How author and herbalist Erin Masako Wilkins created Asian American Herbalism
A conversation about the power of cultural reclamation.
Erin Masako Wilkins is the founder of Herb Folk and the author of Asian American Herbalism: Traditional and Modern Healing Practices for Everyday Wellness. A few weeks ago I profiled Erin for AAPIC, a regional coalition for the AAPI community in the north bay. Erin’s work is so profound and her book is so delightful, I would be remiss not to share the transcript of our interview here.
Note: this interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I'm not an East West person, but that language represents how I'd compartmentalized my life. I realized that how I identify, and the work I do, is Asian American herbalism.
—Erin Masako Wilkins
Jen Hyde: Tell me about yourself and how you came to be an herbalist.
Erin Masako Wilkins: I am a Asian American herbalist, a, Japanese style acupuncturist and yonsei, or fourth generation Japanese American. I came to herbalism through acupuncture. I went to acupuncture school in Berkeley, and a big part of that graduate school program is herbalism and it just captured my heart. Once I graduated and I started an acupuncture practice, and I was really committed to incorporating herbs.
Very quickly I realized that herbs are just growing in abundance in my bio region, which is the San Francisco Bay Area, so I started to comb through the various herbs that are used traditionally in East Asian medicine and found there's a lot of crossover. Things like chrysanthemum, mugwort, rose, various mints, they grow well here in California and they're used traditionally as well. So I really kind of tapped into that in my own practice.
And then from my acupuncture practice I realized that so many people, for various reasons, would not come to acupuncture. Whether for financial [reasons] or maybe [because] they have an aversion to needles, that comes up a lot. And so I started teaching wellness workshops in the community as a way to share the medicine and kind of breakdown barriers. And as I did that, more and more people came forward with an interest, not just in learning about the herbalism, but about the reclamation of our cultural connections to the earth and to the medicine.
JH: You practice eastern energetic theory. I’m curious what that is and why it’s an important aspect to your practice.
EMW: So East Asian medicine is based in energetics versus say, anatomy and physiology primarily. So we're looking at energetics like chi in the body, how that works, blood and fluids in the body, and even more esoteric, yin and yang, and how those principles or energetic philosophies create wellness or illness. Some herbalists will look at the herbs as far as their biomedical constituents, the chemistry of the herbs. I really look at herbs and herbal medicine through an East Asian energetic lens.
JH: And you're sourcing the herbs here in California?
EMW: Yep. As much as possible, I'm trying to really support and cultivate a sustainable local economy with herbs. So finding independent growers, people who may be growing food, but they're also growing herbs. What's hard with herbs is it takes a lot of labor to not only harvest, but process. And so it is a tricky thing. I kind of have a rotating community of people who are growing some years, some years they're not. And so in my writing, I try and address that, you know, there's some people who have their own yards and they can grow. There's some people who have access to really awesome farms, and then other folks where just the reality is they're going to have to order online, and that's okay too.
JH: You're a real advocate for racial and social justice. It just seems like that is woven through your entire practice. Everything from the sourcing through your engagement with clients. You had said that people were interested in the cultural connection. I'm curious where are people finding that cultural connection?
EMW: A lot of that comes back to this idea of food as medicine. I will share often about herbs and focus on herbs that people get with access. People can find often in the grocery store. I feel like it can be quite important. Things like green tea, which can be used for headaches, for boosting energy, for helping move stress out of the body.
That was one of the cultural points for me when I was in grad school. I was going through these big herbal textbooks that felt very intimidating. There were classical formulas where the primary ingredient is green tea, and for me, that was the cultural connection. I grew up with my grandma drinking genmai cha green tea every day. And for myself, I realized, wow, there is medicine in our culture and our everyday living that we might not necessarily think of as energetic medicine, but it's already there.
It's been really powerful to share that. In classes [I] invite people to consider, what are their food based memories? Or do they have memories of their grandma their auntie making soups with roots? The smells and the sensory memory? Even if they don't know what the herb was called or what it was used for there's just so much there. I've been learning so much in these conversations, in these workshops.
JH: Are folks coming to your workshops primarily Asian American?
