What Counts As Real?

Summary

In this first episode of Between Qi and Science, host Dr. Kin Cheung recounts the night at seventeen when his father first taught him hei gong (qigong) in their Coney Island living room, and traces how that moment set him on a lifelong path between two worlds: the mainstream biomedical view of the body and his father's practice as a self-taught community healer who blends hei gong, acupuncture, cupping, feng shui, and Buddhist ritual.

Weaving together his father's immigration from China, decades in New York's sweatshops, and eventual emergence as a healer, alongside his own path from a philosophy student to a scholar of Buddhism, Kin explores what's lost in translation between biomedical and Chinese medical ways of knowing, the politics of studying one's own family and community, and what it means to hold multiple "code-switched" worldviews at once without collapsing one into the other.

See also:

• Cheung, K. “A Chinese American Religious Healer: Toward Filial Ethnography.” In The Familial Occult: Explorations at the Margins of Critical Autoethnography, edited by Alexandra Coțofană. European Association of Social Anthropologists Series 47, 17-44. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2023. https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/CotofanaFamilial

Dr. Kin Cheung is Priscilla Payne Hurd Chair in the Arts and Humanities and Associate Professor of East and South Asian Religions at Moravian University, where he chairs the Religion and Society Department and Philosophy Department. His research investigates how contemporary agents use Buddhist doctrine and ritual practices in Chinese and American contexts as well as transnational networks. Topics include Buddhists in relationship with healing, meditation, ethical dilemmas, economics, capitalism, secularism, whiteness, masculinity, science, and technology. He is editor of Teaching Asia during a Resurgence of Anti-Asian Racism (Association for Asian Studies, 2024) and co-editor of Buddhism and Healing in the Modern World (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024).

Find Dr. Cheung at moravian.academia.edu/KinCheung and on X: x.com/ProfKinCheung

Read his latest (open-access) article "A Chinese American Node of Healing: Taiji, Acupuncture, Qigong, and Buddhist Medical Arts" published in Transnational Asia here: transnationalasia.rice.edu/index.php/ta/article/view/127.

Brought to you by Axis Mundi Media, Between Qi and Science is a limited series from the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement (IRMCE), in collaboration with the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI) through generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation as part of the Under Gods project.