What Beijing has taught me so far: anything that can heal is good 

By Kaminta Hou, University of California, San Diego

Currently, I am in my seventh week of research and am wrapping up the fieldwork portion of my project. As a quick reminder, I am in Beijing conducting an ethnography on how traditional Chinese medicine functions in modern society. So far, I have completed a handful of interviews and spent many hours observing practitioners and patients in the clinic. I will be visiting the clinic a few more times before returning to the United States, where I will begin organizing my field notes, reflecting on my experiences abroad, and writing my final research report. 

Since my last update, not much has changed in terms of my overall research plan, but I have made significant progress in my fieldwork. My focus remains the same: understanding how traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) operates alongside biomedicine and how practitioners and patients navigate these two systems of healing. What has shifted is that I am now transitioning from collecting data to making sense of everything I have observed. The next stage of my project will involve analyzing interviews, organizing observations, identifying recurring themes, and ultimately turning those findings into my final paper. 

There were definitely a few hurdles that I did not expect. One of the biggest was simply gaining access. I have learned that the first step of ethnography is gaining access to the people and spaces you hope to study, and that is much more difficult than it sounds. Since I came to Beijing without being affiliated with a local university, finding a clinic willing to host me was a real challenge. Before arriving, I believed my local contact had already arranged a full-time observership with a traditional medicine hospital. However, after I landed, I discovered that they had not yet reached out to the hospital. During my first few days in Beijing, I was worried that I might not have a research site at all. I spent those days making phone calls, sending messages, and reaching out to every connection I could think of. Fortunately, my local contact eventually secured an observership, and my other connections also came through. In the end, I gained access to three different hospitals. Looking back, this experience taught me that fieldwork often depends just as much on persistence, flexibility, and networking as it does on research design. 

Another major challenge was language. Before beginning this project, I felt fairly confident in my Chinese. However, I quickly realized that conversational Chinese and medical Chinese are completely different. The specialized vocabulary used in clinical settings and traditional medicine was unfamiliar to me, making observations and interviews much more difficult than I had anticipated. This challenge was especially frustrating because Chinese does not use an alphabet. When I encountered unfamiliar words, I often wrote them down phonetically and later tried speaking them into a translator. Sometimes the translator could not recognize what I was saying, and the word was simply lost. During interviews, I also found that I occasionally struggled to express my questions as clearly or concisely as I wanted. I worried that my language limitations might make interviewees less willing to engage deeply with my questions. However, I had to remind myself that learning was one of the primary goals of this project. Every difficult conversation helped me improve my Chinese and become more confident communicating in professional settings. Looking back, simply continuing to ask questions and participate despite my uncertainty feels like one of my biggest accomplishments.

Perhaps the most meaningful challenge has been confronting my own assumptions about traditional medicine. Traditional medicine is often viewed with skepticism in Western medicine. Even terms like holistic or integrative medicine are sometimes dismissed and I can remember classmates joking about and belittling traditional medicine. As a pre-med student, I worried that my interest in traditional healing might somehow be viewed negatively or even hold me back. 

However, spending time in China has really changed the way I think about this topic. There are certainly many people in China, including some of my own family members, who criticize traditional medicine and question its scientific validity. At first this really discouraged me and made my research topic feel unimportant. But as I investigated more, I noticed something interesting. Even those who spoke negatively about traditional medicine still kept herbal medicines in their cabinets. They warned me against drinking ice water because cold was supposedly bad for digestion, and when I mentioned a stomachache, they explained it in terms of excess “heat” in the body. In other words, while they might reject traditional medicine intellectually, many of its ideas remain deeply embedded in Chinese culture. 

Observing traditional medicine in hospitals reinforced this realization even further. Regardless of debates over whether traditional medicine “works”, it clearly provides a meaningful space for healing and care. What surprised me most was that practitioners did not see traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine as competing systems. Instead, they viewed them as complementary perspectives with different strengths. No practitioner I met claimed that herbal medicine alone could cure diseases like cancer. Rather, they emphasized integration and collaboration with western medicine. One herbalist summarized this perspective perfectly on one of my first days in the clinic: “Anything that can heal is good.” 

That simple statement has stayed with me throughout my fieldwork. I think that being educated entirely through a Western medical lens has led me to internalize a certain shame toward other ways of healing. But traveling outside of the West and encountering a different perspective has shown me that there is no reason to feel ashamed of being interested in traditional medicine. 

Instead, it has reminded me that healing is deeply cultural and that different medical traditions can coexist in incredibly meaningful and beautiful ways. I cannot wait to share these insights in my final paper, and I am so grateful for this experience. Not only for the research, interpersonal, and professional skills it has helped me develop, but also for the broader global perspective it has given me.