First time I heard of a cultural panacea was in London during grad school, when one of my Greek friends told me that her family didn't have health insurance because her mother treated everything with olives: olive soap and olive oil. When her sister contracted an STD and the olive soap treatment didn't work, they consulted a biochemist uncle who 'prescribed' something beyond olives. Her mother's deeply ingrained belief in the healing power of olives struck me. What olives is to my Greek friend's mother, green tea is to the Chinese but maybe in a less orthodox way: green tea toothpaste, green tea extracts in shampoo and cosmetics, green tea everywhere in home remedies.

In Kunming, a girl in her early twenties who goes by the English name Nora shows me how she treats her pierced ears when they get irritated. After enjoying a cup of green tea, she selects two stems of tea leaves and dries them. Once they are dry and have hardened, she places them inside her pierced earlobes. “The green tea extracts from the leaves soothes the irritated skin. It also keeps the piercing from closing up, that's convenient.” These tea-leaf-stem earrings can be worn for months, “they are natural and healthy,” she explains.

This makes me wonder about other cultural panaceas: in Indochina it seems to be tiger balm, but when I lived in the UK, I remember paracetamol being the cure-it-all. My British friends seem to treat everything with it – from a hangover to the common cold. Paracetamol is incredibly cheap and readily available at drug stores such as Boots. When will an OTC (over the counter) drug take the place of tiger balm, green tea or olives?