The Wounded Healer

What does it mean to carry a wound forward in time without ever fully being able to close it?

In this second episode, Kin traces how his father was forged into a healer by the brutal conditions of New York's Chinatown sweatshops — grueling factory work that wrecked his body and left him with no access to formal healthcare, pushing him to piece together an eclectic, self-taught practice from whatever was within reach: cupping and moxibustion learned between shifts from Dr. Mui, a former Chinese doctor turned factory worker; herbal tonics from a Shaolin-trained coworker; feng shui wisdom from Cantonese radio; and an improvised, budget-conscious version of a Buddhist life-release ritual using brine shrimp. 

Weaving in his father's childhood poverty and neglect in Guangzhou, a marriage strained by money sent across oceans, and the family's brush with his mother's cancer diagnosis, Kin draws on Jung's and Henri Nouwen's idea of the "wounded healer" to frame his father as someone who heals others precisely because his own wounds, physical and relational, never fully closed — while reflecting on his own distance and privilege as a scholar able to analyze what his father could only live.

See also:

• Father John Catoir interviewing Henri Nouwen about his 1972 book titled The Wounded Healer: Fr. Catoir & Henri Nouwen, Part 6, "On Loneliness"
• Henri Nouwen 1972 The Wounded Healer

Dr. Kin Cheung is Priscilla Payne Hurd Chair in the Arts and Humanities and Associate Professor of East and South Asian Religions at Moravian University, where he chairs the Religion and Society Department and Philosophy Department. His research investigates how contemporary agents use Buddhist doctrine and ritual practices in Chinese and American contexts as well as transnational networks. Topics include Buddhists in relationship with healing, meditation, ethical dilemmas, economics, capitalism, secularism, whiteness, masculinity, science, and technology. He is editor of Teaching Asia during a Resurgence of Anti-Asian Racism (Association for Asian Studies, 2024) and co-editor of Buddhism and Healing in the Modern World (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024). 

Find Dr. Cheung at moravian.academia.edu/KinCheung and on X: x.com/ProfKinCheung 

Read his latest (open-access) article "A Chinese American Node of Healing: Taiji, Acupuncture, Qigong, and Buddhist Medical Arts" published in Transnational Asia here: transnationalasia.rice.edu/index.php/ta/article/view/127.

Brought to you by Axis Mundi Media, Between Qi and Science is a limited series from the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement (IRMCE), in collaboration with the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI) through generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation as part of the Under Gods project. 

Host: Dr. Kin Cheung

Executive Producer: Dr. Bradley Onishi

Producer: Andrew Gill

Original Music, Scoring, and Engineering: Scott Okamoto

Story Editor: Dr. Leah Payne

Production Assistance: Kari Onishi

Cover Art: Eric Zwierzynski