Author Biographies

Chip Chace

The likelihood that I am the reincarnation of an ancient Chinese physician is remote at best. Aside from some vague notions about Daoism and a taste for Japanese erotic poetry, my adolescent interests in things oriental was pretty generic. I experienced no life-changing acupuncture cure, nor did any of my friends. Nevertheless, Chinese medicine crept up on me with stealth and then struck hard.

I'd dropped out of college and spent winters working on the drilling rigs in Wyoming to finance my rock climbers' version of an Endless Summer; a wannabe rock monk. The winter of 1980, I went to Australia and stumbled upon a guy doing taijiat the base of a cliff in the jungle, kookaburras screaming, koala's grunting, and snakes slithering, yet at the same time, everything strangely silent. One look at him and something shifted. I didn't know what it was, or why I liked it, but I wanted a piece of that.

I spent the summer of 1980 in Tucson Arizona studying taijiwith an older guy who was the senior student of a big-name teacher in town. His name was Murray Fenster but I called him Yarrum Retsnef because that was much closer to who he was. His parents had just gotten his name backwards. The only time you can begin to move around in Tucson during the summer is in the evening and we would do taijilate into the night. He also introduced me to modern Chinese philosophers like Lin Yutang and even more arcane notions like the idea that the mucous that we were producing from the raw foods diet we'd been eating was a discharge. Hawk-drop knee, Snort twist step, Spray sputum like fog. Yarrum shared with me his taijiphlegm-form, and by the end of the summer he fired my passion for all things Asian and mystical to a fever pitch.

In August of that year, my girlfriend and I had to get back to the East Coast. We'd become bored with hitchhiking, so we found a car that needed to be delivered to New York City. The idiots at the drive-away car company gave a couple of twenty-year-olds a Porsche to drive across the country. It was an entry level Porsche actually, a luxury car for people who couldn't afford the real thing. The suspension was so bad we called it "Squeaky," but it looked sharp and it had a sunroof. Our mission was to deliver it to a junior stockbroker on Wall Street who turned out to be our age. Squeaky took us on a meandering road trip punctuated by arcane discussions concerning the pro's and con's of tamari in the macrobiotic diet and whether Daoist ejaculatory control was really a good idea or not.

Somehow we decided to see the Smoky Mountains of Arkansas, but it was dark when we got there, so there wasn't much to see. The summer heat and humidity had created an intense fog, but the moon was full and beamed down on us through the sunroof. We were content to drive along the mountain roads and talk about what we were going to do with the rest of our lives when our travelling money ran out. We alternated back and forth between jobs for her and jobs for me. We were on me and had worked our way through smoke jumping, more roughnecking, mountain guiding, and even solar engineering when she stopped and said, "Well, what about acupuncture?" I opened my mouth a little bit but nothing much came out. I just sort of looked at her over there in the passenger seat and moved my jaw up and down. She arched an eyebrow and had a little smirk on her face like maybe it should be funny, but we both knew immediately that she'd struck a chord. We also crashed Squeaky.

Fortunately, I'd taken my foot off the gas pedal for all of this, so Squeaky only hit the ditch going 35 miles per hour or so. Grass is soft in Arkansas, and a skilled tow truck operator saved us our damage deposit. We got pulled out and crept off on our way, my fate sealed.

Not long after that, I met a guy in Boulder who alternately, inspired, intimidated, badgered, and encouraged me in my quest. He once whacked me so hard with a copy of Acupuncture: A Comprehensive Text, that I had a welt on my head for a week. Seems I'd been using the only decent book on acupuncture as a footstool during one of his classes, and that was not the way to treat sacred texts. Bob Flaws and I have remained friends ever since and his influence has long outlasted the welt.

Yarrum migrated back to Miami to care for his ailing parents. He hooked me up with an acupuncturist down there who taught me a lot about ethics. Most of my apprenticeship was conducted exclusively at night over Heinekens while my mentor chain-smoked Export-A's. I sold diamonds over the telephone by day. He taught primarily by inverse-example, typically getting things profoundly wrong himself. His was a sort of "crazy-wisdom-from- hell kind of thing. I don't think I was ready for anything more than that at the time. By the time I was ready, my drilling-rig wages had vanished in the Miami heat and I was broke. My father came to the rescue. A card-carrying MDeity of the old school, he reckoned that it was better to gain a perspective than lose a son, and so he put me through the New England School of Acupuncture. In the end, his view of the world was not so different from mine.

The possession of a diploma from an American acupuncture school in 1984 didnt necessarily imply that you knew much about Chinese medicinebut I met some important influences there nonetheless. Kiiko Matsumoto was instrumental inspiring me to study the classics and introducing more subtle ways thinking. Randy Barolet taught invaluable lesson skepticism. Dan Bensky has remained one my most despite factuntil last yearhad never seen him treat patientwrite herbal prescription or even insert needle.

I didn't have any real teachers per se, at least none of these people were willing to call themselves that. Their council was more in the spirit of elder brothers and sisters pointing me in a direction and letting me go off on my own. I'd come back months or even years later. As often as not they would say "No, no, no, you've got it all wrong," and off I'd go again. Some marginal facility with the Chinese language, a result of the efforts of the Klarer brothers, Zhang Ting-liang and Yang Shou-zhong, enabled me to spend the ensuing decades reading, practicing, and basically teaching myself how to make Chinese medicine work.

Along the way, I went to China, needled balloons without popping them in Toyo Hari training and generally tried to educate myself. Some of my translation work was published. Bob Felt at Paradigm Press was responsible for egging me on in this pursuit. In the early nineties I watched a video by Miki Shima titled Mysteries of the Needle. It brought tears to my eyes. His description of the sensation he experienced when needling a patient was identical to my own. Six years of angst and insecurity over my patchy education vanished in that moment. Miki's inspiration has continued to this day. Around the same time, I began collaborating with Yang Shou-zhong on a translation of the Jia Yi Jing. This experience cemented my fascination with the classical medical literature, and confirmed my suspicion that no one really knows what any of it actually means.

These days, I'm primarily interested in clinical practice. I read a lot of Chinese medicine and translate a little. I teach a few times a year, mostly as a means of clarifying for myself why I think what I think. The rest of the time I go rock climbing with my wife and sit zazen.