Atchoo! Atchoo! Atchoo!
There was my Chinese husband, having a sneezing fit right over our sink. I gave him the usual “bless you” and worried stares of a wife, wondering if this was the harbinger of a bad allergy day for him. And he gave me his usual prognosis on why he had this sneezing problem in the first place.
“In Zhejiang, I never used to sneeze like this,” John lamented, blowing his nose. “I miss the warm, humid air of Jiangnan,” that south of the Yangtze River region, the land of fish, rice and moist air that included his own beloved province.
It sure didn’t help that, in 2008, we moved to a high desert area in the Mountain West of the United States — what you might term a land of tumbleweeds, dust and dry volcanic mountains. But even when we lived in Cleveland, Ohio, right on Lake Erie, my Chinese husband’s nose seemed to ignore the humidity and moisture, and just sneeze away in defiance. Even worse, his skin became so dry and itchy that he scratched out two pear-sized welts on both of his upper thighs. It took an entire year for those welts to disappear.
The Chinese have a saying for this: shuǐtǔ bùfú (水土不服). Continue reading “Shui Tu Bu Fu: A Tale of Two Noses”