EMW: So before the pandemic, a lot of my patients and those in the workshops were primarily white. That's the demographic in Sonoma County. Everything was in person. When the pandemic happened and I had to shift everything online, what I found was it cultivated such a more diverse community. And so now when I teach in person or virtually, there's always a significant Asian representation in those classes and it just has been so rewarding to cultivate that presence and that pride within the medicine organically.
JH: Did you grow up in Sonoma County?
EMW: I didn't. My mom's father, Hiroshi Yamamoto, was born in Ukiah, and he was second generation Japanese American. He went to high school in Santa Rosa. Right after high school, it was the World War II, the internment, and his family ran. They ended up in Utah. He fought in the war and then he started his family in Sacramento. So I say my family has been in Sonoma County for five generations, except for the generation and a half when we were displaced. I grew up in a very racially diverse area in Sacramento. Then right before high school started in the nineties, my mom moved us back to Santa Rosa and to this day [she] will say, “I don't know why I moved us to Santa Rosa.”
She just felt a calling and to me, especially with all of this work in cultural reclamation, it makes so much sense because our family has a history here.
JH: I feel like that history is so easily forgotten or overlooked.
EMW: It's been a really interesting piece of our story and not something I was at the forefront of my consciousness until more recently. I opened [my] herb shop and I started doing a lot of writing specifically for the workshops and talking about our cultural connections to the land. Not only was my grandfather born and raised in Sonoma County, he and his nine siblings, they were farm laborers.
JH: Can you tell us more about what your book is about and how it came to be?
EMK: So when I was doing the workshops, I started writing zines. I just love the idea of somebody creating just one piece from start to finish. So I started just making my own designing them hand stapling them. And then I also started started sharing about the workshops to promote them and writing about my family history [on Instagram]. From my past life in undergrad, I had a focus in oral history and memoir writing, I had a lot of knowledge around the Japanese American experience in California, and so I was writing about that.
And an editor found me through another cookbook author, Hetty McKinnon. And it felt very magical, you know. I think it was decades of work, but all of a sudden this moment happened where the editor reached out like, “would you like to write a book on Asian American herbalism?” which is something that I coined. I was like, “yes, absolutely!” I'm so grateful for that opportunity, and it was so much more challenging than I expected.
JH: Now with it finished and it's about to come out and you have events coming up what are you working on now?
EMW: I've started teaching more and more, so I'm teaching at California School of Herbal Studies in Forestville, and Scarlet Sage in San Francisco. I'm starting to do more herb clinics online again. And then just this last March, I went to Japan for the first time ever!
Now I see it as like kind of a spiritual pilgrimage, but at the time I just knew I needed to do it. Right when the borders opened, I went for it. I visited a big tea farm in the south of Japan.
Now I'm focusing on importing Japanese green tea sourced from a generational family farm in the south of Japan, which is where my family's from. I’m just trying to just bring in those threads of connection to culture and lands and history.
JH: How do you situate yourself within an Asian American context and within your career?
EMW: In undergrad my studies in women's studies and politics were all really centered around critical race theory, identity, Asian American identity. And I was so aware of the intersection of my privilege, where I was born, color of my skin, being mixed race, that even though I was really raised in my Japanese family, I almost didn't feel entitled to claim all of the parts of me.
When I went to Japanese acupuncture school, I really didn't consider what does it mean to be a person of East Asian, Japanese heritage, practicing a traditional Asian medicine in modern times. It wasn't a conversation at school and I didn't put those pieces together myself until a decade later, in pandemic, in crisis, realizing I'm not an East West person, but that language represents how I'd compartmentalized my life. I realized that how I identify, and the work I do, is Asian American herbalism. It's such a simple thing. It seems so obvious now, but even when I started talking about it with my other mixed and Asian friends, there was this kind of sense of like, “Oh, that's so cool. That makes so much sense.” And that really was the start of the book.
Read my profile of Erin here.
Visit Erin’s storefront, Herb Folk here.
If you are in the Bay Area, come to Erin’s book launch at Copperfield Books in Petaluma on October 20th! Details here.