about and guarding us from further damage.
Well, I’d like to think that. I just don’t want my body to fail me at the very thing that is supposed to come easy and keep me alive.
I understand. We do believe that the body has this innate ability to do whatever it can to heal itself, so let us do whatever we can to help you perform this ability.
She takes me to a room, dimly lit with a table, sheets neatly tucked under, politely turns away as I don the gown she hands me. She instructs me to lay on the table, my chest facing up. And she asks some questions. What do you do for a living? On average, how long do you sleep for each night? Where does it hurt? How often do you experience symptoms? What have you been doing to treat this so far? I try my best to answer as she collects her equipment and nods in response to what I’m saying.
The needles don’t hurt. I see them on my chest, on my arms, but all I feel is a swelling, puffing, almost numbing sensation. There is no blood, no pain, no visible changes. I can feel my eyelids drop lower, as she puts her hand on my chest, where it hurts when I breathe in. But it’s a dull ache now, and the sapling begins to shrink.
When she removes them, it doesn’t hurt. She gently nudges me up and turns while I dress. The lights in the room pulse lightly as I put my jacket on. How does it feel?
I shrug. I don’t feel much right now. Definitely more relaxed than before.
She smiles. That’s what we hope. Would you like to schedule some follow-up appointments with us? We have some openings for next week.
The lights are low, and I can almost feel the tenseness slipping out. My chest feels open, my heart thrumming faintly in my ear. The inhaler, the painkillers, the X-rays, the antiseptic from the doctor’s office, they’re all far, far away.
Of course. Let me check my schedule.
Place
My friend from high school comes to visit me in my apartment, gushing about how we haven’t had the time to catch up in forever. I think she just felt bad about not seeing me, or maybe she just felt bad for me. But I know now that it’s no use thinking of the worst possible case and try thinking of what else she might have had on her plate. She rushed a fraternity, started a fling with the boy next door, had her car towed when someone rear ended her, stressed about finding a summer internship in finance. I remember all the things I don’t tell her, and I stop pitying myself.
This time, she’s talking about the retreat she just got back from with the fraternity brothers. She follows me around the kitchen, chittering excitedly as I try to find the instant ramen packs I bought from the supermarket last week. I make a bowl of noodles for the both of us as she recalls how the boy she’s seeing sets aside time every week to meditate. “He’s always talking about manifesting truth, something about the cosmic energy in himself and everything around him, something about microcosms and macrocosms,” she muses. “You know, I think I’d understand if he was majoring in religion or something. Maybe even philosophy. But he’s mechanical engineering. Like, how does he have the time to contemplate, like, spiritual instincts or something?”
I remember my mother, her comments on biomedicine and Chinese medicine, and decide to not say anything. The noodles give my silence an excuse. I almost forgot how my friend talks a mile a minute.
“Okay, like, I get it, I guess. Self-healing is pretty nice, right? Like, probably why all the millennial white ladies go to yoga classes. Spirituality and stuff. I tried to tell him once after we hooked up that I never saw a college student so invested in this stuff. Like, they tell you to question everything, right? And ask why stuff is different from the normal?” She stops to slurp some of her noodles and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. I nod slowly. Completing case studies during physician shadowing wasn’t new to me.
“But he just tells me that understanding isn’t all questioning, just accepting and observing the stuff that’s around you. And I just was like, how are you even in mechanical engineering? And he just gets out of bed and keeps going on about all this five elements stuff and how if I’d take some ideas from him, I could control my anger release better. I can’t believe him.” She huffs and keeps eating.
“I don’t think it’s contradictory, though.”
It’s the first time I said anything since she came in. I think I surprised myself as much as I surprised her. She turns to me, eyebrows furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t think those things are mutually exclusive. You can keep your spirituality while working in a field that everyone thinks is inherently objective. Because nothing, not even what we are taught in academia, is all objective. There’s lots of things in biomedicine we can’t even explain yet. Like, we can’t explain exactly how some things in the body are regulated, or why some cancers come back. Lots of things are being debunked, too. Hell, people used to manipulate data to convince people that white people were superior to everyone else by using skull measurements.”
Her eyes are wide, her mouth agape. But for some reason, I feel defensive. I did acupuncture. I went to a Chinese medicinal pharmacy. The boy she’s with is meditating, probably engaging in another system of medicine just as I was. There’s just some things we can’t calculate or solve. We can’t all make decks or presentations for the big banks or the big accounting firms.
