No single person invented acupuncture or Asian herbalism. For millennia, people apprenticed and practiced to care for their communities.

The US acupuncture profession is a colonized space. 75% of licensed US acupuncturists are white.

To become a licensed acupuncturist in the broken system that the white grad students of the UCLA cohort and their peers created in the 1980’s, prospective students must pay or take on debt for $75k minimum, more often six figures to cover living expenses while going full-time and being out of the work force for 4-5 years. (The exception is POCA Tech!)

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 grandpa Lee Ting-Chien and his father Lee Chao-Shun were both medical doctors. Grandpa was a pediatrician through WWII and 白色恐怖 martial law.

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.

I have been trying to access our traditional medicine since 2010, when a white man in Taiwan told me that “Chinese people don’t accept [TLGBIA] people.” (This is false.)

At every juncture, I have encountered cultural appropriation and Orientalist exotification, gatekeeping and structural harm.

I have broken down emotionally and almost dropped out more times than I can count. Not because of academic rigor or specific issues with my wonderful school, but because of an unending onslaught of microaggressions. This is a common experience.

Like many other diasporic families, my grandparents chose assimilation in order to keep their bloodline alive. In the context of Kuomintang martial law, WWII, the Cultural Revolution, and the Chinese Civil War, Lee Ting-Chien and Suchin Lin Lee saw English and “modern” medicine as the strategy to survive. Our folkways were a liability. Their sacrifice gave me everything I have, and I am profoundly grateful.

It is excruciatingly painful and unjust to know my family lost access to our Old Medicine due to white supremacy, and then have to navigate a price-gouged, inaccessible system characterized by orientalism, entitlement, gatekeeping, exotification and cultural appropriation.

To reclaim my inheritance, I am now tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

I persist because this is the work of my lifetime. My grandmother gave me the name 李道玲, which she translated as the “way of ingenuity.” With the strength of the 午 horse and the clever resourcefulness of the 子 rat, I honor my ancestors’ sacrifices and keep going.

This is my offering to my ancestors, my descendants, and my communities. Thank you for supporting me and my lineages as we heal across the space-time continuum.