Welcome. The Chinese-Medicine Practitioners Have Been Expecting You.

I woke up a few weeks ago, and something strange started happening. Everyone was calling themselves Chinese. My token white woman friend texted me a photo of pu’er tea with the excitement of a new initiate. “Have you guys heard of this?” she asked, unwrapping a compressed disk of tea. As a Taiwanese American, I’ve been familiar with it for my entire existence.

This friend — who knows she is my token white friend — approaches cultural exploration with genuine sensitivity and earnestness, even if she cannot personally tolerate heavily spiced food. I consider her my local barometer for how American culture happens. She’s reliable, earnest, and self-aware, and the moment she asks a question like this, I can open TikTok or Instagram and watch millions of other people discovering “ancient Chinese practices” as if they’ve just been unearthed, rather than circulated for centuries. My mother spoon-fed me ginseng powder alongside my Flintstones multivitamins as a kid: Seeing gigantic bags of Ziplocked Chinese herbs on the kitchen counter has always been a regular occurrence for me.

Suddenly, though, TikTok transplants are enthusiastically heading to Chinatown for $35 blowouts — only to complain, of course, that the experience lacks the customer-service polish of the $99 appointment they would get at Drybar. They’re scoping out Asian-grocery stores with the hopeful air of a puppy waiting to be adopted by a friendly expert already doing their weekly shopping. What’s framed as curiosity often carries the quiet expectation that culture should be accessible, legible, and optimized for the comfort of the tourist.

This is how wellness trends tend to move in America: from survival practice to lifestyle accessory, from communal knowledge to individual optimization. Chinese wellness traditions — rooted in diagnostic frameworks, interdependence, and care across generations — are increasingly reframed on TikTok as aesthetic routines meant to be self-taught, self-branded, and self-improving. Cultural heritage is being memeified and the origins flattened into references to “some random lady,” who is, of course, the originating Asian content creator, named Sherry.

Viral popularity often strips these practices of context, labor, and lineage, especially when Chinese practitioners themselves are treated as optional, interchangeable, or insufficiently “accessible” guides.

To understand where this line is drawn — and who gets to draw it — I spoke with three Chinese wellness practitioners and founders who all have different takes on this moment when, suddenly, everyone on the internet is “living a very Chinese year.”

Lulu Ge, founder of Elix Holistic Supplements, is thrilled by the uptick in interest. Her position as a Chinese American beauty founder, who may profit from the surge in popularity, isn’t a surprise, but it is sincere. On our video call, she’s radiant with joy. “On some level, this is just so healing for my inner child,” she told me, describing what it feels like to see practices she once hid in order to survive now being met with enthusiasm rather than ridicule. “Especially during this particular moment in history in our country — where there is so much uncertainty, so much volatility, so much devastation — to see people encouraging each other and being so loving and supportive and to know there are no dumb questions, it’s so rare.” The basic tenets people are adopting, such as drinking warm water with lemon or wearing house slippers are harmless and easy to adopt. But the larger system of Chinese holistic care isn’t a collection of hacks — it’s a system designed to help people “learn to decode the symptoms of your body,” she said, in which everything from your tongue to your period to your digestion is a signal, not a shortcut.

The wave of sudden interest has an impact on the communities from which these products come, and it’s not necessarily sustainable. Dr. Emily Grace Siy, a board-certified Chinese herbalist and doctor of acupuncture and Chinese medicine based in San Francisco, said her shop now has a five-hour wait time: “I see the traditional herbal shops in Chinatown become inundated with people lined up who genuinely want help, but they also go home and don’t take their herbs as directed. They make videos focused on how bad the herbs taste. I’ve seen people pressure the shops to take them as patients when the shops are already overbooked and too busy. I’ve seen shortages in items when they trend. These trends do impact communities.”

Other practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine are also leery of the sudden interest, having seen the rise begin a few years back with gua sha and ear seeding. What was once considered “marginal” has been so popularized that multiple national chains now offer ear-seeding-like speed facials.

Sandra Chiu, the founder of Lanshin and a certified TCM doctor, has been watching the change with worry. “Nine years ago, facial gua sha suddenly exploded on social media,” she told me. “At first, I felt excitement and pride, but that quickly turned into concern. The people going viral weren’t Chinese-medicine practitioners — they were influencers and aestheticians. Gua sha became defined almost entirely as lymphatic drainage, which isn’t how we practice it. When influencers with no formal training are treated as authorities, the medicine gets distorted and sold back to the public in ways that are often ineffective or unsafe.”

Calling it “the most alarming example right now,” Chiu pointed out the use of ear seeds: “Almost every video I see online is someone with no Chinese-medicine training teaching people how to use them incorrectly. There are real contraindications, especially in pregnancy. And I’ve seen a popular TCM influencer recommend herbs for rosacea that I would never prescribe to a rosacea patient.” What works for one person may not work for another, and the ability to understand the nuance and context is, of course, lost on the majority of a novice population.

I understand the enthusiasm people feel when they discover home-based practices like hot water with lemon or the relief someone experiences when a TCM tincture finally eases period-related bloating. But I also remember watching these same practitioners being vilified during the early days of COVID simply for being Asian. I remember the suspicion directed at walls of dried herbs and mushrooms long before they were rebranded as “wellness.” My two cents? Just don’t be rude to the Chinatown grandmothers, take the teas as they recommend, and keep the rude Google reviews to yourself. This culture may be a trend to you, but it’s a lineage and will outlive your social media.