MEDIUM RARE

One takeaway from the pandemic of 2019 that benefitted many of us:  We learned that we didn’t need to “see the doctor” face to face.

Before Covid-19 there was only one way to consult a doctor, which was to make an appointment to see him or, in special cases, make him come see us.
All that has changed; I’d call it progress.

It’s progress when the doctor says you can monitor your blood pressure, or you can do without your meds on weekends. Without seeing you in person.

No medicine Saturdays and Sundays? In my son’s opinion, “Sounds like what a Chinese doctor would say.” In his opinion, one Chinese doctor looks like any other Chinese doctor, holding a cup or bowl of a dark brown liquid that looks like coffee but tastes like sin; in other words, extremely bitter. 

It’s my fault, really, having told him stories about my childhood when, after fracturing my ankle and the doctor threatened to do something drastic, my mother invited a Chinese bone doctor to come see me instead. He prescribed a herbal concoction to be applied directly around my foot, and told my mother to make me drink turtle soup for lunch and dinner for something like 10 days. Needless to say, my ankle was saved. Young as I was, I never learned the name of the mysterious doctor.

Fast forward to several decades later, in the year 2024, there’s now a Chinese doctor whom everybody is talking about in Chinatown. They say he’s a genuine, Western-trained M.D., and as far as two of my friends are concerned, he’s the toast of Ongpin street, with “people from all walks of life” coming to him for consultation. It’s a long, patient line of patients waiting for him to see them, each holding a number.   

“He looked at my tongue, he pressed a small space on my back, he knew right away what was wrong with me,” said Evelyn (not her real name). Then he gave her a white tablet.

Evelyn comes from a family of doctors, so she’s shy about telling them her experience with the “Chinese doctor.” I believe her, though readers would do well to treat this report not as a ringing endorsement but as third-person hearsay.