My wife often cooks with ginseng. She slices the ginseng thin and it goes into the wok with what she is cooking—tofu, cabbage, edamame, Bok Choy, etc. Ginseng is a dried root that the Chinese believed possesses magical powers because it’s shaped sort of like a little person.
At one time, modern scientists rejected these claims, but recent research shows it does help the body resist illness and heal damage caused by stress by stimulating the immune system.
Because I only eat ginseng with food my wife cooks, I’ve never taken the herb for its healing properties but I love what it does for flavor.
Records in China show that ginseng was used as an herbal medicine over 3,000 years ago and in cooking as far back as 5,000 years. Chinese emperors valued ginseng enough to pay for the herb with its weight in gold. In America, ginseng was also used by several North American Indian nations. Source: Ancient Ginseng History
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Pearl S. Buck loved the peony and so did the Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi (1835 – 1908). The Chinese Peony is the Paeonia lactiflora. Along with the plum blossom, the peony is a traditional floral symbol of Mongolia and China. The peony comes as a shrub and a tree. There is even an Ode to Peonies.
The peony is also known as the “flower of riches and honor” and is used symbolically in Chinese art. In 1903, the Qing Dynasty made the peony the national flower. Today, there is no national flower in the PRC, but the tree peony can be regarded as a national favorite. Taiwan—on the other hand—has named the plum blossom as the national flower for that island territory.
The World Health Organization reports that the dried root of the Radix Paeonia (red peony) is used to treat dementia, headache, vertigo, spasms of the calf muscles, liver disease, and allergies and as an anticoagulant. (pg 198, World Health Organization) These uses have been described in pharmacopoeias and in traditional systems of medicine.
Traditional Chinese medicine claims that drinking Bai Mudan (white peony tea) helps dispel heat within the body and enhances immune function while protecting the heart and blood vessels.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Although this festival is not celebrated in mainland China as it once was, the Festival of the Hungry Ghost originated more than twenty-five-hundred years ago when it was believed by many Chinese that ghosts cannot rest and had to be appeased so they would not turn from wondering ghosts to malevolent demons. By remembering dead family members and paying tribute to them, it is believed that they will not intrude on the lives of the living or cause misfortunes or bad luck.
One legend says that Mu Lian[also known as Maudgalyāyana—568 BCE] told his mother he wanted to be a Buddhist monk and left home.
Years later, he returned to discover that she had died. He knew that his mother had done bad things in her life and was probably in hell. Since his mother had no one to feed her, she had to be hungry so he offered food to her hungry ghost but the food didn’t reach her.
To solve the problem, Mu Lian was told by his Buddhist master to become a vegetarian and perform spiritual deeds. After following this advice, on the 14th day of the seventh lunar month [August], he saved his mother from hell and she was no longer a hungry ghost.
The history of the Chinese Festival of the Hungry Ghost is much older than the tradition of trick-or-treating on Halloween night in the United States—Halloween History.org says that the practice of trick-o- treating spread from the western United States and moved east starting in 1942 during World War Two when sugar was rationed and the practice then became an American tradition.
And according to Time Magazine, Americans spend about $7 Billion annually on Halloween candy, costumes and parties. Time Magazine says, “Modern-day Halloween [October] traditions are said to derive from ancient rituals intended to protect people from ghosts, harsh winters and crop failures.”
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Unsavory Elements edited by Tom Carter, the author of China: Portrait of a People, has twenty-eight short memoirs that offer a balanced view of China from expatriates who have lived and/or traveled there.
But the title almost misleads because not all of the authors come off as unsavory elements—most are there to learn and not to judge. Only a few of the stories in this collection were written by expatiates suffering from some form of sinophobia.
I also value books that teach and I think that many of the stories in Unsavory Elements did that refreshingly well.
For a few examples, first there was Paying Tuition by Matthew Polly who wrote: “One of the first things I had learned during my stay was that the Chinese love to negotiate. They love it so much that even after an agreement is reached, they’ll often reopen negotiations just so they can do it all over again.”
I have visited China many times and—unlike most Westerners—I enjoy negotiating, but I didn’t know about the reopening gambit. Next time, I may want to give that a try and extend the fun.
In Communal Parenting by Aminta Arrington, I learned that the “Chinese have a fundamentally different relationship with their history than we Westerners. History is a subject we study in schools,” and that history is not connected to who we are.
