I had never had a professional massage
before I left the U.S. No, that’s not
quite right—let me start over. I’d never
paid for a massage before leaving the
U.S. I’d had massages before, of course,
but they had all been the efforts of amateur enthusiasts, and so came gratis.
Besides, most of that was way back in my college days. As far as professional
massages go, I’m not sure that I’ve had one of those to this day, but now I
have at least paid for a few. These have
all been in Asia, basically because they are cheap enough here to indulge in
now and then, and a person would be a fool not to give them a try when the
rates are so reasonable. They can be
wonderfully relaxing when done right.
So far I’ve had paid massages in
Thailand (firm up to nearly painful, but ultimately very nice), Vietnam (gentle
and very relaxing), Cambodia (gentle, relaxing, and unconscionably cheap--$10),
and southern China, where they tended to go for the Thai approach in the
establishments I visited. Basically,
however, the treatments have all been pretty similar, with a regional variation
here and there.
I am in northern China now—Jinan, in
Shandong province—and last weekend I decided to see what sort of massages are on
tap here. A whole new experience, is the
short answer. Here’s what happened.
I found a likely looking business and
entered it with a sort of wary confidence.
Every transaction is an adventure when you don’t speak the language, and
this goes double when you mean to go into a strange establishment, remove most
of your clothing, and let someone you don’t know grope you a while. So the first hurdle was making sure I was in
the right sort of place, and hadn’t, say, wandered into a pet-grooming salon
through misapprehension of the Chinese characters outside. I knew the Chinese
word for massage, however, and could make the appropriate gestures, so I was
soon put at ease on that score: they did
massages here.
The menu was all in Chinese, however, so
I picked something in the mid-price range and hoped for the best. The hostess conducted me to a room with about
six severely reclined chairs, all empty, and gestured to the middle one. I believe she told me to make myself at home,
but, since it was all in Chinese, I wasn’t entirely sure.
She left, and I removed my jacket, shoes
and socks, hoping that I had taken off enough, but not too much, to make a good
impression. Presently, my masseuse
appeared—a plump, pretty woman of 25, as I subsequently learned. She was carrying a wooden tub of hot water
with rose petals floating in it. She
placed this on the floor and motioned for me to roll up my pant cuffs and
deposit my feet in the tub. As I did so,
she produced a small foil envelope, from which she extracted a moist,
mask-shaped piece of towel. By gestures
she invited me to place this over my face.
I complied, but didn’t feel any more relaxed for it. The combination of my feet in hot, rosy water
and my face under a cold, wet towel wasn’t doing it for me, so I tried to
strike up a conversation with my masseuse as a diversion.
As
I expected, she spoke very little English, and I soon exhausted my repertoire
of Chinese phrases: “I am an English
teacher;” “I want to get off the bus here;”
“That’s very expensive;” “I like tomatoes.” But we managed to find out a few things about
each other nonetheless. Her name was
Juen, she was a native of Jinan, and although I was twice her age, she insisted
on seniority in the partnership because she was masseuse number 59.
Presently she hauled my feet out of the
bucket and then coddled them for a good long while, which seemed to give her
great satisfaction, but was wasted effort as far as I was concerned. I know that for some people a foot massage is
heaven, but not me. Maybe I haven’t been
wearing cheap enough shoes, but throughout my life my feet have generally
looked after themselves. I would find an
ear massage equally rewarding—ah, but we’ll get to that. For the moment, however, Juen seemingly could
not do enough for my toes.
“Are you going to paint them or sculpt
them when you get home?” I asked finally.
“Shen me?”
“You seem to be committing them to
memory. Have you named them all
yet? They feel wonderful now, but shall
we move on to other topics, so to speak?”
She laughed. “Wo ting bu dom!” She gave my foot a final rub and reached for
a towel to dry them. It was then that
the strangeness first intruded. From somewhere
she brought out a glass globe about half the size of those containing live
goldfish that you used to win at carnivals.
