My Story

Getting Sick

I got sick a lot as a kid. Most of the time it was tonsillitis, and at the worst of it, I got sick every other week. I used to eat a lot of medicine and get a lot of shots in my butt. Once I had to get nine shots in five days.

There were a lot of folk remedies where I grew up. I used to get fevers a lot, and we didn't really go see a doctor back then. Usually, my mom would take 钱纸, a type of thin paper usually burned as an offering for the dead, and pour baijiu (a strong liquor) on it, then put it on my forehead. Magically, I would recover a day or two after :))

I remember once, in the middle of the night, I had a high fever. After trying the paper and liquor method, I was still miserable. My mom went out to the field to catch a toad. It was an old folk remedy, meant to draw the fever out. She came back to my room and held the toad against my chest. I could feel its belly on my skin, and it got warmer and warmer the longer it sat there, until eventually it peed on me. Then my mom took it back outside and let it go… I still feel bad for that toad.

I never went to a dentist as a kid. I didn't even know that was a thing until I moved to a city for high school. My first real dental appointment wasn't until I was 28, after I'd already come to the US.