Other-Worldly: Making Chinese Medicine through Transnational Frames by Mei Zhan (review)

Chinese medicine can be found in many places around the world. For example, the city where I live, Nashville, Tennessee, is known both as “Music City USA” for its country music scene and as the “buckle of the Bible Belt” for its numerous evangelical churches. Yet here in the conservative South, manifestations of Chinese medicine (and related arts of healing and well-being) abound. Nashvillians practice and consume acupuncture, qigong, and herbal therapies in a distinctive setting that is at once American but also intimately connected to a China both imagined and real.

Mei Zhan’s new study explores how these imagining of “other worlds” is central to the making of Chinese medicine today. Steering away from abstractions such as “globalization” or “transnationalism,” Zhan argues instead for a “translocal” approach—a fine-grained consideration of how actors on the ground in specific locales shape the meaning of Chinese medicine while dreaming of (and interacting with) faraway places. Chinese physicians in Shanghai conjure a “California lifestyle” that includes big apartments, leisure time, and herbal medicines to boost depleted qi. Caucasian acupuncturists in California search for authentic Chinese medicine in China and are disappointed when they do not find it. Indeed, the primary thrust of Zhan’s argument is that any such search for authenticity is inherently quixotic: Chinese medicine is decidedly “worlded,” the product of specific negotiations and networks that crisscross the globe and wrap Chinese medicine in an inextricable embrace with “the West,” commercialization, and biomedicine. Instead of searching for authentic, seamless systems, Zhan argues, the truth about Chinese medicine can be found exactly in the fragmented, specific “entanglements, negotiations, and dislocations” revealed in individual practitioner’s lives and dreams.

Zhan’s book, accordingly, is divided into three thematic sections, “Entanglements,” “Negotations,” and “Dislocations,” centered on these concepts. Each section consists of two chapters, structured around vignettes about the many physicians the author encountered through her fieldwork in Shanghai. The first section, “Entanglements, ” presents the ways in which Chinese medicine is embedded in worlds of race, class, politics, and money. In chapter 1 (“Getting on Track with the World”), for example, Zhan presents a doctor who markets herbal medicines to upscale Shanghainese who suffer from yajiankang (“subhealth”), a newly invented malaise brought on by the stress of modern urban life. His tale becomes a symbol of Chinese medicine’s shift from serving the Third World proletariat under Mao to serving the demands of a California-dreaming middle class in the post-Deng era. The second chapter, “Hands, Hearts, and Dreams,” introduces Dr. Hu, a kindly, generous practitioner who wins patients with his physician’s virtue (yide) but is not unaware of the monetary benefits that stem from fulfilling this stereotype. His story nicely demonstrates the intertwining of commodification and sentiment in defining Chinese medicine.

Section 2, “Negotiations,” examines the way that Chinese medicine defines itself in dialogue with biomedicine. In chapter 3, “Does It Take a Miracle?,” several doctors confess that the only way they can truly distinguish their practice in Chinese medicine is by achieving dramatic success in cases that Western medicine had given up as hopeless. By revealing this need for miracles, however, they acknowledge Chinese medicine’s inherent marginality in comparison with biomedicine. In chapter 4, “Translating Knowledges,” Zhan shares her observations as a bilingual observer in an acupuncture class populated with visiting American students. In the presence of foreigners, Chinese patients and practitioners in the teaching wards invariably define not only their medicine but even their bodies and ailments vis-à-vis Western standards.

The final section, “Dislocations,” deals with the change and discontinuity brought about by Chinese medicine’s engagement with the world. In chapter 5, “Engendering Families and Knowledges,” Chinese women in medical lineages subvert gender expectations either by taking up the family’s tradition of Chinese medicine or by fleeing tradition, going to the United States, and studying biomedicine. Chapter 6, “Discrepant Distances,” traces the disappointment felt on either side of the Pacific...