Yong Kang Travel Service
Oct 10th, 2007 by Michael Max
Sunday night was like any Sunday night before an early rising to meet the plane that would float me back across the ocean to the Middle Kingdom. Restless. Dream filled shallow sleep that longed for oblivion and respite from the months of planning and preparation. It did not arrive. It was like being a child before the first day ever of school. Except this time. I was the school.
It had all begun a year ago while in Yangshuo. An odd place that one, set in amongst soldier like limestone mountains wound together with the flow of the rivulets and streams of the Jiang River. Somehow time spent in Yangshuo proves pivotable. Life finds a new slipstream after a few weeks there. That place has created and ended more than a few chapters in my life. I trust the force of creation and destruction it opens.
It was last year from Yangshuo that opened the chapter on translating Huang Huang’s Ten Major Formula Families in Chinese Medicine. This year, I lead a group of Western practitioners back to China to spend two weeks with him. Learning his methods which stretch out from Han dynasty China, through the comings and goings of centuries, and flower in the clinic at the Nanjing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Chinese medicine has its own convoluted history of family traditions, puzzling ancient texts, flowerings and witherings of schools of thought and official sanction. Of course, for us doctors, the issue is always the same.
How can I help the person front of me?
And Huang with his binocular vision of past and present, has a set of lenses that give us a view into illness and health that turn much of modern Chinese medicine on its head, and helps to cut through the fog that accompany so many cases of complex illness. He does not offer miracle cures, but he does offer a way of observing and working that seems to work with the flow of life that effect us humans on the deepest of levels.
Finding my own way through China is one thing, and something that after seven years of language and experience is not difficult. But, opening that door for others, and giving them two weeks to acquire something that it has taken me years to cultivate, that is another story. It is walking in the shoes that are 2 parts tour guide, 3 parts teacher, a measure of businessman, along with generous portions of patience and trust. Bridging cultures, time zones, language and desires makes for a times a delicate mix that could either explode or blossom.
Perhaps this is how a catalyst feels as it sets off chain reactions of transformation.