We got there just a few minutes before closing time. The men in the fish market pointed us towards the back, barely looking up from the hoses they were using to clean the concrete floor. Smelly water splashed at our feet as we made our way through a low door into a dusty storeroom cluttered with teas and jars filled with alien gels and liquids.A plump, diminutive woman with a frizzy black bob and flappy doughy arms, waved at us from behind a desk in the far left corner.
This, I supposed, was Lucy—the woman we’d come to see.
She was with another customer and shouted at us “One min-at! One min-at!”
Her voice was gruff and accent risible, and had it not been followed it with a raspy peal of laughter, I would have misinterpreted her commanding tone as anger.
Lucy is an herbologist. Trained in the ancient Chinese art of combining medicinal herbs, she uses a blend of herbal knowledge, Chinese Astrology, and intuition to “prescribe” remedies of carefully selected herb and root teas. The herbs are meant to help the patients achieve balance of the yin and yang by purifying the system and eliminating toxins that can otherwise manifest as various ailments.
My dad’s yin was off. A routine physical had revealed uncomfortably high PSA levels that had his doctor concerned and my mom, little brother, and me carefully dancing around that word that we were all thinking, but much too frightened to say.
He was scared too. As evidenced by the odd, strangely clinical tone he adopted when explaining the results to me over the phone one afternoon. His voice has always had a way of changing when discussing things that make him uncomfortable. He switches from his native, casual Spanish, to a formal and laborious English. His classical theater training shining through in his purposeful and measured words, carefully punctuated with the requisite beats and pauses. As if the thing he has most control of—his voice and language—could serve as a barrier between him and that which he feared he could not.
We’d come to Lucy on the recommendation of his friend Sam, who swore she saved his life. Sam, a large brute of a man, with too much of a tan and arms like tree trunks, would shed tears when recounting the moment she spotted him at the market and—without introduction—ordered him to the emergency room pointing frantically at a spot inches away from his heart. Frightened by her earnest cries, Sam drove directly to the hospital complaining of chest pains. He was admitted and it was there that the doctors discovered a clot that would have surely resulted in his death had it gone untreated just a few hours longer.
I was curious to meet this woman who’d saved Sam’s life with her keen sixth sense. She was short, and barely visible from where we stood, but every so often her arms would flap up and a cackle of laughter would fill the room. After a few minutes, she called us in. Her office was basically a desk, the old banged-up metal kind my elementary school teachers used. It was littered with papers and strange wooden boxes. In the center she placed a marble composition notebook and a gold-tipped fountain pen and well. Behind her, the wall was lined entirely with old-fashioned apothecary drawers, each labeled in fading hanzi characters.“What’s in those?” I asked, pointing at the wooden drawers.
“Is Tea! Is Herbs and Teas!!” She shouted at me in the tone I quickly realized was her normal speaking voice.She began examining my dad, first asking him to write down his name and birthday. She looked up his time of birth in a guide and giggled to herself as she jotted some notes down in her book.
“Take off watch!!” She commanded, grabbing his wrist with her thumb and forefinger to count his pulse.
“Too fast!!” She shouted, again writing something in her book.
She then sketched the crude outline of a man into the notebook and began drawing strange scribbles in the area near his kidneys. “You have too much poison!”
My dad shifted uncomfortably and tried to explain what the doctor had said. “NO! Stop!” She shouted again, not letting him continue. “I know how to fix.”
She stood up, setting up several brown paper bags into which she tossed large handfuls of mixed herbs from the cabinets. Occasionally she would explain what she was putting in and why:
“Dry Yam—for kidney! Dandelion—for heart!”
The woman spoke entirely in exclamation points.
While she continued her mixing, I got up and wandered back into the storeroom where I realized many of the products were labeled with price tags. I found a bottle of Japanese sesame oil on sale for two dollars and walked back in to my dad.
“Can I buy this?” I asked him, not really sure if it was for sale or not.
“Yeah, get what you want,” he said with a wave, his eyes
focused on Lucy who was rummaging through a giant box of what looked to me like hay. I started collecting things and bringing them back into the office where I piled them on a chair: a tin of Chinese white tea and another of jasmine green, a bottle of chili oil, a jar of chili paste, a gigantic bag of panko, dried seaweed, a box of something called “Woo-Man Tea,” which featured a Baywatch-esque lifeguard on the package and a translation explaining that it was “Tea for Woman.”When I finished, I came back into the room. My dad looked exhausted and Lucy was writing out a list of things for him to avoid. “No meat!” She said, jabbing her finger at him.
“Not even chicken?” My dad asked, slightly defeated.
“You want chicken? You eat chicken! You eat chicken but you die!!” She shouted back, throwing her head back into a laugh.
“DIE?!” My dad cried with a cough. “That’s not funny! Why are you laughing!”
She ignored his question, continuing to tick things off as she wrote them down: “No. No meat. No bread. No ice cream. No sugar. No spicy. No tofu. No soy milk. No candy.”
I was having a hard time controlling my own laughter while my dad continued to protest as each of his favorite items was added to the list.
“What do I eat? I can’t lose weight…I have to look healthy. On camera,” He explained.
“Sweet potato! And Rice. You eat sweet potato with rice you get fat and good. No meat!”
My dad grimaced at the thought of a diet of sweet potato and rice and continued to offer suggestions in a syntax that was quickly mirroring hers. “What about fish? Fish OK right?”
She shook her head and sighed. Looking at me she shouted: “Tell him!”
I put my hand on his shoulder as I replied with my best straight face:
“No fish.”
Lucy burst into laughter again while my dad sat stubbornly reluctant. She came out from behind her desk and took his hands. Her voice was soft for the first time as she looked into his face:
“We fix problem first. Then you eat what you like. OK?”
My dad understood. Shaking his head in quiet agreement and collecting his teas. We bid Lucy goodbye and took our bags through the fish market. The lights were out now and the vendors had all gone home. In the vegetable market next door, we passed by a stand full of sweet potatoes.
"Here Papa!" I showed him, selecting two of the largest yams. "Eat! You get fat!"
My dad laughed for the first time since we'd arrived and gave me a hug as I put the potatoes down.
"Thanks for coming with me," he said, with a bit of a crack in his voice.
I nodded, making sure to keep my slowly dampening eyes away from his face.
