1. You should take medicine

There are three things that every Chinese person will say if you talk to him or her long enough. This will be a three-part post, because each one requires a day or two to unpack.

“You should take medicine.” In America this is said, but more commonly we implore each other to “go see a doctor.” But here in China, everyone is a doctor so they just cut to the chase and diagnose you. If you so much as cough, wipe your nose, clear your throat, sneeze, sniffle, yawn, frown, fart, or close your eyes, a Chinese person will suggest medicine. And not as a passive, helpful, FYI mention, but actively and with sincerity. *concerned face* “You really should take medicine.” This totally defeats the mystical or romantic notion I had of Chinese medicine and replaces it with overmedicated hypochondriac mania. Try insisting you’re "just sleepy" or telling someone you’re going to "tough it out." To a Chinese person it just makes you sound delirious resulting in increased calls for medicine and maybe even hot water as well. Before the first symptom of illness Chinese start chain-guzzling remedies in their tea, crunching on pills, and getting booster shots at the clinic. Caught in the rain? Did you get a chill? Quick, chemotherapy. Here, medicine is not just a panacea, but a preventative strike against viral infection. I can imagine Chinese treating broken limbs, brain damage, and cancer all with medicine alone.

I figure it stems from a poor understanding of germs and viruses. A Chinese person has no problem eating undercooked meat from a street vendor who is using his hands and cooking on unclean, never-sanitized equipment. They don’t flinch when munching at a small family restaurant and they bite down on some glass, rocks, or copper. But if you go outside in shorts in 60 degree weather your concerned friends will warn you that you should wear more clothes. “Wearing too few clothes makes you sick.”

This is from high school graduates.

Granted, the same kind of mommy-sense is passed down to American children too, but we understand that a lack of insulation makes our bodies burn more energy to keep warm, which can weaken our immune system, thus increase the chance our system is unable to stave off bacterial and viral infections. Chinese people yell at you when you open a window on a bus not because they’re cold and their immune system is threatened but because they think the illness fairy can get in. Meanwhile people cough all over the bus while I just stare at my closed window, watching condensation bead and fall down, wishing I wasn’t in a humid human petri dish.

After probing a friend and finding where her biological knowledge ended, I became quite curious about what kind of health education Chinese students get these days. They don’t study drug or alcohol use. They don’t study exercise or nutrition. They don’t study pregnancy, sex, or contraception. However, in biology they study cell reproduction, animal reproduction, and quickly breeze through an embarrassing section that explains the same process works in humans.

I can’t tell you how much this explains.

Of course, education is not one-size-fits all. Comparing our educational curriculum to others is tried and true in the West, but as failing to account for cultural differences reduces the analysis to a moral pat on the back, as is the case with Female Genital Mutilation. China seems to have its bases covered. Drug and alcohol abuse seems to be ameliorated to a large degree by culture where shame is a high crime and students are pushed too hard in school to ever pick up the habit. The traditional diet here does a good job of hitting the corners on the food pyramid, and city life, traditionally the only place sedentary lifestyles are attainable, doesn’t quite prohibit walking and cycling the way American cities do. Strong conservative mores regarding premarital sex probably discourage some teenage pregnancy and STI transmission, though there are no numbers to really say. Even if the government is keeping tabs, they surely aren’t going to report a disappointing picture. Moreover, I would wager the logistics of sex are stacked against teenagers and college students here who, even if they are sufficiently informed on technique from Western film and the internet, don’t have anywhere to go do it. They live at home or in dorms with 6 to a room. They don’t have cars to go park in. While it’s not hard to find kids making out on the streets and in dark corners at night, I don’t think I’ll ever find people actually having sex in public. And of course, family planning is easy to come by here, so any unwanted pregnancies that do occur are probably dealt with rather easily. This is all speculation on my part, based on very limited information.

Health curriculum is a lower priority in Chinese schools than subjects which can continue to propel its development, like math, science, and English. But, as China continues to raise its standard of living it is bound to have increasingly levels of obesity (already being noted in Chinese media) and as it consumes more Western media it is bound to have increasing sexual openness and a corresponding increase in incidents of unprotected sex. However, I would be shocked to see any notable increase in drug or alcohol abuse, because there are such high penalties for criminality and antisocial behavior, and because there are no statistics to speak of which one could monitor. Good ol’ ignorance is bliss. It works for the CCP and it works for graduates of Chinese schools who don’t have much in the way of a formal health education. It won’t work forever though. Eventually kids will need to know how to use condoms, and if it doesn’t come from school then it will have to come in an episode of Friends (the most popular show of people in college).