The Fragrance of the Medicine Sea: When Pinellia First Blooms

Around the spring equinox of 1996, rain fell for three days in Cizhen, Mingzhou. Seventeen-year-old Chen Xi tucked her college application into her schoolbag. A guaranteed place at Qingbei University was right there for the taking, but all she wanted was to study traditional Chinese medicine. Her family ran Chen Shang Tang, a venerable Mingzhou pharmacy and a medical dynasty with a history of more than three hundred years.

She had memorized the Medicinal Properties Rhapsody at five, could identify 108 medicinal herbs at eight, and at fourteen wrote her first prescription. Her grandfather had found only one fault with it: "The dosage is off. You added three qian too much astragalus." But this time, when she presented her application, her grandfather knocked over his teacup, her father's chopsticks stopped in midair, and the whole family's anger simmered in the steam rising from the copper hotpot.

There was the old object buried beneath the angelica field in Qingming Lane, only unearthed fifty years later. There were the seven days after her grandfather hurt his back, when she kept the dispensary running on her own. And there was the first time she opened the dispensary, when her very first patient said, "No rush. You're as slow as your grandfather."

Then came that summer. The results of the gaokao were announced, and the title of provincial science-track top scorer landed in her lap. Calls from Qingbei chased her all the way to school, but the only letter she cared about was her acceptance from Eastern Chinese Medicine University. There was also a trip into the mountains to search for tea, a tortoiseshell passed down since the Guangxu era, and the family history that generations had kept buried in their hearts.

You learn about medicine one herb at a time, and you come to understand people little by little.

On the journey north, someone gave her a packet of wild aster seeds and said, "They won't sprout until they've had three spring rains." The green train carried her north. The scent of medicine was behind her, and ahead.