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No Medicine Needed for Teething Babies
by Liu Shan Shan
(The epicenter of the May 12, 2008 earthquake occurred in the area where these Qiang people live. They are among those in the worst affected areas searching for survivors and mourning the lost.)


It was a cold, bone-numbing winter day in Mao Xian, Sichuan. I walked down the dirt lane, under a bright blue sky,
surrounded by the mountains that form the edge of the high Tibetan Plateau to my Qiang grandmother’s house.

Later, as I sat huddled with my Qiang friends around the smoky, warm, fire-pit, I noticed for the first time a different use of the pungent numbing

Picture
An elderly Qiang woman guides her grandchild along the path.

Sichuan Province
spice known in English as “prickly ash”. This fragrant, numbing peppercorn is what gives Sichuan spicy food its distinctive and potent flavor. However, I had only ever seen it used in cooking the delicious, local dishes.

The amazingly, unusual, new use (to me at least) for huājiāofěn (花椒粉) was to see an old gray-haired grandfather rubbing the numbing pepper powder all over a hand-carved wooden pacifier. Then he gently stuck the pacifier in his young grandson’s mouth and the teething infant almost immediately stopped crying. The young child sat on his grandfather’s lap contentedly sucking away at the pacifier as the pungent pepper powder did its work of numbing his painful gums. I marveled at my Qiang friends’ creativity in using a natural, homegrown spice to soothe and numb the teething pain of a little one instead of running out to the pharmacy for medicine to deaden the pain.