Research: Journals

The Journal, Issue 30.1

Prose: Bo

by Julie Wan

Judge Sue Williams Silverman has this to say about "Bo":

This author has an amazing eye for detail, starting with the central image of the essay, the "small tin metal box barely larger than a pencil case," in which her father stores his acupuncture needles. Equally strong details ripple through the entire second section where the author reconstructs the world of Chinese expatriates living in Saigon before she was even born. In addition to fine details, this writing has great humanity. From her parents' unselfish love for each other to the elderly doctor the author's father cures, the sensibility is one of hard-won kindness. The cross-cultural struggle with language is equally fascinating and fully realized. The concept of "Bo" is almost untranslatable even in the language that spawned the term. The struggle is to understand the place of something that is mercurial within her own life, family, culture, and world. That she can undertake such a large topic--and do so almost invisibly within the narrative--is a testament to this writer's skill.

I came across the box every time I cleaned out the kitchen cabinets, a small tin metal box barely larger than a pencil case. It sat in the far back corner of the shelf, next to the rubbing alcohol and cotton balls.

Cleaning out the cabinets was one of my chores as a child. Standing on a kitchen chair with a rag and a tub of soapy water to rinse the shelves, I pulled down all the bottles from the medicine cabinet and sorted through the pills and creams and ointments, spreading them out on the kitchen countertops and floor below me.

I created a mess of names and colors. After I set aside the Tylenol and Sudafed and Neosporin, I could no longer read the labels. There was the bottle of yellow pills I took for mild colds, the menthol my dad dripped into water and had me drink when I felt nauseated, the small vials of tiny, bead-like pills we dissolved into a soup spoon for my little sister because she was still too young to swallow them whole.

The tin box had no label or color. The only way to know its contents was to slide off the lid, which I did again and again, peering inside at the thin and wiry needles, fine as threads of hair.

The Chinese don’t take medicine. We eat it. Our cupboards are filled with dried leaves, beans, roots, seeds of all kinds—medicinal herbs that often find their way into our daily meals. The rock sugar that my parents dissolve into our baths for relieving skin irritations also goes into our sweet, soupy desserts. We eat watermelon to prevent acne and rub our faces in the rind for good measure.

When we were growing up in Toronto, my sister and I would go shopping with our parents in Chinatown. We could always smell the dried herbs from afar, old and musty, the smell of antiquity lingering in the air. And the overwhelming scent would call us in, my parents remembering some ingredient they’d run out of at home.

Inside the shop, my sister and I would wander around, looking at the barrels of dried scallops and duck gizzards, chrysanthemum flowers in bulging packages, and bags of lotus seeds, ivory and round, like large pearls. In the glass counters are the dried seahorses, sliced deer antlers, birds’ nests made of swallows’ saliva. Up on the wall, an oversized shark fin acts as centerpiece, looming over us like a moose head over a fireplace. The fin is as authentic as everything else here: once filled with life, but now dry and firm, a delicacy for soup or an ancient remedy for ailment.

I watch as the herb seller measures each customer’s purchases on his scale—a little metal pan held up by a thin stick. He taps the sliding notch lightly to find the weight, then tips the contents of the pan onto a sheet of newsprint and folds this up into a package.

My parents make their selection, stocking up on buk kei, wai san, dong gwuy, gei tze. Sometimes they make more expensive purchases, a box of fine ginseng or a package of dried Chinese mushrooms, which they will give as gifts to friends. At the checkout stand, the cashier resets his abacus, lining up all the wooden beads at the bottom of the two frames. Tallying our items one by one, his fingers move back and forth on the instrument, tapping the beads against each other in quick beats.

At home, we infuse the herbs in water. The smells fill the house—pungent and bittersweet. I can see the water through the glass pot turn from clear to murky. Sometimes the mixture is sweet and dark, so I can’t see the gei tze and yoon yok until I drink to the bottom of my bowl. Sometimes it is brown and salty, and we drink it like soup at dinnertime. Other times, it really does taste like medicine, black and syrupy, bitter and tart.

We drink the medicines even when we aren’t sick. They are bo.

Bo is what we say when we patch up a hole in a shirt. Bo is what we say when we compensate, make up for a missing date, forget to get a gift for my mom’s birthday. Bo is what my parents say when my sister and I have to drink the dark potions that have bubbled all day long in our glass cauldron. Bo is the catch-all word to make us eat whatever they set before us, soup of black chicken and ginger, skin of donkey or tortoise shell ground and boiled down to a black elixir.

When I ask my dad what bo even means, he resorts to English to explain. “It means it’s good for you.”

Continue reading Julie Wan's essay in Issue 30.1...