“Not so for the Chinese,” Arrington writes. “History here [in China] is not book knowledge. Rather, their history is carried along with them as they walk along the way, an unseen burden, an invisible shadow; unconscious, and therefore, powerful.”
Kaitlin Solimine in Water, For Li-Ming writes about the five-months she stayed in China as a teenager in a high school, home-stay program, and it was her first time outside of the United States. For those few months, Li-Ming was her Chinese mother.
Here is the gem that Solimine shares with us: “That’s the thing about Chinese mothers: hidden behind their maternal expectations and critical diatribes are women who will fight to the death for you. As soon as I called her Mama, Li-Ming would be my strongest ally for the only months I knew her.”
From Graham Earnshaw in Playing in the Gray we discover: “There were no rules. Or rather, there was only one rule: that nothing is allowed. But the corollary, which reveals the true genius of China’s love of the grey—in contrast to the black and white of the West—is that everything is possible. Nothing is allowed but everything is possible. It’s just a matter of finding the right way to explain what you’re doing.”
Reading Empty from the Outside by Susie Gordon we see that the “New China isn’t shackled with the Judeo-Christian Morals of the West.”
Some in the West may see this lack of Judeo-Christian morals in China as a bad thing but that depends on how deeply entrenched a Westerner is in fundamentalist Christian morality. China—believe it or not—does have a moral foundation that many in the West turn a blind eye to. If you are married to a woman who was born in China and grew up there during Mao’s puritanical repressive twenty-seven years as its leader, you might understand what I mean.
In conclusion, there is Tom Carter’s signature-title piece. In his short Unsavory Elements, Carter says in one passage, “Claude admittedly couldn’t care less about Chinese culture; he was simply, like so many other foreigners in China—myself included—aimless and desperate for an income.”
There is so much more to this book called Unsavory Elements than these few examples. If you are have an open mind that isn’t infected by sinophobia and you want a better understanding of the Chinese, I highly recommend this collection.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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In the “Contra Costa Times”, I read Tibetan leaders seek East Bay help by Doug Oakley, May 27, 2010. This was a politically correct news piece that was partially accurate because Oakley only shared part of the history between China and Tibet—the part that favors Tibet’s so-called government in exile, which represents about 1% of all Tibetans—the rest still live in China.
Oakley writes that, “Tibet was invaded by the Chinese army in 1950. After the Tibetan army was defeated, both sides signed a 17-point agreement in 1951 recognizing China’s sovereignty over Tibet.”
These facts were correct, but they did not tell the whole story.
Any historian who checks primary-source material that does exist outside of Communist China will discover that Tibet was ruled by three Chinese dynasties: The Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties from 1277 – 1911. Even after Sun Yat-Sen’s so-called Republic replaced the Qing Dynasty in 1911, Tibet was considered part of China.
Primary sources like the October 1912 issue of The National Geographic Magazine—with a piece written by a Chinese doctor who was sent to Tibet by China’s emperor in 1907— and more than fifty letters written by Sir Robert Hart during the 19th century support the fact that Tibet was part of China for more than six centuries prior to 1913 when the British Empire convinced Tibet to break free for political reasons. [Note: I have an original copy of that issue of NGM, and copies of Hart’s letters]
The so-called Tibetan government in exile says they are seeking autonomy within China. In fact, China does offer a form of autonomy to the 56 minorities that live in China, but this isn’t the level of autonomy that the Dalai Lama demands, which is a return to the old Tibetan ways described in that 1912 issue of National Geographic, which is unacceptable to China.
Tibet has never been a democracy or a republic. And the average life expectancy for Tibetans increased from 35 years in 1950 to over 65 years by the 2000s while China has ruled the region, and going to school is mandatory for children. Source for life expectancy facts: Tibet from the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific.
Between 1913 and 1950, life expectancy in Tibet did not improve during the few decades that the Dalai Lama ruled the region. In fact, little to nothing changed and most Tibetans were mostly illiterate serfs/slaves of wealthy and powerful landowners. In fact, every family had to send a son/s to become Tibetan Buddhist lamas. There was no choice and there was no educational system for children. The Tibetan people have more freedom of choice today—even under CCP leadership—than at any time in recorded history.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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