In the fall of 2003, when I was twenty-two, I moved to Wuhan from New York City.
People mistook me for Tibetan sometimes. Or I’d pass by and they’d start to argue with one another about whether I was Indian, or from Xinjiang, or just a general foreigner. When they asked me where I was from, I said, “美国.” In Mandarin, the name for the USA is Měiguó. It literally means “beautiful country.” So friendly!
I’ve written about my experiences in Wuhan in various ways, directly and indirectly, over the years. Wuhan was the coolest city in China. (Second was Nanjing.) Wuhan was janky and punk and transparent and endless and lonely. I felt free there, but I wasn’t invisible.
This piece, “Medicine,” was originally published in Vice in 2007, several years after I’d moved back to New York from China. I was living in Bed Stuy and getting sick with cat scratch fever (although at the time I didn’t know that—I thought I was just going insane).
My brilliant friend, the writer Amie Barrodale, was the fiction editor at Vice at the time. When I thought I was losing my mind, she encouraged me to write simple stories, such as stories about things that happened in China. This was one of the short stories that came out of that experiment.*
MEDICINE
In China there was a honey man on the corner of my street who sold his honey in old Coke bottles set up on a box full of bees. He also sold dried up honey pellets. I knew if I ever ate them I would live forever. They have things like that in China: magical cures.
One spring my boyfriend and I took a trip to the southwest. We visited an ancient stone village called Lijiang. We saw a sign hanging on a tree at the foot of a long road that said “Herbal Specialist, World Famous, 5 KM”. We rented bikes and went down the road. It was a road that cut through a valley with lush hills on either side with neon pink and golden flowers. When we neared a little wooden house there was a painted sign that said, “Doctor”.