“I gave the doctors something easy enough. I can’t breathe. It, like, creeps up on me all of a sudden, you know, sometimes when I’m stressed, sometimes before I go to sleep. The doctors and nurses couldn’t do anything about it, and you can call me desperate or whatever, and you can call the boy you’re sleeping with desperate, too. But you kind of remind me of me. You’re so convinced that what they teach you is the right thing, that you’re somehow greater or something because you learn how to question stuff around you. You’re convinced that there’s some higher power out there that makes things objective or factual. Because it’s easier that way. But sometimes they run out of things they can answer and instead focus on calling other answers bullshit. But isn’t that just really hypocritical of them? Standing on this, like, pedestal as if they were above everyone else, telling you what is fact and what isn’t when they can’t even explain shit themselves. Maybe we’re desperate, maybe we are buying into bullshit. But maybe we’re just taking back some ownership. There are avenues we can take to make things better. We can sit around all day, convincing ourselves that the higher powers did everything they could do, that what we’re doing is so high and mighty. Or we can take that leap and find some sort of, I don’t know, liberation in seeking an alternative. I’m ready to do that, and honestly, I think your boy is too.”
She’s shaken, and I almost feel bad. But it’s refreshing, almost cathartic to say it out loud. Maybe I just took it out on her. Maybe I wanted to say it to the doctors, the nurses, my mother, my professors. Maybe I just needed to convince myself that what I was doing was the right thing. But I think she’s beginning to understand. There is a sheen in her eyes, and although she still looks confused, she’s biting her tongue, forehead creased in thought.
“Sorry for taking that out on you,” I mumble. She shakes her head.
“No, I understand.” She closes her eyes and sighs, patting me on the back. “There’s a lot of resentment in there that you haven’t been able to unpack. I think I understand you and him a little more. I overstepped. It isn’t my place to tell you or him what’s right or not. I hope you’ve found your own place, though. Some place that’s not as bitter.”
I think of the boy she’s with. Accepting and observing. Self-healing. My grandmother’s face, my ex boyfriend’s hand, my mother’s stern voice, and the doctors’ apologetic faces all swim in my mind. It’s still painful, but it’s not as sharp anymore. It’s throbbing, aching, burning now. I feel it ebb slightly; the pain dulls a bit. Maybe it’s the tablets.
I turn to my friend. “I’m getting there.”
Harvest
When your 外婆 was still here, when you were still in elementary school, you went to the Buddhist temple in the city over on New Year’s Day. Your father and mother told you that you all weren’t a religious family, but you all went anyway and you didn’t really understand what it meant to believe in Buddhism anyway. The chanting was loud and echoey, you couldn’t decide whether or not you liked the smell of incense, you wondered why the monks looked the way they did but you kept your mouth shut because you knew somebody would scold you for it.
Your parents, you think now, went to temple to appease your 外婆. Coming to a new country is difficult, and any remnant of what she is familiar with will surely comfort her. Just something to provide her some solace, some way to smooth the crinkles from her eyes, banish the loneliness just for a little while. Just a way to get her to feel better. Just.
You wonder if she prayed when she passed. When she took her last breaths and you mirrored her. Maybe she will join your 外公, your grandfather. What did she pray for? Her homeland? Her beloved? Companionship? Good fortune for the rest of her family?
You notice that the temple is holding a healing ceremony today, and you don’t know what force compels you to visit, ten years after you last saw the golden, sloping rooftop. People are shuffling into the building, and you remember, faintly, something your high school world history teacher said when your class was learning about Buddhism. Is it a religion, or is it a philosophy? It can be both.
As you enter the building, you scan the room, following in others’ examples. Kneel on the mat, pamphlet of chants in front of you. Two monks begin to chant as the women next to you press their palms together and hold their hands to their chests, eyes closed. You don’t understand the chants but follow the women in their actions, closing your eyes and placing your hands at your chest, bowing your head. The familiar smell of incense, the beating of the bowl, the offerings at the front of the room. You wonder if the people next to you actually believe, or if they’re there for some remnant of solace. You wonder if you actually believe.
