ANCIENT MEDICAL PRACTICE OPENS WORLD OF CULTURE

China daily.China
March 17, 2006 Friday

Seven years ago, Gayane Tsaturyan came to Beijing from Armenia hoping
to fulfil her childhood dream of helping others through medicine. She
is moving closer to her dream as her graduation from Beijing University
of Chinese Medicine is coming up in August. In the meantime, the
22-year-old student is working as an intern at Dongzhimen Hospital
in Beijing’s Dongcheng District.

>>From the first day she worked at the outpatient wards last November,
she attracted the attention of curious patients as well as many funny
incidents, she told China Daily.

“They took me as a foreigner at first sight, but later on they would
rather believe I was an Uygur from the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous
Region, Northwest China,” said Tsaturyan.

In the mind of those patients, she explained, they don’t believe
that a foreigner can serve as a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)
doctor in a Chinese hospital.

This gives her supervisor extra work to explain several times a
day that the quasi-Xinjiang woman is actually an intern student
from Armenia.

“However, they didn’t expect that I could understand nearly every
word they said about me, like my big nose, fair skin and deep eyes,”
said Tsaturyan with a laugh. “They chatted in public with each other
while I was walking by. I picked up Chinese because I wanted to
study TCM.” Language course To learn TCM, she said people must study
Chinese language well. It is through TCM that the world of culture
and language opened up for her, allowing her to know China and its
people more intimately along with the ancient traditional medical
practice. Tsaturyan came to China in 1999 at the age of 16 and entered
the Beijing Language and Culture University to undergo two years’
intensive Chinese language training. Unlike many foreigners who fear
Chinese, Tsaturyan said she enjoys it.

“The Chinese characters look very beautiful,” she said. “Writing
characters is just like drawing pictures.” To enrich her understanding
of Chinese characters, she signed up for a calligraphy course,
learning how to use the soft brush and black ink to write Chinese
characters and strictly following the traditional routine.

“Calligraphy helps me deepen my understanding of the basic the
structure of Chinese characters, like different dots and strokes,”
said Tsaturyan. “The more complicated structure a character has, the
more beautiful it looks.” In her eyes, the classic Chinese characters
look prettier than the simplified ones. She dislikes memorizing a
new word by rote, however. So, she tries to catch it in contexts. She
owed this good habit to her Chinese teachers.

“They taught me Chinese simply in a pure Chinese environment,” she
recalled. “Though they could speak English, they never used it in
teaching Chinese. They use gestures to help us understand meanings.”

She still remembers her teacher’s gestures at her first Chinese class.

“My teacher acted as if throwing something out, to let us understand
the word of xiake (dismissal when class is over), and then we realized
that we could leave,” she said. “Gesturers are way more important than
anything else in the initial phase.” Rich body language, accompanied
with several commonly-used Chinese words like zhege (this), nage
(that) and duoshaoqian (How much it costs), she recalled, helped her
handle routines in Beijing.

However, she had trouble making out the right tones of the Chinese
characters with the same pronunciation.

“Taxi drivers drove me to the wrong place, simply because I couldn’t
utter the right tone as perfectly as Chinese,” she said.

To get more interaction with the Chinese, she went out of the small
campus and registered in a salsa dancing course at a club named Latino
Fly. Now she has been learning salsa for almost a year.

“In this dancing course, I meet with people of different ages and
jobs,” said Tsaturyan.

Besides dancing together, she said she may chat with them during the
break and even travel with them during holidays.

Medical studies She began to study TCM in the fall of 2001. For
Tsaturyan, Chinese language learning is much easier than TCM study.

“Though I could use Chinese in my daily life after two years study,
I understood almost nothing when I took the first medicine course,”
she said. “Chinese in the field of TCM is much more complicated than
the daily Chinese.” Courses like Fundamentals of TCM and Ancient
Literature in Medicine are filled with jargon like yin and yang
(the negative and the positive in nature), wuxing (the earth’s five
fundamental elements), and qi (vital energy), said Tsaturyan.

To tackle these abstruse words, Tsaturyan bought dictionaries
specialized in TCM and looked up those new words one by one.

“The dictionary is a treasure full of knowledge,” said Tsaturyan.

“With the help of the dictionary, I can improve my understanding of
Chinese as well as Chinese medicine by myself.” The language difficulty
also lies in names of Chinese herbal medicines. “There are too many
herbal medicines in awkward-sounding Chinese characters,” she said.

“We must memorize the medical function of each one, and combine them
into a subscription for patients in the manner of TCM like feeling the
pulse, watching colours of the upper side of the tongue, and asking
about the previously-contracted disease of patients.” She added that
foreigners may encounter the language barrier along with the great
difference in beliefs.

“To study TCM well, I have to change many things that I had believed
before I came to China,” she explained. “The philosophy in religion
and biology that I accepted as truth are in sharp contrast with the
fundamental ideas promoted by TCM.” Six and a half years of living
in China, she said, has made her feel that she has already turned
from a foreigner into a native Beijinger. “I am afraid that I may
miss China very much after I go back to Armenia,” she revealed.