No.2 Father's Drawer — The Pandora's Box Inside a Chinese Herbal Cabinet

In Chinese pharmacies, there's one extremely obvious common feature: there's always an entire wall of cabinets.

These cabinets are made entirely of wood, with no modern design elements — just rows upon rows of small drawers.

Each drawer holds a single medicinal herb. In smaller pharmacies where cabinet space is limited, a single drawer might be divided into four compartments, each holding a different herb — a clever solution for organizing hundreds of different ingredients.

Even with an entire wall of large cabinets, drawer space is always tight. But every pharmacy keeps at least one drawer permanently empty of medicine.

My father's pharmacy had one such drawer too. Inside it were:

Noteworthy herbal prescriptions,

An abacus,

Account ledgers,

Letters from patients,

The pharmacist's personal notebooks,

Coins and old paper money.

It was like a Pandora's box — every problem in the pharmacy, every incoming and outgoing medicine, and every patient's hope (the prescriptions) could be handled through that one drawer.

In the 1990s, in China's fourth-tier cities, most people were still quite poor. People rarely visited doctors or pharmacies, because that meant spending extra money — an unexpected expense that many resisted, even if they could actually afford it.

It's similar to how, even today, many elderly Chinese people cannot bear to turn on a light at night in an empty room. They simply cannot tolerate wasting electricity — even though electricity is now cheap and their pensions can easily cover it.

This "scarred by poverty" mentality only began to ease with my generation — those born in China in the 1980s and after. We grew up in an era of economic prosperity following China's reform and opening-up.

Back then, people avoided seeing a doctor whenever possible. Only when the pain became absolutely unbearable — to the point where it affected their work — would they reluctantly visit a hospital.

Some wouldn't even go to the hospital. They'd go straight to the pharmacy...

My father was a pharmacist, not a physician. In principle, he couldn't dispense medicine without a doctor's prescription.

But I saw it with my own eyes: many scruffy, middle-aged and elderly people, still covered in thick dust and mud from working in the fields, would come to my father's pharmacy to buy medicine. They never had a prescription. They'd just say, "I don't feel well here, and also here," with expressions of extreme pain.

My father had no choice but to help them. Otherwise, they'd just stay in the pharmacy — because they already knew that the special drawer in my father's pharmacy held many prescriptions.

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He had accumulated these prescriptions over years of helping people. He would identify which formulas were effective and keep them. Of course, patients would take the original prescriptions with them. The way he preserved them was to write them down from memory, one by one, during quiet moments when the shop was empty.
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He often had to prescribe (using proven formulas from other doctors that were suitable for the symptoms), prepare the medicine, and carefully explain how to take it, what to eat and avoid, and how to rest — for those dusty, patched-clothing customers. Then he would tell them, "Three doses at cost price — 3 yuan and 30 jiao."

But once money was mentioned, those customers became experts at bargaining. Their usual line was something like: "Oh dear, I didn't bring enough money. I only have 1 yuan and 60 jiao. Please be kind — my family really needs this medicine."

Sometimes he'd snap back:

"You don't have enough money? Then why are you buying medicine?"

"Get out! Just get out!"

He'd put the packaged medicine back on the shelf and start serving the next customer.

But here's where it got interesting: those customers would simply stretch out their hand toward him, just like beggars, pleading for him to sell them the medicine. The problem was, the cost price was already 3 yuan, and they only offered 1 yuan and 60 jiao. How could he sell it?

I really can't adequately describe this scene — please forgive me, I'm not a literary writer. They would just keep their hands stretched out toward the shelf where the medicine was temporarily placed, shamelessly begging.

In the end, almost always, after serving 2 or 3 other customers, my father would take the 1 yuan and 60 jiao and hand over the medicine.

I saw this happen so many times. It was practically robbery.

My father was clearly unhappy about it — but he still indulged them.

His usual first words to pharmacy customers back then were:

"Did you bring enough money? If you haven't, don't even think about getting any medicine!"

But after the whole ritual, he'd still accept their 1 yuan and 60 jiao for something that cost him 3 to 5 yuan in raw materials alone — not counting labor, rent, or anything else.

That drawer in my father's pharmacy was full of coins — all from those 1-yuan-60-jiao transactions. He never used them, never recorded them, just left them there.

Wasn't that just charity?

I don't think he even knew what "charity" meant back then. It was just part of his daily work — as ordinary as eating and sleeping.

However, my father never wrote out prescriptions completely by hand. He only kept those that were truly effective, or those he believed were "definitely good."

He once told me: in TCM, you must have a master. Without a master, you cannot write prescriptions — even if you know how, because no one will recognize your authority.

It genuinely saddens me now. So many years have passed that I can no longer find those prescriptions. I can't show them to you as proof — but they did exist, many, many of them.

And I'll never see my father's special drawer again.

That's how life is — you lose so many things along the way. Just like I'll never see my father again.

— Bong, by the banks of the Xiaoshui River in China, on a quiet night. May you shine as brightly as fireworks.