Cupping and Scraping

OR FORAYS INTO CHINESE MEDICINAL PRACTICES

I was feeling sick. Feeling stressed. Anxious. I had just started an antibiotic round to cure my G.I. disease of the week: Giardia. (I started the semester with a three-month case of intestinal worms, then had such bad food poisoning that I was put an IV drip at the campus hospital. Fuck you, natural pesticides.) In under 2 weeks, I obsessively watched the entire first and second season of The Vampire Diaries. Something was terribly wrong. So when offered a chance to make things better, I jumped on it. Even if it meant taking a knife to my back. Or being covered with perfectly circular hickie-like marks, as if I had made love to a giant octopus just the night before.

My roommate was off to cure her cold with some good, old-fashioned cupping and scraping. This balances the "wind" and "fire" in your body. By returning your body to its proper balance, you're returned to health. Or so I was told. I didn't really understand the treatment. All I knew was that if anyone was out of balance, I was. So I prescribed cupping and scraping to myself. And joined Alexandra under the knife, fire, and glass fish bowls.

My limited knowledge of Chinese medicine involves my fascination with "hot" and "cold" food. Food that, irregardless of its scientifically-measurable temperature, is always hot. Or cold, as the case may be. Cold foods include rice, soy beans, watermelon, and ice cream. Hot foods include noodles, mangoes, chilies, and potatoes. You must eat the correct ratio of hot to cold to stay healthy or to regain your health...which is all based on what condition your body is in at the current moment and what the weather happens to be doing. If you ignore this balance, your body reacts...badly. For example, during your period, you shouldn't eat cold foods because they cause cramps. (I still find this hard to believe.) I love it when my Chinese friends say, "OH my cramps are so terrible! I must have eaten too much ice cream."

Chinese medicine is not just pills or smelly herbal concoctions, it's a lifestyle. So off to the masseuse, I went. For around $4 or 25 RMB, I got 45 minutes of her attention. I didn't get to see a second of the procedure. I was just told to take my coats and shirt off, lie on my stomach on a cold massage bed (in front of a fan-turned-heater), and stick my head through the hole. I tried to relax. She pulled out some sort of knife, and then went to town on my back. It felt like someone was scratching me with their nails, not softly but not hard either. And with a fair bit of pressure too. The feeling was mildly annoying, but easy to tune out. Each scrape came with a loud sound of dry skin against blade. She never made me bleed, but as you can see from the pictures, she brought a lot of blood up to the surface. She stretched my skin this way and that to get better scraping angles. She really loved scraping my shoulders. All and all, it was mildly entertaining, constantly wondering when this was supposed to hurt. (All Chinese medicine seems to be painful in one way or another.) It never was.

She was finished, and so brought her fish bowls over in a giant plastic crate. OK...they weren't really fish bowls, just tiny glass globes with a end lopped off that I loved imagining the tiniest of fish calling home. Picking up an oil-soaked, lighter-lit cotton ball, turned ball of fire, with metal tongs, she heated up the air inside one bowl. It was time for the cupping to begin. She started with my left shoulder. SLURP went my skin into the bowl. As she put more and more on, I felt my back becoming tighter and tighter, until I was sure I could not move. The skin stretched so tight, I felt like I was being laced into something, like a corset made of the strongest bubbles. It was nice feeling being so secure.

But a few minutes passed. I swear my skin was being pulled bit by bit, a little more and a little more into the bowls. And even when I thought there was no way my skin could be sucked and stretched any more, even then, the suction kept going. It kept going on and on. I was in so much pain that I was twitching on this table...when moments before I swore I could not move. They had draped a blanket over my bumpy, glass back, and I felt like a monster going through some terrible transformation, slowly. Ever so slowly.

I broke. I lay there strapped into my secure corset of glass, and no one could save me. I just started floating. Mentally, I was just gone, and there was only peace with a background constantly awash with pain. Somewhere after reaching this place, the masseuse came back. She took the globes off, one by one. Starting exactly where she had started. Under her fingertips, the bowls easily popped off my back, as if I had made up the feeling of complete bondage. By the time she got to my right side, the pain building up there was threatening to consume me. Those cups did not come off as easily as the ones before.

I put my shirt back on, took a taxi ride home, ate dinner with friends, then passed out early. Deeply. That peace stayed. At the price of a purple/red-spotted, useless back. (I couldn't sleep on my side or back for 3 days.) The bruises stayed longer. Two weeks later, I could still see faint circles on my shoulders.

The days after the procedure were strange. I felt like I had the flu. I was exhausted and weak, though calm. I ate little. When I told my Chinese friends, I was universally reprimanded. "Why did you get that?" I had not had a cold. Cupping and scraping are supposed to cure very specific illnesses, not just balance a person. They looked at me as if I had casually mentioned I had played with fire, and believed that to be a good cultural learning experience. Be careful, playing with culture. Or, as I did, play away.

A NOTE ON THE PICTURES: The first two pictures were taken a few hours after I was cupped and scraped. The third picture was taken 24 hours after. The forth picture was taken 48 hours after. The last picture was taken 4 days afterwards.