Ancestral Acupuncture
a lineage practitioner's perspective on 5NP
This is a guest post by 李道玲 Camellia Dao-Ling McDermott Lee of Epigenetic Alchemy.
Thank you to all my ancestors known and unknown.
Thank you to the ancestors of the lands that have held me. Tongva, Kizh, Kumeyaay, Tataviam, Wampanoag, Caeté, Tupinambá, and Occaneechi-Saponi.
Thank you to my ancestors who loved and lived authentically in the face of oppression.
Thank you to my women ancestors in arranged marriages whose names and herstories are erased by the patriarchal lineage system. Your labor made everything possible.
Thank you to my paternal lineage of Taiwanese healers who cleared the path I walk. My father Dr. William Tsung-Liang Lee, my grandpa Dr. Lee Ting-Chien, my great-grandpa Dr. Lee Chaoshun, and the village practitioners before them.
Thank you to my mother, Nancie McDermott, for raising me in racial justice organizing.
Thank you to Dr. Mutulu Shakur, 李传真 Dr. Miriam Lee, 伍于念 “Doc” Hay, Dr. Tomson Liang, Lincoln Detox, and all the ancestors of Liberation Acupuncture.
Thank you to the patients and people of NADA, Working Class Acupuncture, POCA, and POCA Tech.
Thank you to Dr. Maoshing Ni, Dr. Daoshing Ni, their wives, their father OmNi and his wife, Dr. Yo San Ni, Madame Yo San Ni, and the 38 generations of their family who preserved their ancestral medicine across centuries.
My name is 李道玲 Camellia. As the eldest child of the eldest son of the eldest son, I am the 李 Lee clan’s ancestral steward who would host the 對年 Dui Nian ritual for all relatives in the family… if I was a man.
I am an Asian acupuncturist in my clinic internship at Yo San University. I am a survivor, a non-binary queer person, a community organizer, and a practitioner of the Yoruba tradition Ifá. My ancestors and all of who I am are present in the words I write. I speak for no one else.
My family has lived on the indigenous land of 台灣 for centuries. My great-grandmother had bound feet. My great-grandpa 林呈祿 wrote against the Japanese occupation by editing the resistance paper Taiwan Youth. My grandma graduated top of her class, becoming the first Taiwanese person and woman to attend National Taiwan University despite facing racism for being a “brown Taiwanese girl” at her Japanese-run high school.
From Fujian province to the windswept island of Kinmen, from rural Miaoli county to bustling Taipei, my paternal ancestors made their way to the United States in hopes of giving their children a better life. Under martial law, Lin Suchin and Lee Ting-Chien made sure their children had US citizenship and fluent English. It took me a long time to fully appreciate the sacrifices they made for me.
At the same time, by immigrating to the United States they brought us into a matrix of genocide. We became settler colonists on land seized in violation of treaties with sovereign nations.1 We became model minorities unfairly compared and pitted against Afro-descendent people whose forced labor and torture literally built the US infrastructure and economy. 2 And the buy-in price for a cut of white privilege (mixed with a lot of self-hate and internalized oppression) was our ancient medicine. The majority of our old remedies, songs, and folkways stopped flowing from generation to generation.
To survive in the post-WWII reality of the United States as a global superpower, my grandparents traded in our folkways for social capital that allowed my parents to give me a middle-class upbringing. They sent my father Dr. Lee Tsung-Liang to Taipei American School, where a guidance counselor told them that their children couldn’t be bilingual. In my father’s household, English language and Western culture were valued as social capital to escape from martial law. Our ancestral folkways were backwards; the West was modern.
We have carried shame, self-doubt, and internalized racism regarding the inferiority of Chinese culture for decades. I remember seeing the masked pain in my father’s face when his co-workers said his food made the break room smell bad. I have felt the rage as white people are praised for the most basic, broken Mandarin and my diasporic family is judged for our difficulty with the language we lost.
I know in my body that social phenomena like racism and misogyny have consequences on physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well being.3
My grandfather Dr. Lee Ting-Chien died before I was born, at sixty years old. His side of the family deeply internalized the inferiority of our ancestral folkways and the superiority of Japanese imperial and European/US culture in order to survive imperial occupation and martial law. I wonder if he might have lived longer if he had been willing to receive care in the ancient medicine ways of our ancestors. If he hadn't been carrying the patriarchal burden of the oldest son without the multidimensional support of our ancestral medicine.
My great-aunt had debilitating OCD from the abuse she suffered from her stepmother. She was so overwhelmed by the terror of the germs in the hospital that she didn't get preventative care that could have identified her cancer early. Acupuncture is effective at treating anxiety disorders like OCD.
One beloved auntie died around fifty from breast cancer. The violence of Taiwanese patriarchy constantly pushed her towards marriage as if her brilliance and achievements had no meaning without a husband. She chose not to remove the cancerous cells because of her concern that she wouldn't find a husband if she had her breasts removed. Her older sister lived longer than the doctors expected while receiving both acupuncture and biomedical cancer treatments.
