Between Qi and Science: My Experience of What Can't Be Measured

What do I take from my father before I lose him, and how do I prepare to heal from a wound that has no cure? In this sixth and final episode Kin opens with his father's near-fatal fall from a ladder while pruning trees during COVID lockdown, using it as a lens to reflect on aging, mortality, and anticipatory grief. He then turns to what his father's philosophy of death and forgiveness — captured in a recorded chant of blessing for listeners and his father's counsel to "smile, not cry" when a loved one dies — have taught him about parenting, anger, and inherited wounds. Reflecting on the values, storytelling, and unspoken love passed down through his working-class Cantonese immigrant household, and on how he is consciously repeating and correcting those patterns with his own children, Kin closes the series by embracing "strong agnosticism" as a stance toward qi, healing, and knowledge itself, and urging listeners to seek out genuine disagreement — popping their own epistemic bubbles — as the surest path to growth.See also:Lucy Allais on Forgiveness https://philosophybites.com/podcast/lucy-allais-on-forgiveness/ Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad on Hard Knock Radio: Baldwin, Lorde, and the Discipline of Liberation https://kpfa.org/episode/hard-knock-radio-july-3-2026/ Vesely-Flad 2026 - The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/790233/the-fire-inside-by-rima-vesely-flad-phd/ Medine, Carolyne M Jones - bell hooks, Black Feminist Thought, and Black Buddhism_a Tribute https://scholarworks.iu.edu/iupjournals/index.php/jwp/article/download/5479/440/24124  Nguyen - 2018 “Escape the echo chamber” https://aeon.co/essays/why-its-as-hard-to-escape-an-echo-chamber-as-it-is-to-flee-a-cult Schulz - On Being Wrong https://ed.ted.com/lessons/on-being-wrong-kathryn-schulz 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 CheungExecutive Producer: Dr. Bradley OnishiProducer: Andrew GillOriginal Music, Scoring, and Engineering: Scott OkamotoStory Editor: Dr. Leah PayneProduction Assistance: Kari OnishiCover Art: Eric Zwierzynski

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 CheungExecutive Producer: Dr. Bradley OnishiProducer: Andrew GillOriginal Music, Scoring, and Engineering: Scott OkamotoStory Editor: Dr. Leah PayneProduction Assistance: Kari OnishiCover Art: Eric Zwierzynski

What does the placebo effect actually reveal, once you stop using it to dismiss healing you don't understand? In this fourth episode Kin turns from his father's individual miracles to the mechanics of healing itself, opening with an acupuncturist who feels the same "qi" his family does and moving through decades of placebo research — sugar pills whose size, color, and price change their effect, sham knee surgery that heals as well as real surgery, and a study in which only the prescribing dentist's belief (not the patient's) changed outcomes — to argue that placebo is less a "mind trick" than an embodied ritual, one that mainstream medicine performs just as much as it accuses alternative healing of doing. Kin lands on a position of strong agnosticism — code-switching between mainstream and Chinese medicine rather than picking one as more real — while acknowledging, through his father's attempts to remotely heal a troubled relative, the real limits and dangers of that confidence, setting up the next episode's turn to his father's healing as an act of intimacy rather than mechanical fixing.See also: Kneebone 2016 - Performing Surgery: Commonalities with Performers Outside Medicine  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5006638/ Johnson 1994 - Surgery as a placebo https://www.proquest.com/docview/198981324?pq-origsite=gscholar&fromopenview=true&sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals Moseley et al 2002 - A Controlled Trial of Arthroscopic Surgery for Osteoarthritis of the Knee https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013259 Kaptchuk interviewed by Shankar Vedantam on The Dramatic Cure https://www.hidde     nbrain.org/podcast/the-dramatic-cure/Kaptchuk 2000 - The Web That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine https://www.goodwillbooks.com/the-web-that-has-no-weaver-understanding-969-9780809228409.html Kaptchuk 2010 - Placebos without Deception: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Irritable Bowel Syndrome https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3008733/ Cheung 2025 - “Placebo Effects, Qi, and Intention_ How Biomedical Hegemony Polices Competing Paradigms” (ch10_p197-222) https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781836245643 Lévi- Strauss, C. ([1958] 1998), ‘The Sorcerer and His Magic’ in P. J. Brown (ed.)Understanding and Applying Medical Anthropology (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company), 129– 37.Moerman 2012 - Meaning, Medicine and the 'Placebo Effect' https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/meaning-medicine-and-the-placebo-effect/C189929ABE972E5D4C7FE32008EE8838 Tilley, H. (ed.) (2021), Therapeutic Properties: Global Medical Cultures, Knowledge andLaw. Osiris. Vol. 36 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).Solomon, M. (2015), Making Medical Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Gracely et al. 1985 - Clinicians' expectations influence placebo analgesia. https://www.jameslindlibrary.org/gracely-rh-dubner-r-deeter-wr-wolskee-pj-1985/ Scheid 2020 - Some Moments in the Encounter between Chinese Medicine and Covid-19 https://www.asianmedicinezone.com/p/the-pan-of-pandemics-why-and-how?open=false#%C2%A7some-moments-in-the-encounter-between-chinese-medicine-and-covid-19 Cheung 2021 - Merit, Karma, and Exchange: Chinese Buddhist Mountain Tourism Company Listings on the Stock Market https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/89/3/931/6377686?redirectedFrom=fulltext Raz and Harris eds 2016 - Placebo Talks: Modern perspectives on placebos in society https://global.oup.com/academic/product/placebo-talks-9780199680702?cc=us&lang=en& 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 CheungExecutive Producer: Dr. Bradley OnishiProducer: Andrew GillOriginal Music, Scoring, and Engineering: Scott OkamotoStory Editor: Dr. Leah PayneProduction Assistance: Kari OnishiCover Art: Eric Zwierzynski

