International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)

In OTHER-WORLDLY Mei Zhan uses traditional Chinese medicine as a site for studying the translocal production of knowledge in the globalized world.  Based on her interviews with Chinese medicine practitioners, patients, and teachers in the sister cities of Shanghai and San Francisco, Mei Zhan argues that Chinese medicine, as it is currently practiced, is not a universal system of knowledge developed exclusively from ancient tenets, but is instead a product of transnational interaction. American doctors of Chinese medicine often travel to China for training, bringing with them not only local interpretations of what traditional medicine means, but also their own consciousness about how acupuncture and herbal medicine fit into the Western medical milieu.  At the same time, practitioners in China have been adapting their methods of treatment, training, and research to international standards of science for nearly a hundred years.  These encounters, as well as those between patients and practitioners with biomedical doctors, constantly redefine the world of Chinese medicine.

In the first chapter, the author recounts the ways in which Chinese medicine has been transformed across space and time.  Zhan charts how China touted traditional Chinese medicine as the world proletariat's preventative medicine in the middle of the 20th century, but focused on soliciting East Asian, European, and American attention in later decades.  She details how acupuncture and herbal medicine providers in California, once restricted to underground practice in ethnic enclaves, now seek the patronage and approval of white middle-class consumers and corporate insurance companies.  Providers in Shanghai now market their work as medicine with a "Californian" cosmopolitan flair, in an effort to attract wealthy urban middle-class customers as Chinese healthcare becomes increasingly privatized.  Another chapter focuses on how traditional Chinese medicine doctors deploy vocabulary from Western medicine to support the legitimacy of their work and to meaningfully translate their techniques.  The last chapter focuses on the author's fieldwork during the SARS outbreak.  Chinese medicine practitioners seized the opportunity to treat SARS patients who had been failed by biomedical doctors, and also used the epidemic as an opportunity to bring in new preventative healthcare clients.  Throughout, Mei Zhan is attentive to the ways in which imaginaries of China, the West, modernity, medicine, authenticity, kinship, gender, and tradition are constructed through the everyday practice of traditional Chinese medicine.