Hi, I’m Bong

I was born in a small town on the banks of the Xiao Shui River in Hunan Province, China, where life moves slowly and everyone knows the pharmacist. My father was a traditional Chinese medicine pharmacist. He ran a tiny pharmacy for nearly forty years.

When I was little, my world wasn’t a playground or a soccer field. It was a low cabinet under the medicine drawers—maybe three or four square meters. My father put me there to keep customers from bumping into the medicine, but honestly it was also to stop me from putting herbs in my mouth. I still did, of course.

I tasted almost every herb I could reach. Bitter, spicy, pungent—nothing a kid would call food. Only cinnamon bark had a little sweetness, so it became my childhood “snack.” But I learned fast that too much cinnamon makes your eyes water and your nose run, almost like biting into a handful of chili peppers.

My father was a man of few words. He never lectured me. There was no “father-knows-best” energy in our house. Our conversations were usually under three sentences. He felt more like a quiet roommate who happened to be older and responsible for my meals.

I watched him serve old men in dusty clothes, men with patches on their pants who clearly had almost nothing. He would scold them—“What are you buying medicine for if you have no money? Get lost!”—and then, after two or three other customers had come and gone, he would take their one yuan and sixty cents and hand them medicine that cost him over three yuan. Those coins went into a special drawer that never held herbs.

That drawer also held old prescriptions, an abacus, account books, letters from patients, and some worn paper money. Only after he died did I understand that the drawer wasn’t full of clutter. It was full of the kindness he never knew how to say out loud.

My father died of stage-four lung cancer in 2022, two days after his sixty-fifth birthday. China was still under strict COVID lockdowns. I couldn’t make sense of it then, and I still can’t fully now.

He had spent his whole life around Chinese medicine. But when he got sick, he refused it completely. He wouldn’t drink a single bowl of herbal soup. Instead, he went to fortune tellers—the very people he had always told me were frauds. He would rather be lied to by a stranger than trust the medicine he had handled every day for decades.

After he passed, I was lost for a long time. I kept dreaming about him. Eventually I decided to take over the pharmacy and become a TCM pharmacist myself. As a child I hated the smell of the shop. Now, strangely, it is how I understand him.

The domain 5baba.com sounds like “my father” in Chinese. I wanted this site to be a memorial, but also a record: of the smells under the medicine cabinet, of my father’s rough hands, of the way ordinary Chinese people live and get by.

I don’t diagnose, prescribe, or promise cures. I just want to tell you honestly what I saw in the pharmacy, what kind of man my father was, and how an ordinary person slowly learns where he came from.