Harmonious balance

“Matilda’s Acupunc­ture Ses­sion” — Photo by Mark Hillary

I learned a few things over the past few days, which by the way, have been great.

For those of you who’ve been ask­ing after Naomi, she’s doing very, very well at home, but more about that later.

One of Naomi’s cousins who she doesn’t get to see very often, flew in from Tai­wan on what I thought was some hocus pocus tra­di­tional Chi­nese med­i­cine sem­i­nar thing. And although both Naomi and myself are slightly more enlight­ened about Chi­nese med­i­cine, I’m still not sure what the cousin is here for because of our lim­ited grasp of Mandarin.

This is prob­a­bly one of the few times I’m glad I have some grasp of Man­darin, because the cousin took pains to explain to us hea­thens that Chi­nese med­i­cine wasn’t all the hocus pocus things we were brought up to think it was. I think he felt he had to, because Naomi’s mum had told him that us “west­ern edu­cated” peo­ple were dis­dain­ful of any­thing that wasn’t explained in Eng­lish, and that wasn’t found in Eng­lish and Amer­i­can med­ical jour­nals, or some­thing to that effect because I’m not sure what she said because I have a lim­ited grasp of Mandarin.

To cut a short story shorter, we knew Chi­nese med­i­cine in Singapore’s was called “Tra­di­tional Chi­nese Med­i­cine”, (or “TCM”, because we like to acronymize every­thing), and also because we thought it was a direct trans­la­tion of the Chi­nese word for it, “Zhong Yi” (中医).

But! It appar­ently is not! The cousin explained that there was the com­mon mis­con­cep­tion that the “Zhong” in “Zhong Yi” referred to “Zhong Guo” or the Mid­dle King­dom, aka China. The truth is, accord­ing to the cousin, that the “Zhong” sim­ply means “Zhong”, or “mid­dle”, allud­ing to bal­ance and har­mony, and that the whole aim of “Zhong Yi” is to help one’s body attain a har­mo­nious balance.

So, that’s it. TCM for me will remain the abbre­vi­a­tion for Teo Chew Muay and noth­ing else. Except maybe “Turner Clas­sic Movies”, but that shouldn’t be counted because I don’t really watch the chan­nel.

Tech­no­rati Tags: TCM