Apothecary

My mom has been complaining that her hands and feet have been getting ice-cold this winter season, so to remedy this, she went to a "thay thuoc bac," an Apothecary of Eastern Medicine. After taking her pulse and asking some routine questions about her ailments and symptoms, he scribbled some Chinese characters onto a ledger and passed the note to his behind-the-counter assistants, who proceeded to gather the ingredients from little drawers containing different kinds of dehydrated flora, tree bark, and fungi. These get weighed on a little scale according to the apothecary's prescription, and my mom left with a bundle of individual packets wrapped in white butcher paper.


At home, she cooks up these ingredients seeped in water, in an earthen pot with a handle and a spout. After extracting the medicinal juices, she'd hunt through the moist remnants for the dehydrated Chinese apples. These are add-ons to most prescriptions to sweeten the medicine, and my mom likes to eat them. She'd usually find three and pull the soft, sticky, date-like flesh from the center seed with her front teeth.

The smell of Chinese herbal medicine used to be extremely unpleasant to me, and it's been a long time since my mom has prepared the bitter, black liquid to drink. However, since she started again recently, I've been finding the smell to be rather bearable when I come home at night. It's this heavy, earthy scent of tree bark and roots, tinged with a bitterness that hits the back of your throat. The earthen pot emits steam from its spout so that the aroma penetrates the entire house; for the time that it is cooking, the medicine seems to seep into my clothes, my hair, my bones.

I guess you can say it's a acquired scent. Standing in the dark at my front door, struggling to pluck my house key from my keychain, I can already smell the heady medicine eeking from the crevices. When I push open the door, I am engulfed in light and smell, greeted by the familiar sight of my dad sitting on the sofa, reading the latest Vietnamese newspaper, and my labrador trotting up with a tail-wagging hello. The smell of herbal medicine hangs thick and heavy. Reluctantly dredged up from the memories of my olfactory sense, its thin curlicues of smoke wrap around me and pull me in, like an insistent, irresistable siren's song that calls me home.