The following is a reprint of an excerpt, "The Bow", Chapter 7 of Stories of HumanKind, Volume 1. It is told from the perspective of Dominica Zhu, written in 2015, as it relates to her mother.

"My roots in knowledge preservation and medicine come from the generations before me. As a daughter of Chinese immigrants, a daughter of the Dai and Tibetian people, who lived through the Cultural Revolution, I knew of the pain, complexity, and triumph it has taken for me to inherit the wisdom of the Chinese Medical System passed on to me from my mother. I also understood how easily this all could have been destroyed without those determined to preserve it.

I remember running through the house with bare feet as a young girl, and my mother telling me how our kidney points are located at the bottom of our feet. Even at the age of five, I started to learn how important it was to keep these areas warm––to protect our organs. My mother, adorned in this lifetime with a sharp and creative mind and a relentless passion for serving humanity, has a remarkable understanding of the human body. Practicing as a well-loved Chinese Medical Doctor in New York, she has combined her native Chinese medicine background with profound and thorough scientific methodologies that target the West's current, changing environmental needs. She understands how the body responds to food, plants, medicines, and its relationship with nature itself. She possesses an effortless ability to connect different systems and find solutions to even the most complicated medical problems today. She understands how to connect the lines of our hands to the meridians within our bodies and the pressure points intricately and delicately laid within touch on the surface of our skin. 

My mother teaches generously and intimately of the elegant ways the body heals itself. There was never any condition too large that she was afraid to tackle and no complaint too small for her ears to listen. Growing up, I would often tell my friends that I was not only raised by my parents but by an entire medical system. The ancient technology around healing––wisdom that I inherited through my mother's oral stories–has become the foundational lens through which I see the world.

 Having spent my life learning from her, I began to see the immediate need for ancient wisdom to have a place in modern society. It wasn’t until I became older that I truly understood the timeless gift that my mother had shared with my brother and me––passing on the fundamental understanding of what it means to live in a human body and how to truly care for this one home.

 Unfortunately, the real value of the apprenticeship model has begun to fade in Westernized cultures. We often do not have the patience to learn carefully from our elders. Instead, we have dedicated more time and resources to fast-tracking through life.

 Enormous generational knowledge gaps are being created as elders are being pushed to the side and only bite-sized, pixelated articles––often charaded as truth––are being consumed instead. The reality is, there is no shortcut to caring for our bodies and this Planet. We have access to more information than ever, yet true wisdom remains rare.

With the height of technology and machine culture, we oftentimes live in a state of distrust of ourselves and the world around us. The long-accepted and unbreakable truths and laws of the natural world are increasingly ignored and silenced by the distractions of our modern times. What is more, the indigenous wisdom that once pulsated in abundance amongst communities now depends on the few who remember to listen for its sole survival.

Through modernity’s condemnation of indigenous practices as backward, we are no longer prioritizing the protection of those who were closest to the land and who had been protecting her for generations before us.

The stories that my mother would tell me growing up––sometimes in passing, sometimes during dinner or before bed as she returned home from a long day’s work at her office––inevitably grounded me in this work..."