Is my dad's healing real, and if it is, how do I make sense of it without simply translating it into mainstream medicine's terms? In this third episode, Kin recounts his father's most striking healing feats — restoring his grandmother's face after a paralyzing stroke, dissolving a neighbor's decades-old tumor, and developing an involuntary "sixth sense" that guides his hands to heal — and wrestles with how to understand them as a scholar of religion trained to be skeptical of both mainstream and religious explanations. Kin argues that his father's healings might best be understood not through translation into biomedical terms but through code-switching — holding qi, karma, and biomedicine as parallel languages rather than collapsing one into the other — setting up the next episode's turn to the placebo effect and what it reveals about the shaky boundary between mind and body.See also:Cheung, K. “Miracle as Natural: A Contemporary Chinese American Religious Healer.” In Miracles: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion, edited by Karen R. Zwier, David L. Weddle, and Timothy D. Knepper. Comparative Philosophy of Religion Series 3, 131-154. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2022.Klass, Morton (1995) - Ordered Universes: Approaches To The Anthropology Of ReligionSered, S. (2003). Afterword: Lexicons of the supernatural. Anthropological Forum, 13(2), 213–218.Campany, R. F. (2012). Signs from the unseen realm: Buddhist miracle tales from early Medieval China. University of Hawaiʻi Press.Kim 1999 - “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans”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 CheungExecutive Producer: Dr. Bradley OnishiProducer: Andrew GillOriginal Music, Scoring, and Engineering: Scott OkamotoStory Editor: Dr. Leah PayneProduction Assistance: Kari OnishiCover Art: Eric Zwierzynski

What does it mean to carry a wound forward in time without ever fully being able to close it?In this second episode, Kin traces how his father was forged into a healer by the brutal conditions of New York's Chinatown sweatshops — grueling factory work that wrecked his body and left him with no access to formal healthcare, pushing him to piece together an eclectic, self-taught practice from whatever was within reach: cupping and moxibustion learned between shifts from Dr. Mui, a former Chinese doctor turned factory worker; herbal tonics from a Shaolin-trained coworker; feng shui wisdom from Cantonese radio; and an improvised, budget-conscious version of a Buddhist life-release ritual using brine shrimp. Weaving in his father's childhood poverty and neglect in Guangzhou, a marriage strained by money sent across oceans, and the family's brush with his mother's cancer diagnosis, Kin draws on Jung's and Henri Nouwen's idea of the "wounded healer" to frame his father as someone who heals others precisely because his own wounds, physical and relational, never fully closed — while reflecting on his own distance and privilege as a scholar able to analyze what his father could only live.See also:Father John Catoir interviewing Henri Nouwen about his 1972 book titled The Wounded Healer: Fr. Catoir & Henri Nouwen, Part 6, "On Loneliness"Henri Nouwen 1972 The Wounded HealerDr. 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 CheungExecutive Producer: Dr. Bradley OnishiProducer: Andrew GillOriginal Music, Scoring, and Engineering: Scott OkamotoStory Editor: Dr. Leah PayneProduction Assistance: Kari OnishiCover Art: Eric Zwierzynski