For as long as anyone can remember, Chinatown has been the most crowded neighborhood in Manhattan — an all-but-unnavigable tangle of fish markets, dim sum joints, kung fu palaces, and mini-malls. Herbalists are a dime a dozen here, and it's hard to walk half a block without passing an acupuncture clinic or a store advertising therapeutic foot massages. And yet, tucked away on tiny Baxter Street, Guoliang Herb House stands apart. Nearby, practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine might diagnose patients by taking their pulse, listening to their breathing, or smelling their body odor. Dr. Zheng, the store's 72-year-old proprietor, who emigrated to the United States in 1999 — and opened shop here three years later — studies their eyes.
I visited him on a cold Saturday morning, looking like a pallid scarecrow, and smelling like an ashtray rinsed, half-heartedly, in a barrel of Jack Daniel's. He checked my pulse and then — with the help of his son, partner, and translator, Zhicheng — began taking a great many digital photographs of my bloodshot eyes. According to Dr. Zheng's Chinese eye-reading, which he invented in Guangzhou in 1967, the windows of the soul also reflect the condition of every one of our internal organs: The far corners, it seems, correspond to our heart and blood circulation, bracketing our lungs and (in the center of the eye itself), the kidney. The brain's left and right hemispheres are in the 11:00 and 1:00 positions, with the stomach, bladder, intestines, and reproductive organs skirting the outlines of our lower eyelids. By studying them, Dr. Zheng says he can diagnose any number of maladies, from anemia to arrhythmia, back pain to dream-disturbed sleep, not to mention cirrhosis of the liver.
Despite my best efforts, I turned out not to have that last condition, but my stress levels were high, and my dreams were indeed disturbed. Also, my kidneys and lungs had seen better days. Using Dr. Zheng's prescription and a hand-held scale, Zhicheng measured out a small mountain's worth of remedies: bark, roots, stems, mosses, fungi, and other, utterly unidentifiable ingredients, which I was instructed to brew up at home and drink — one cup in the morning and one cup at night — for six days straight. The diagnosis, and the herbs, cost $80. There was no talk of a follow-up visit, either because the good doctor is so confident in yielding results or because no appointments are necessary at the Herb House: Walk-ins are always welcome. But at home, the process wasn't so simple. I used a clay pot and followed some rather explicit instructions, which took an hour or so to execute. In the end, I was left with two separate gallon pitchers of "tea," which looked, and smelled, a bit like burnt manure.
As it happens, there's a Western analogue to Dr. Zheng's practice. It's called iridology, and it was invented in the 19th century by a Hungarian physician named Ignatz von Peczely. But if iridology never quite stood up to scientific scrutiny, Dr. Zheng claims that his technique is entirely different: The one studies only the iris, he says, while Chinese eye-reading takes every area of the eye's surface into account. The other waiting room patients I spoke with supported him heartily. A young woman from Taiwan told me that Dr. Zheng had managed to cure her every flu and (heretofore incurable) headache. An older Latino woman described the evaporation of an ovarian cyst. (Two thirds of Dr. Zheng's patients are women, and Latino and African American patients make up about half of his practice.) "Why didn't you go to a Western doctor?" I asked her. "You go into a hospital, you leave with more problems than you came in with," she explained.
