I love that medicine smell. Pungent, bitter, sweet, sour and salty. Skin tingles only. Like Tiger Balm,  oily on mosquito bites. Like Pak Fah foong yau, White Flower brand oil, ice feeling for head ache  or stomach ache. Like Vicks. Like Halls cough drops for sore throat. Like Pei Pa Kau, our favourite  sirap, thick and black and sweet, when we got cough or fever or vomiting. Miracle lah! Those Po  Chai Pills, many little, little pills only in tiny plastic bottles. Taste like rusty nails, like old blood, so  bitter only, but really stops you from running to the toilet! Some more, what is in those small  drawers in the Sinseh’s shop? Dried seahorse, chrysanthemum flowers for tea, ginseng root, strange  black fungus, goodness knows, also have lah! My mother used to boil up bees and roots in a black  tea from the Sinseh’s shop. That time my body so heaty, my tongue so yellow. Aiyo! I so obedient  lor, I drank it up. Got better, lah. So I still like to walk past the Kedai Ubat, the medicine shop. It  reminds me of those days, we didn’t have to go to the Western doctor, sit for hours in the white  walled hospital, waiting for our number to be called. Then waiting again at the Pharmacy. So many  pills, so many hundreds of ringgit. I wish I could brew you some bees, Mama, to make you feel a  bit better. 

*foong yau: Cantonese for camphoraceous oil 

*sirap: Malay spelling for syrup 

*lah: Malay exclamation 

*lor, aiyo: Chinese exclamation