IN: When I was little, I fell up some stairs when I was trying to like, race up on hands an knees or something. I hit my face really hard, like thats why I have this scar on my eyebrow here. Anyways, I got this like really, really bad blackeye. And my grandma would take an egg, boil it to be like hard boiled, and then wrap in in a cloth and press it to my eye. And I remember her and my parents telling me it was sucking out all of the bad stuff. Like, the bad energy or something. Like she wouldn’t let me eat it after either, which I was pretty sad about most of the time. Like it was because of the bad energy that I couldn’t eat it.

I looked it up and it just says that like, it’s an actual thing people do, but like I guess it’s just the warmth that’s supposed to help you. But like I clearly remember my parents telling me it was sucking out the bad stuff, just bad evil energy and blackness from my eye.

Context: I met the informant at lunch and asked about any folk remedies her grandmother used when she was little.

Background: The informant is a second year student at USC who is Chinese-American, but her parents grew up in Vietnam. Her grandmother used a lot of folk medicine growing up, and this was a method used to treat her black eye.

Analysis: I found this really interesting because at the core it could be a more scientifically backed treatment if you approach it from the “heat-healing” perspective of increasing bloodflow in the area to alleviate the bruise. However, the informant was very adament that it was about the evil blackness for her grandmother, and that it was likely something she learned from her mother before her.