Oil On My Father’s Back

Summary

What kind of man is my dad, and what does that teach me about the kind of man I should be? 

In this fifth episode Kin turns to his father's healing as an act of physical and emotional intimacy — touch, vulnerability, reciprocal trust — and asks what that reveals about masculinity, opening with a hospital scene where his father's hands-on treatment of an elderly patient's ears leads to a mysterious cure. Surveying how Asian American men are made invisible or reduced to kung-fu and "model minority" stereotypes in U.S. media, and how his father also exceeds the traditional Chinese wen-wu (civil-martial) archetype of manhood, Kin argues that his father's healing — openly admitting his own pain, praying and chanting for others, massaging patients' bodies, and being massaged in turn by his son — models a masculinity built on care and vulnerability rather than domination. Kin closes with his own memory of rubbing healing oil on his aging father's back and recognizing that same model of manhood taking root in himself.

See also:

• Kang, Xiaofei. 2023. Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda, 1942-1953. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Bryson and Buckelew 2023 - Buddhist Masculinities https://cup.columbia.edu/book/buddhist-masculinities/9780231210478/ 
• Wiecha, Jan - Intimacy (Encyclopedia of Sexual Psychology and Behavior, 2023 Springer) https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-031-08956-5_1240-1.pdf 
• Chou 2012 - Asian American Sexual Politics: The Construction of Race, Gender, and Sexuality https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/asian-american-sexual-politics-9781442209251/ 
• https://www.taaf.org/news/staatus-2025 
• https://taaf-staatus-2025.vercel.app/STAATUS_Index_2025.pdf 
• https://apa.si.edu/inhuman-figures/
• Cheung, K. and C. Pierce Salguero. “Interview with a Contemporary Chinese American Healer.” In Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Sources, edited by C. Pierce Salguero, 241-251. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.
• Cheng 2018 - “Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman” https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/696921 

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. 

Host: Dr. Kin Cheung

Executive Producer: Dr. Bradley Onishi

Producer: Andrew Gill

Original Music, Scoring, and Engineering: Scott Okamoto

Story Editor: Dr. Leah Payne

Production Assistance: Kari Onishi

Cover Art: Eric Zwierzynski