The wisdom of another culture

To step into the Gin Herb store -- or Wing On Tong, as it is known to its Cantonese-speaking patrons -- is to enter both another country and another century.

Behind a long counter fronting a wall of wooden drawers, fourth-generation herbalists in the family-owned store measure and mix leaves and roots, mushrooms and minerals, perfuming the air with the aroma of musty ginseng and sweet licorice.

The small shop on the corner of North Spring and Ord streets is the oldest continuously operated Chinese pharmacy in Los Angeles.

Opened around 1900, it moved to that location, in what many locals still call New Chinatown, after the city condemned and razed the original settlement in the 1930s to build Union Station.

From the turn of the last century through today, Chinese immigrants and their descendants have tended to other immigrants and to curious non-Asians with teas and herbs, needles and massage. An exhibit opening Saturday at the downtown Center For Healthy Communities uses photos and video from Gin Herb and two other Chinatown shops, plus other exhibits, to illustrate the imported tradition’s history and evolution in Los Angeles.

The exhibit offers “a window for the mainstream public to try to understand traditional Chinese medicine,” said Lan Ong, whose family runs one of the featured shops, Wing Hop Fung Ginseng and China Products on North Broadway.

That window shows how a tradition is practiced in ways as varied as the waves of immigrants that brought it to these shores.

Wing Hop Fung -- the name means “Together Forever Prosper” -- is three blocks and a century apart from Gin Herb.

Ong’s parents opened the store in 1985 after arriving in the United States six years earlier as part of the influx of Chinese Vietnamese “boat people.” Their own parents had settled in Vietnam after fleeing Communism in China.

Wing Hop Fung has the same musty-sweet scent as Gin Herb and a matching wall of wooden drawers fronted by a counter and scales.

But the two-story, 20,000-square-foot Chinatown emporium and a second huge facility in Monterey Park are modern one-stop department stores where locals can also shop for clothes, dishes and housewares and tourists can find trinkets and antiques. The company’s mail-order business ships teas and herbs throughout the country and overseas and exports American-grown ginseng to China.

The third shop featured in the exhibit -- CHA, or Chinese Healing Arts -- is at Chinatown’s North Broadway edge but could as well be in Silver Lake or Santa Monica. Co-owner Sora Lee, who emigrated 15 years ago from Korea, opened the shop in 2006 as a tea house that also offers tonics, acupuncture and reflexology. In contrast to the clutter and clamor of both Gin Herb and Wing Hop Fun, CHA is spare and serene, as much New Age spa as ancient apothecary. Its customers tend to be whites or English-speaking Asians.

“A lot of people these days know about alternative medicine,” Lee said. “It’s trendy.”

When Wing Hop Fung opened in 1985, its customers were for the most part other Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants, said Ong, who was then 5 years old. But in the 22 years since its opening, Ong said, the number of non-Asian customers has risen, as has the breadth of Asian customers.

“It’s huge in the Korean community -- they’re asking for medicines, even [using] their Chinese names,” Ong said. “We have a lot of Japanese coming in. Even a lot of Southeast Asians -- from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore.”

A 2005 report by the national Institute of Medicine estimated that 15 million adults in the United States take herbal remedies or high-dose vitamins. Regardless of nationality, customers seek relief from chronic pain or insomnia, fatigue or strained muscles. They want to lose weight and rejuvenate aging faces.

Different as they are, each shop follows the basic tenets of traditional Chinese medicine to treat such complaints.

Where Western medicine is focused on symptoms and diagnoses, Eastern medicine looks for an imbalance among the body, mind and spirit, said Suellen Cheng, a curator for the Chinese American Museum of Los Angeles and an advisor to the exhibit.

At a first visit, a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine will frequently spend 45 minutes to an hour -- a luxury by Western standards -- talking to a patient to figure out what herbs or treatments will restore balance.

“It’s a gradual way of healing, and takes a little bit longer,” Cheng said. “You brew teas to drink three or four times a day.”

Traditional Chinese medicine also focuses on prevention. During a recent visit to Gin Herb, Cheng said that many customers were there before the flu season started for astragalus, ginseng and other herbs believed to boost immunity.

The exhibit does not examine controversies surrounding traditional Chinese medicine, such as its use of bear bile, tiger claws and other animal and plant parts banned by international treaty but available on the black market. Nor does it delve into how many ingredients are unregulated and how many therapies untested, at least by Western standards.

The exhibit is meant to be less a policy debate than a social history, said co-curator Sojin Kim, an anthropologist who works for the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo.

Sabrina Lynn Motley, a folklorist who co-curated the exhibit and oversaw an earlier one on Latin American botanicas, agreed. “It’s about creating and regenerating a sense of community, through healing and wellness,” she said.

The Center for Health Communities, at 1000 N. Alameda Street, was created by the private nonprofit California Endowment to build coalitions between nonprofit health groups and local communities. The exhibit, “From the Abundant Pharmacy: Traditional Chinese Medicine in Los Angeles’ Chinatown,” is part of the center’s Healthy Neighborhood Festival, which will run from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and feature health screenings and information as well as performances and global music.

mary.engel@latimes.com