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[by Roger Wicke, 2021 Dec 24]
C.S. Cheung, M.D. died on 2021 December 13 at his home in San Francisco at the age of 96. He is survived by his wife, Cindy.
After escaping from Communist China in the final years of the Cultural Revolution of 1977-76, Dr. Cheung came to America and began his long career teaching classical Chinese medicine and publishing numerous scholarly books and articles, first establishing a school in San Francisco.
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I first met him in 1983 after deciding to study Chinese medicine and enrolling in his school as a first-year student. His lectures were notable for their remarkable clarity and his erudite command of English. As a medical researcher with a PhD in Biomedical Engineering, I had become disillusioned and demoralized by how Big Pharma dictated trends in medical research and sought a way to break free of that future. When I learned how Dr. Cheung had originally trained as a medical doctor in China, completed his residency at a Chicago hospital, and then became demoralized by the many ways that American doctors were expected to do business, he became my role model and mentor. Only years later did I realize how fortunate I was to have studied under a man who had thoroughly read and digested many texts of classical Chinese medicine — as it had been at its zenith and prior to its systematic destruction via "reform" and transformation into "TCM" following the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949.
Over the following decades acquiring experience as an herbalist and beginning to teach courses myself, Dr. Cheung and I regularly shared our insights, frustrations, and challenges as we both observed alarming signs of decline across all aspects of American society and culture. Dr. Cheung told me that what he saw happening in America seemed to be harbingers of what he had personally experienced during the Cultural Revolution — the same types of propaganda and rhetoric being promoted in universities, the political correctness, creeping censorship, decline of critical thinking, disrespect for tradition, destruction of culture and history, and the madness of crowds. Yet he would always discuss these matters calmly and with an inner wisdom arising from his commitment to a Buddhist respect for life.
He was the most remarkable man in my life, and I will always treasure the many conversations we've had over the years and the interests we both discovered that we shared, from a love of long, leisurely walks in the mountains and forests, European and American literature, to a passion for Mozart and Bach.
Dr. Cheung taught a number of advanced seminars for RMHI over the years. Much of RMHI's educational software and course materials have their origins in ideas that Dr. Cheung and I discussed over the decades I have known him. His legacy will live on in the minds of his many students and colleagues.
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