Searching for the Elixir-of-life: Part 8
In the movie, “The Emperor Who Unified China”, the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, asked, “Where does it come from … immortality ... and if I don’t have it … who does?” The search began with him around 221 BC, and has continued to this day over 2,000 years later.
One particular family has been keeping the dream alive now for over 500 years. From generation to generation, accumulated knowledge has been passed down. The great minds in each generation take the knowledge a step farther then pass all they know on to their offspring.
Great-grandfather Tieu decided to once again begin the search for the elusive “Elixir-of-life” and found in his search that any potion would be complicated. After numerous dead-ends, he concluded that a single “cure-all” was not realistic given the complicated structure of the human body and health. It took Great-grandfather his entire life to finally realize this. Once he came to this realization, he was too aged to continue his search.
Knowing that he would not be able to continue, Great-grandfather passed on his conclusions to the grandfather who then passed them on to the father. The father, Phat T. Tieu, listened to the story of the First Emperor of China and how he had searched throughout his reign for the “Elixir-oflife”. The father became a master of Chinese Medicine as his ancestors had.
Although Chinese is the family’s ancestry, the Tieu family was now living in Vietnam, and the cultural interest in herbal/botanical cures was continued mainly out of necessity.
During the 1960’s and 1970’s, the father supported the United States of America (USA) during the Vietnam War. When the fall of Saigon, Vietnam occurred, the father was put on trial for war crimes. The Vietnamese government took all of his property. He and his family were sentenced to death; but, a neighbor stood up for them, and he and his family were allowed to leave the country.
The family was loaded on an old junk boat with more than two-hundred (200) other people. They were afloat at sea until, fortunately, the boat became marooned on an island. The people spread themselves out around the island and built make-shift shelters for their families. A few fruit trees, like little bananas, were growing on the island, and there were fish to catch in the ocean.
The people, along with the Tieu family, struggled for food and survived for six (6) months until a fisherman found them and contacted the United Nations (UN). The UN picked them up and brought them to the USA to start their lives over from scratch.
The father found in his son, Huu, the mental capabilities of carrying on the family research. Huu was fifteen (15) years old when his family was on the island.
His father passed the family’s knowledge on to Huu. He took Huu to an herb store in San Francisco, California, and explained the technology that would be involved in reducing the properties of the herbs and botanicals. He explained the conclusions that he and the generations before him had arrived at and how, with the introduction of computers and high-tech software, we would be able to expand on their conclusions and receive the maximum benefits. His father requested Huu to continue the search for the elusive “Elixir-of Life”.
Huu took his father’s request to heart and continued the search. Armed with the information handed down from his father, he began in earnest to study plants, their characteristics, physiology and survivability. After understanding plants, he experimented on animals. He found that he needed to take perfectly healthy animals and make them sick; observing and studying carefully what happened to them as their bodies changed. Then he had to make them well again with continued observation. He administered only one hundred percent (100%) natural potions and knew that the chance of a harmful side-effect was minimal.
He visited libraries, did internet searches, attended seminars and spoke with various people in the fields of botany and herbalism. After spending years of “hit-and-miss” experiments, he began to break down the needs of people’s health and decided that his main focus should be the immune system. To strengthen one’s immune system would be the closest way to achieve his ancestors’ dream of an “Elixir-of-life”
EVENTS at Family HELM:
On Saturday, June 18, Dr. Veronica Mendoza will conduct a workshop on leadership qualities, selfesteem and family topics that affect our health. A $25 fee is requested.
Until then … TAKE CHARGE! … Sylvia