A Wise Tongue

For all the difference between Western and Chinese medicine, they are alike in primacy of the tongue. A TCM doctor looks at your tongue before you even have a chance to use it, then feels your pulse. A Western doctor makes sure your papers are in order, then asks you to say “Ah”. They both know the tongue speaks a lot more eloquently for your health than you can, with your vague palaver about “shooting pains” and “not feeling so hot”.

Then again, a TCM doctor can write an extended essay on your overall condition after the tongue examination. Color, coating, size and shape are the supporting evidence for conclusions that, sadly, sound more poetic than scientific. But “subsiding yin” and “ghost winds” are valid, if lyrical, ways to describe imbalances in your health that grow more precarious the further you wander from Confucius’ golden mean.

Nobody living a sitting, stressing, and sucking down coffee lifestyle boasts the shiny, firm, bright pink organ of perfect health. Just stick yours out at your nearest neighbors. Little chance they’ll tell you how healthy it looks. But there’s hope. See below for common tongue traits and what they say about your health. With a little adjustment and a lot more clean living, you can stick your tongue out at anyone and get an admiring smile in return. Wiggling your eyebrows helps.

Smooth, Pale Tongue

Any life well-lived is a little bumpy, and so is any tongue well-kept. No bumps? And no color? You’ve got nutritional deficiencies, completely uncalled for in anyone with an internet connection. Or perhaps called for. World of War Craft, Facebook, and Skype are a triple threat to your health, not just your sanity. Net zombies and other obsessive types have been known to subsist almost entirely on instant noodles and the odd package of frozen dumplings. No iron, no B-12, no blood to the tongue.

No wonder anemic has been the in-look for young Chinese adults since ’98, smooth pale tongues and all. This is why yang rou chuanr stands should be operated within 50 meters of all Internet bars, comic book shops, and other haunts of the adolescent – as a public health service, ironically enough.

Red Tongue

Pink healthy. Red, not so much, unless you’re Gene Simmons, or a fan of Twizzlers. You have a yin deficiency, if not pellagra. Nowadays, everyone’s hyped to get yanged up with rhino horns and abalone, leaving their yins extra passive and weak. You need a nice fertile void, from which may sprout both future generations and harebrained business schemes. Constant irritability and insomnia, on top of your red tongue, are sure signs you need to nurture your metaphysical womb.

Try to steam more of your food instead of frying it, especially Chinese yam. (shan yao). And stop trying to conquer the world. For what doth it profit a man to possess a giant flabby yang and a dried up little yin? Balance in all things, quoth Confucius.

Purplish Tongue

More common than you might think, even in this Kool-Aidless land. For China is now the last stronghold of Starbucks. Then there’s the legendary pollution of sky and water, food additives cooked up at the petro-chemical plant, and veggies raised in the shadow of nuclear reactors (like you eat veggies).

It’s all poison, and you can only flush so much out with your bottled “spring” water. Eventually, your qi is going to get blocked like a pro-Tibet website, right at the liver. That’s why you stumble around each day in a lethargic haze, dull of eye and passion, not because of the binge drinking. Okay, because of that too.

Not everyone has the money for bizarre detox procedures at a high-end spa, and just as well. Diet got you into this mess; change it to get out. More ginseng, hot soup, and warming spices such as black pepper and ginger, will whip the qi back up until your hair stands on end and your tongue stops looking like an eggplant. The China Expat prescription – three hot pot dinners per week. Tasty, affordable, and the Chinese culinary equivalent of a high colonic.

Coating

Like a high-maintenance wife, your tongue needs just the right coat to look and feel its best. The ideal coat is clear and thin, a spring rain coat, just enough to warble an aria or whistle Dixie in. Much more likely, though, your coat is thick and white, a winter stole. It’s the thrice-hourly smoke breaks, that liter for the road, that coffee when you should have had a tea.

Actually, it’s that and more. What part of your tongue is wearing the coat? Your innards are three gurgling, whistling and squeezing organ centers, or jiao : upper, middle, and lower. The front, middle, and back of the tongue correspond respectively.

Most people with too-heavy coats wear them on the back of the tongue, the region corresponding to the lower jiao, the bowels. Their intestines are clogged with the fried odds and ends of things that were chewed twice then swallowed whole, those pieces of meat that crunched, but there were people around so no spitting it out on the plate; we’re human beings here, not farmers.

The damp heat arising from a clogged lower jaio will make you old before your time, and a potential public menace on a crowded subway. Stop with all the fried and the greasy, already. And the dairy, too, milk mustache ads be damned. It’s cow sweat, folks, and it clogs like ready mix cement. No one’s gonna get weak bones without it, either; Americans have the highest osteoporosis rates in the world.

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