[Sca-cooks] tiger balm and another ointment recipe

[Philip & Susan Troy]

CorwynWdwd at aol.com wrote:

>>White Flower Oil (in Cantonese it is bok fai yau [yow, not yaw], which
>> may be helpful in buying the stuff) is a clear, non-viscous oil
>>
>
> And it can be bought online from several sources. The actual Website can be
> found at http://www.whiteflower.com.hk/ and at
> http://www.herbal-healthfoods.co.uk/main.htm they have listings of treatments
> for various conditions, listing White Flower Oil for a lot of different
> ailments (Not TOO sure about using it for heat stroke though).

Along with red Tiger Balm and White Flower Oil, the third of the holy trinity of Chinese herbal medicines that actually work is po chai yuan or Po Chai Pills, which are small vials containing little red pellets containing, I believe, carnauba wax, kaolin (as in kaopectate, not a mysterious Chinese herb but a form of clay), and also some mysterious Chinese herbs. Indispensible for most forms of digestive distress, along the lines of Pepto-Bismol, Immodium, etc. As recently as a year or two ago there used to be several Po Chai Pills websites, which included some pretty funny Cantonese TV commercials in streaming video, complete with the catchy Po Chai jingle! Much less successful, in my own estimation, is the cough syrup my lady wife made me try early in our involvement. I think it highly significant that the last time I saw this product, which would have been Saturday afternoon, I noted that it had been demoted from a cough syrup to a sore throat syrup on the English label, bu
t otherwise remained the same. I forget its name, but it always made me think of the sulfur and treacle (or is it molasses?) administered to the inmates at Dotheboys Hall in "Nicholas Nickleby". We're talking freeze-dried raw sewage dissolved in a molasses base, and I never liked molasses, even without either sulfur _or_ sewage of any kind.


A year or so after I tried this stuff on the recommendation of this
lovely lady with whom I had become involved (and whom I later married in
spite of it), I was still working as a theatrical lighting technician.

My co-workers and I are riding in a van back to the shop in Brooklyn,
down the Bowery toward the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge. In the
distance is an _enormous_ billboard, maybe forty feet high and sixty
feet wide. On it is an almost unbelievably attractive young Asian lady
in a scarlet silk cheong-sam that could, conceivably, have been
airbrushed on after the fact, it fit so... arrestingly. Her eyes are
full of unspoken invitations to an eternity of sensual delights. Her
lips whisper in the ear of every male passerby, probably some female
ones, too. Every inch of her is a challenge leading to infinite
rewards... . In short, she's Hong Kong's, or possibly New York's, answer
to Fritz Lieber's "Girl With The Hungry Eyes".

In her hands, she is holding a mysterious bottle, labelled in Chinese
ideographs. The text on the billboard is also in Chinese. You just
_know_ that, if you buy this product, she will be yours, forever.

My co-workers, coarse, male manual (although skilled) laborers that they
are, begin to admire the billboard, and to speculate on _exactly what_
the bottle contains. Some kind of oyster extract? Spanish fly? Powdered
rhino horn? Rabbit hormones? I got it. Deer antler extract. In, of
course, a form so concentrated as to endanger anybody with a weak heart,
should they be driven to the sexual vigor the ad seems to promise.

I, of course, am guffaw-ing in the back seat, helpless with laughter,
because I know that the bottle contains a truly nasty-tasting cough syrup.

Adamantius
--
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com

"It was so blatant that Roger threw at him.  Clemens gets away with
things that get other people thrown out of games.  As long as they
let him get away with it, it's going  to continue." -- Joe Torre, 9/98