But, you think now, you don’t actually have to believe in the Buddha, do you? You don’t have to believe in reincarnation or nirvana, do you? You just come in, with the knowledge that if you have good will, you will harvest good fortune. To plant the seed, and harvest a bounty. You bow your head closer to your chest, wishing for good health to your parents, good health to those around you. You wish for good health for yourself, that the wretched seed in your lungs is replaced with a seed that expands your airways, replaced with a seed that makes you healthy, makes you happy, makes you optimistic and assertive, that fills you with the ability to move forward. From your illness, your sadness, your trauma. You don’t want to be stuck here anymore, disillusioned by something you always wanted to pursue, longing for a loved one who will never come back, bitter from the respect your partner didn’t give you.
When the chant concludes, you look around and follow those around you as they bow their heads once, twice, thrice. As they file downstairs to eat, you take a breath in. It’s still hard, and it still hurts, but your heart isn’t beating as fast as it usually does when this happens, your chest doesn’t rattle, and the breath comes out without shaking. Your grandmother waves goodbye with a twinkle in her eye. Your mother isn’t yelling anymore but sighs with relief that you’re feeling better. Your ex boyfriend leaves out the door, closes it behind him. The doctors and nurses listen intently to your every word, not jumping to conclusions or prescriptions. They’ll come again, you know, but in this moment, your mind is clear.
You hope that you’ve sowed a new seed.
Entropy
You’ve always liked chemistry. You find balancing equations therapeutic, drawing mechanisms challenging, doing experiments fascinating, everything methodical yet still enough to push you to actively try to wrap your head around it. There aren’t too many rules and way too many exceptions, but there are always some guidelines you can rely on.
You remember your high school chemistry teacher trying to get kids to remember the laws of thermodynamics. Entropy in an isolated system always increases. You have to remember that entropy is, like, randomness. It’s not enthalpy. R for random, and H for delta H.
But what exactly do we mean, then, with an isolated system? Is our universe one, large isolated system, even as it’s ever expanding? If the universe is one isolated system, then what is beyond our universe, such that there’s something outside of our isolation? Does that mean that the randomness and chaos in our universe will only ever go up?
It sure feels like that sometimes, that the universe just spirals out of control with pure indifference to those who are part of it. You struggle with things nobody can explain, grapple with the people who love you leaving you, relive the trauma of the boy you like not caring for your “no” over and over and over again, reaching further down until you decide, what’s the point.
It’s certainly not magic. It’s just another form of control. To seek out what you need, to take the leap and fill the gap that your understanding can’t breach, take back the ownership of your body. To be able to say “no” to what you used to trust the most. We all tell people to just say no. But we never do what we tell others to do. I’m so sorry, but I just don’t think it’s my thing. I think I’ll be busy that day. I’m just not feeling too well. I’m just not interested. I don’t think I’m comfortable with this.
But actions speak louder than words, don’t they? No, I don’t want you to touch me there. No, I don’t want to go any further. The push on your hand should have been enough. The tears, the tension, the shaking. No, I don’t want to keep using my inhaler. No, I don’t want to keep taking medications that don’t work. I’m going to the pharmacist this weekend, though.
When do you know that something worked? When do you know it was this specific thing that cured you? Is it when you tell yourself it worked? Is it when the doctor tells you? Does the universe tell you? Is it when you feel that little bit of control in a universe that is constantly adding chaos and unrest?
You think, now, it’s useless to ask other entities to tell you how to feel, though. How do you feel, then, if there’s no guide to tell you what emotion is what? Are you at peace? Isn’t peace relative to an already established state of chaos? How do you know that you’re better? It’s all arbitrary, isn’t it?
Yes, the universe is ever expanding, ever so random, ever growing more chaotic and restless. But, in this moment, after you step outside of the temple, you breathe in, and it’s deep, and it fills your lungs. You breathe easy.
Glossary
外婆 (waì pó) – maternal grandmother
外公 (waì gōng) – maternal grandfather
理想 (lǐ xiǎng) – ideal(s)
长大 (zhǎng dà) – to grow up
过程 (guò chéng) – process
姑姑 (gū gū) – aunt, father’s sister
中国 (zhōng guó) – China
中药 (zhōng yaò) – Chinese medicine
美国人 (meǐ guó rén) – American (person)
About the Author
Mabel Tang is a sophomore at Rice University from Irvine, California. When she’s not baking bread, playing with her dog, or watching Studio Ghibli films, you can find her at the nearest coffee or boba shop looking for her next travel destination.
References:
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Primary Sources:
Yan, Rongzi. “Experiences in Chinese Medicine as a Biomedical Professional.” Interview by Mabel Tang. November 30, 2020.