Today I spent a good bit of the morning sinking into the back seat of a cab while the driver pummeled himself on the head with a knotted wooden branch, all while yelling, “This is how I keep myself healthy nowadays!”
As you learn about cultural practices, sometimes things strike you as a little strange but quite understandable. Layered upon each other, however, these strange things evolve from “I never thought of it like that” to wooden-branch-over-the-head strange.
Today I was heading to the northwest corner of Beijing to teach an improv comedy course with two Chinese improvisers. We’d picked up a cab on the way there and one of my colleagues noted the bumpy wooden branch, about a foot and a half long, on the dashboard.
“Oh, you play with sticks too?” my friend Li Jun asked the driver. Which, given that the conversing parties are not dogs, felt to me a bit strange, but I let it fly. Obviously, there is a story here.
“You betcha!” The driver responded, his voice thick with the Beijing “Marbles in the Mouth” accent.
“I’ve got an olive branch and a peach branch,” Li Jun said, as if he were discussing the finer points of which country his favorite coffee blend came from.
At this point, it was clear there was something I was missing. “What do you do with the branch?” I asked. Unbeknownst to me, this was step one down crazy alley.
“You rub it!” The driver replied, taking a hand off the wheel while merging onto the highway. “Rub it over and over, eventually it gets smooth and shiny, so shiny it blinds you. I’ve got a friend who rubbed the same branch every day for three years. By the end it was black. Beautiful.”
The bumps on the branch were not incidental either, I discovered. “They hit pressure points in your hands, and loosen the flow of Qi, which makes your whole body healthier. The good elements from the wood also seep through into your skin when the bumps stimulate them.”
Whereas before you had a simple branch, after the supercharging rubbing regimen, you now possessed a supercharged wand of healing, the only catch being that in order to gain benefit required a certain amount of strength to be exerted. And so we arrived at the portion of the ride where the cabbie took the branch and began thwacking himself on any bit of exposed skin he could reach while keeping the wheel straight.
“Doctors are mad expensive nowadays,” he told me over the sound of wood meeting skull. “I can afford this.”
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