Today, people seek out the therapists’ knives to help relieve physical ailments, improve sleep quality and deal with the pain of being dumped....
BITS ‘N’ PIECES
While it looks dangerous, daoliao, which translates as “knife massage” or “knife therapy”, is believed to have physical and emotional healing powers and is a form of Chinese medicine that is thought to be more than 2,000 years old. Practitioners say it was first carried out by monks in ancient China. It spread to Japan in the Tang Dynasty more than 1,000 years ago and to Taiwan following the Chinese Civil War in the 1940s.
While knife massage is hard to find today in China and Japan, it has undergone a resurgence in Taiwan in recent years as people have sought it out to deal with the stresses of modern life.
Today, people seek out the therapists’ knives to help relieve physical ailments, improve sleep quality and deal with the pain of being dumped.
The knives target “qi doors”, or pressure points, similar to other types of Chinese medicine like acupuncture. But practitioners also believe the steel knives have an invisible power.
The therapists have certain rules to follow. For instance, if they are in a bad mood, they shouldn’t give a knife massage in case they transfer bad energy to the client. To keep their own energies pure, all practitioners stick to a vegan diet. Hsiao and her army of therapists also wake up at or before 05:00 every morning and do 100 squats and headstands, and bash knives for 30 minutes against a pillow to get their qi going.
It’s thought that ‘dude’ is an abbreviation of ‘Doodle’ in ‘Yankee Doodle’, and probably refers to the new-fangled ‘dandy’ that the song describes. Originally sung in the late 18th Century by British soldiers keen to lampoon the American colonists with whom they were at war, the ditty, by the end of the 19th Century, had been embraced in the US as a patriotic anthem.
By then, an indigenous species of fastidiously over-styled popinjays had emerged in America to rival the British dandy, and it is to this new breed of primly dressed aesthetes that the term ‘dude’ was attached. Over time, the silk cravats and tapered trousers, varnished shoes and stripy vests worn by such proponents of the trend as Evander Berry Wall (the New York City socialite who was dubbed ‘King of the Dudes’) would be stripped away, leaving little more than a countercultural attitude to define what it means to be a Dude.