Another auntie has a schizophrenia diagnosis and limited freedom because she began seeing and hearing things others couldn't while isolated in the US South without spiritual protection. Psychic gifts run in my family (my cousin apprenticed under a professional fortune teller in Taiwan), and the psychiatric establishment now admits to racial disparities in psychotic disorder diagnosis.4
I have been trying to reclaim our traditional medicine since 2010, when a gatekeeping white man in Taiwan told me that “Chinese people don’t accept [queer and trans] people.” (This is false.) At every juncture, I have encountered cultural appropriation and Orientalist exotification, gatekeeping and structural harm.
To reclaim my inheritance, I am now tens of thousands of dollars in debt.
The Black Panthers’ and Young Lords’ Healing Justice work is my North Star right now.
When I look to radical Asian American history and Third World organizing, I see how powerful and successful liberation work can be when following the leadership of Black and Indigenous peoples.5 I’m fortunate that my mother took me to NAACP chapter meetings when I was a child and actively organized with the Racial Reconciliation group at our church. (She still goes to regular prison abolition working group meetings!) My dad picked me up from the police station when I got arrested for peaceful civil disobedience with Rev. William Barber in 2010. My parents have always supported me in majoring in Africana Studies and doing educational equity work centering Black freedom.
During the colonial fires that devastated Tongva LAnd this January, I organized donation-based, sliding-scale, bilingual English-Spanish6 training in the NADA protocol (5NP). Since only licensed acupuncturists can needle in California, we teach the 5 points with earseeds. Check out the bilingual NADA earseed zine we made below! (Thanks to Arianna Brown for the inspiration!)
The North Star for me was to use my ancestral healing tools in service to my people. While I couldn’t focus outside of clinic, my brain was quiet as I placed pins in points. Organizing the trainings gave me somewhere to put the adrenaline coursing through my body. Folks at our earseed trainings looked at me in wonder when NADA earseeds gave folks instant relief from period cramps, opened up their sinuses, unlocked (many) tears, and we all got sleepy.
In the spirit of the dandelion, I invited people to share the protocol freely and without gatekeeping. In a time when I’m so often grieving, I find joy knowing people have taken NADA earseeds to targeted frontline communities, by-us-for-us Altadena fire relief, and homecoming celebrations for people returning from prison.
And that brings me back to gratitude for the ancestors.
The South Bronx in the 70’s was both the birthplace of Hip Hop and the site of the Lincoln Hospital takeover. In the face of devastating social violence and structural abandonment, Black and Brown communities created art and medicine that transformed the world. They shouldn’t have had to alchemize horror into healing. But they did, and 50 years later, I am still benefiting.
There’s no repaying that kind of gift. Only paying it forward. Only following their example.
When I give free acupuncture to HIV positive elders at Being Alive, I remember being a toddler touching the AIDS quilt patch for my mother’s dear friend Sel. When my Central American patients smile in delight to learn that acupuncture is part of their ancestral inheritance too, I feel our ancestors holding wrinkled hands across the sea.
NADA is a North Star for me as a lineage practitioner fighting to reclaim my cultural inheritance because it shows me how to use my ancestral medicine for collective care. It is proof to me that marginalized communities can make miracles with ancestral tools.
As armed outsiders have brought terror upon my city, I found my North Star by organizing zine and earseed distribution to neighbors and farmworkers. Sharing NADA earseeds proved to me I don't need to wait for a gatekeeping institution’s permission slip or destroy my financial future to be part of a miracle. The miracle isn’t me, it’s us. It’s the social joy that emerges freely in low-barrier community care.
Thank you.
Deloria Jr, Vine. Behind the trail of broken treaties: An Indian declaration of independence. University of Texas Press, 2010.
Beckert, Sven, and Seth Rockman, eds. Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
Jennifer Jee-Lyn García, Mienah Zulfacar Sharif, “Black Lives Matter: A Commentary on Racism and Public Health”, American Journal of Public Health 105, no. 8 (August 1, 2015): pp. e27-e30; Ronald O. Valdiserri, “HIV/AIDS Stigma: An Impediment to Public Health”, American Journal of Public Health 92, no. 3 (March 1, 2002): pp. 341-342; Elizabeth M. Barbeau, Nancy Krieger, Mah-Jabeen Soobader, “Working Class Matters: Socioeconomic Disadvantage, Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Smoking in NHIS 2000”, American Journal of Public Health 94, no. 2 (February 1, 2004): pp. 269-278.
Schwartz RC, Blankenship DM. Racial disparities in psychotic disorder diagnosis: A review of empirical literature. World J Psychiatry. 2014 Dec 22;4(4):133-40. doi: 10.5498/wjp.v4.i4.133. PMID: 25540728; PMCID: PMC4274585.
I am more than my ancestors’ pain. I lose myself if I can see only my own suffering and not my complicity in others’. While I cannot make the ~75% white acupuncture profession show up to defend Chinatowns from gentrification, I do get to allow my pain to guide me in how I engage with other people’s ancestral traditions. I choose to practice relationships rooted in reciprocity, acknowledgement of power dynamics, and a commitment to care and repair.If you're ready to practice that with me, I wrote a book about 5-element healing that connects Daoism to Black feminism and collective organizing. We can practice the healing repair of resource exchange when you purchase it here.