Dollops

One teaspoon in the morning, two teaspoons before you go to bed

Grandma always had her secret remedies for whenever I was sick. Be it a fever or a cough, an ulcer or a chest pain, she'd know what to do.

She'll reach into the cabinet and pull out her wooden box made of Javanese teak, carefully dusting away the layer of dirt that had accumulated on its surface with a kitchen towel. She would then open it to reveal a whole collection of herbs, spices and animal parts, some more distasteful than others like snake skin and lizard tail.

Grandma's best friend in town was the local Chinese shopkeeper who sold ingredients for traditional Chinese remedies, apart from junk food and toiletries that he also sold for side income. His store is set in a pre-war building with stains on the wall and cobwebs in the corners. From floor to ceiling there were drawers upon drawers of dried ingredients, ranging from dried leaves, beans, nuts, a hundred different types of powdery substances, a few dozen types of smelly dried fungi and huge jars of roots and twigs from unknown shrubs; he had it all, stored away in wooden drawers marked with Chinese characters. He provided grandma with all the essential ingredients for any ailment imaginable; from providing relief for my brother's asthma to relieving my mother's back pains.

I thought grandma was a witch; I watched a lot of Hollywood movies as a kid and I swear I thought she made magical potions that turned kids into rats if they were nasty.

Her most famous remedy was Loh Hon Guo with sugarcane, lotus seeds, longan fruits, bits of bark and white fungus. Whenever the sun was hot and the air was dry, she'd automatically brew a pot of this fowl smelling brown liquid made up of these ingredients to combat the heat, and I loved it not only because I felt cool after drinking it but because it tasted yummy despite the rotting stench it made while boiling on the stovetop.

Even mom did not trust the doctor for minor ailments like coughs and colds. She'd follow grandma's instructions and boil chicken soup with herbal additives for me and my brother if we ever fell sick, and only considered taking us to the doctor after traditional remedies were proven ineffective.

My mother was a woman of science. She thought science in schools and had a BSc from her days in university, but she still chose traditional remedies over many other modern alternatives such as antibiotics and Celebrex. As a result, I was a kid who grew up alongside Panadol and essence of seahorse, with the latter being the preferred choice of medication.

And boy did they work. I remember having a terrible fever while grandma was away for the weekend and mom did not have time to prepare Chinese medicine for me so she took me to a doctor instead. I was sick for a further three days eating some bloody pink medicine from a plastic bottle, but when grandma came back she immediately worked her magic and in one day the fever was gone thanks to a few rootlets from China, mushrooms from Thailand, red dates from Pakistan and some leaves from our backyard.

Traditional medication was fucking expensive though, and some of them tasted putrid (like carbon tablets and pohchai pills for diaohrrea) but nevertheless they beat any modern medication out there because they did not have the side effects that modern medication had. I was the only one in my class who drank black chicken ginseng essence to 'boost the immune system and alertness for exams'. Other kids just had Nestle Ice Cream.

Grandma's secret recipes were good against combating ailments of the body, but I don't think they were effective against any other problem.

I've come across many situations in my daily life where no medication you ingest would help solve the problem. From severe outbreaks of depression to mental illness due to the stress of exams, traditional Chinese medication could only help to calm me but not solve the problem. Gone are the days when I could safely rely on 4000 year old magical remedies; I had to depend on other methods of 'curing' myself some of which involved very desperate measures that I will not outline here.

But today someone very dear to me was facing a lot of difficulty and needed some sort of miraculous cure yet I had no Javanese teak box to pull out of the cabinet; I had no black chicken essence to give him that would magically sort out all the problems or green snake liver oil to take away the pain. I could not brew a magical potion that would make the day better for him although I wished with all my heart that this was possible.

I even had no words to offer him for comfort, or a hand to hold in case he felt threatened or lonely. I had no shoulder to lend him to cry on, or kisses to give him to make him feel loved.

I did not have the powers of my grandma to 'cure' him or 'solve his problems' but instead I just sat there on my bed listening at the other end of the telephone line to the situation which was beyond my control and beyond ‘treatment’.

Unlike grandma who could zap away an illness as soon as it popped up because she always had her recipes with her, I was unprepared and unable to offer any form of help, much less assurance that tomorrow would be better than today or that the problem would be solved eventually. Those 20 minutes on the phone left me feeling useless and helpless because I did not have a solution stored away in a jar which I could pour into a pot and brew away for an instant cure.

All I had were tears for me and for him, and a bucket-full of worry.

I wish I had a cure for his problems. A solution. A love so strong that it wipes out all the suffering and keeps him safe.

I can still remember grandma putting a yellow paste on my bicycle wound while I screamed in agony, telling me that it was the best she could do to help and there was no other way out other than the painful way.

I wish I did not have to tell him the same, because I cannot bring myself to be in this position.

I cannot bring myself to be helpless.