Why do some people willingly risk their health and money on dubious Chinese-made pills and creams?
Yes! Exactly! You just need to work on your meal schedule and stick to it. Slowly but surely you’ll become thinner. But remember, it won’t happen instantly. You need to be patient and let the medicine work. Don’t worry, koko [Chinese for older brother] will guide you.”
Anton, a beady-eyed, smooth-tongued businessman, is talking rapidly into the telephone in the small ruko, or shop-house, where he and a friend teach Mandarin. He is busy doing what he seems to do best — hawking traditional Chinese medicines over the phone.
His inventory includes everything from appearance enhancers such as diet pills, weight-gain pills and breast enhancement creams — “You can have a body like Miyabi!” Anton proclaims — to pills for a host of illnesses like diabetes, asthma and tumors.
On Anton’s Web site, there are two photos of him in the section for diet pills: one of him overweight and another of him thinner. The strategic placement of the photos — chubby on the left and slim on the right — suggests that the chubby Anton is the “before” photo and the slim Anton the “after.” This is completely inaccurate, of course. Swap the photos around and one gets the real picture.
“It’s not lying” Anton says so passionately he’s almost hopping up and down. “It’s just people’s assumption [when they see the photos] that I was overweight but now I’m thin because of the diet pills. Really, I am much bigger now than when I was younger. I just put those photos there, but I didn’t write ‘before’ or ‘after’ below them.”
It isn’t clear why Anton feels the need to resort to such tricks, though. The number of repeat customers who call him day and night, as well as testimonials from buyers on his Internet forum thread praising his products, suggests that most of the pills and creams he sells seem to actually work.
Anton is just one of the many sellers of traditional Chinese medicine prowling the Internet for buyers. Previously, one had to travel to ethnic Chinese enclaves in Jakarta, such as Glodok or Kota, to buy these health items. As a matter of fact, this is where Internet merchants like Anton buy their medicines in bulk. But these areas are not easy to get to, and finding what your looking for in the crowded, narrow alleyways is always a challenge.
If one chooses to scour those maze-like passageways, however, there is a wealth of unlabeled jars filled with pills and creams that claim to be able to cure whatever ails you. Some of these even sport cheap-looking printed stickers.
As with other goods in Indonesia, Chinese medicines are often fake. The Web site okezone.com quoted Charles Saerang, chairman of the Jamu Producers Association, as saying that a loophole in the regulations passed by the Health Ministry’s Food and Drug Monitoring Agency (BPOM) allows makers of Chinese medicine to directly connect with health clinics around the country.
“The clinics themselves are legal, but the medicines themselves are questionable,” Charles says.
While their authenticity cannot be verified, most medicines sold at toko obat cina (Chinese medicine shops) on Jalan Pancoran in the Glodok area come with markings purportedly from the Food and Drug Monitoring Agency.
The bleach-haired Ling — who asked that her real name not be used — runs a Web site whose name she does not want mentioned, but should be the first thing that comes up if you type in the key words “selling Chinese medicine” in Bahasa Indonesia on Google.
She says that Chinese medicines do not have side effects because they are all herbal. “The way it works, the herbal medicines clear up the blood vessels first,” she says.
Ling explains that after the “detox” process comes the “balancing” process, where the body’s energy is balanced and normalized. After that, a “reactivation” of the body happens, before it undergoes “strengthening, where the “qi” (life energy) re-energizes the body’s immune system.
“You have to routinely take the medicines, though, to achieve real results,” Ling adds.
“Benny,” a merchant on Pancoran, says the side effects from the different pills include vomiting, diarrhea and stomach ulcer in some rare cases. But these occur very rarely, he says, and are usually very mild.
“Anita,” a 23-year-old bank employee who asked that her real name not be used, experienced some of these side effects. She says that she had to defecate four times or more each day for about a week after taking Anton’s diet pills.
“It wasn’t painful, but obviously, having to go to the bathroom so often is bothersome, especially when I was at work” she says.
She immediately called Anton, who helped put her mind at ease.
“He told me it was due to the detox process that the [diet] pills put you through,” Anita says. “So basically, it’s cleansing all the bad elements from your body.” “Detox” is one of the most frequent reasons that sellers give whenever customers complain about stomach-related problems.
The popularity of Chinese medicines is on the rise, not only because of their increasing visibility on the Internet thanks to online sellers, Web forums and social networking sites, but also because of effective word of mouth.
Eve, a 27-year-old housewife, purchased a lotion designed to smoothen and whiten skin. She says that the product’s effect was immediate.
“All my friends saw how much my skin changed for the better, which all made them immediately want to buy the medicine,” she says.
The skin lotion is in tube form, with a sticker bearing the ironically Japanese-sounding name of Mashiroi.
Eve has a series of photos showing her skin’s transformation, which she claims occurred only after a month. With numerous friends asking her where to buy the medicine, Eve has now become a reseller of Mashiroi, peddling the lotion for almost double the original price of Rp 800,000 ($86).
The paunchy “A Hong,” a merchant in Pancoran who also asked that his real name not be used, says that skin lotions like Mashiroi work wonders by forcing the users’ skin to “die” and be replaced by “new, younger skin.”
But since one’s skin is often theoretically not “dead” yet, the lotion forces it to dry and peel prematurely. This results in an extremely visible skin peeling on the user.
“Susan” is another Mashiroi user. Like Eve, the 29-year-old mother of one has also kept a photo diary of her skin transformation, from a yellowish tone into a fairer complexion. But the whitening came at a price.
“The worst thing was the itching as my skin peeled. There was dead skin everywhere, on my face, which itself turned reddish,” she recalls. “But my mother and a lot of people I know prefer [these remedies], which makes me believe in them even more.”
Randy is a merchant in Pancoran whose store has been around since the 1930s. He says that the tradition of selling Chinese medicines in Indonesia goes back a long way.
“All the medicine that is sold here [in Pancoran] comes directly from China,” he explains. “You do have some other Chinese medicine stores in other areas in Jakarta, like in Kelapa Gading, but they are mostly labeled and licensed medicines and are not made and mixed in China.”
Randy adds that every good Chinese medicine store must carry three essential licensed brands: Pien Tze Huang, Angong Niuhuang Wan and Yunnan Baiyao.
While he claims that the skin, ulcer, hepatitis, heart, cholesterol and other medicines he has at his store “work, it is a case of compatibility. It may work for some patients but perhaps not for others.”
Anton says that the problem with selling medicines for other illnesses is that there are a significant number of fake medicines in the market that sellers claim as being made in China.
Seated in front of a closet filled with medicines such as cungkuo cegenduan (for hemorrhoids), pientan fuyenwan (for stroke victims) and anti cancerlin (for cancer), Anton says that Chinese medicines work, especially the herbal ones. However, he acknowledges that it is increasingly difficult to verify the authenticity of these medicines with suppliers.
“I try to mostly to stay away from that [selling health-related medicines] because the result of taking those fake meds could be life-threatening,” he says. “I don’t really want to sell ill people fake medicine, even if it is just by accident.”