But this one was of thicker glass and had a smaller aperture. Within the globe was a small patch of white cloth. She sprayed some clear liquid into the globe
from a plastic bottle and clicked a lighter, igniting the cloth. She immediately clapped the globe over the
bottom of my foot and, as the flame extinguished itself, a suction was created
which grabbed the flesh on the sole of my foot and held on. She ran this globe up and down my foot a few
times and then peeled it away. It
separated with a loud pop as the pressure was released. She repeated this on my other foot. “Well that’s new,” thought I. She then signaled that I could remove the
damp mask, which I gratefully did.
Next came the leg massage, but I could
tell Juen’s heart wasn’t in it. I was
still wearing my jeans and neither of us enjoyed it much, so she soon
desisted. She left the room with the tub
and returned bearing more equipment. She
now reclined my chair fully and settled on a stool above my head. “Ah, the head massage,” I thought. “That’s always good.” Instead, a bright LED light was snapped on at
my temple and Juen was soon running a Q-Tip briskly around the inside of my
ear. This made me squirm a bit—it was
too clinical or janitorial to be relaxing—and I began to fear that I had
mistakenly contracted for the ladies’ facial treatment or something. But the other ear had to be done too, of
course to maintain balance in the universe, so we got through it while I looked
forward hopefully to a brighter future.
By and by she discarded the Q-Tip and
then brought up something that looked like a paper horn such as one might blow
at a New Year’s celebration.
“What’s that?” I asked, shying somewhat
as she moved in. She smiled sweetly but
said nothing, and then my fears were confirmed as she began to insert the thin
end of the horn into an ear. “No, I
think I’d rather not,” I began. She
hesitated, but then spoke very slowly and clearly in English.
“It’s all right.”
I really wanted to believe her. “You sure?”
“Yes, it’s all right.” So there we were. She finished inserting the horn, held it
there, and then, as expected, there came the click of the lighter. She had lit the other end of the horn. This was even less relaxing than the globes
on the feet. It sounded as if she were
holding an ear trumpet over a bowl of Rice Crispies, and Lord, how big the
flame looked in my peripheral vision! I
could feel the heat of it on my cheek, and knew it was burning closer all the
time. After perhaps 15 seconds she blew
it out and re-inserted it in the other ear.
This time the flame was even closer, of course, but Juen withdrew it
before it could scorch me.
For some reason the flame refused to be
extinguished this time, so Juen placed the horn, still burning, in a thick glass
ashtray beside my chair. She then took
up one arm and began to work on that. I
tried to relax, wondering how one might conveniently remove soot marks from the
ears.
Perhaps half a minute later there was a
loud crack and tinkling of glass as the ashtray shattered from the heat of the
flaming horn. Juen provided a running
commentary in Chinese, and finally smothered the horn by throwing my damp
facial mask over the smoldering remains.
Then she tittered, which I found most alarming of all, as if it were the
most amusing thing in the world to have an ashtray explode at one’s elbow. She said something, still giggling, which I
can only imagine was along the lines of, “Boy, it’d smart to get a shard of that in your eye, wouldn’t it?”
But she attended to business now—the
normal sort I had come to expect in massages—and I started to relax again. She had me remove my shirt and flip over, and
for a while she did a creditable job soothing tense muscles in my back. Then she left the room and returned with what
looked like a tackle box. This boded
ill.
Lying face-down, I didn’t see much of
what happened after that, so I can only report what it felt and sounded like. She first put what seemed to be a thick cloth
mat over my back, and then draped a lighter cloth on top of that. Next I heard the ominous sound of her spray
bottle as she squeezed the trigger again and again over me—for hours, it
seemed. I thought of Montag, in Fahrenheit 451, hosing down books with
kerosene. Then there came a pause as she
weighed her words.
“When it is hot, tell me.”
“Uh, what are you—?“ I began.
“Don’t move your body,” she added,
enunciating slowly and clearly.
“Not a smidge.”
I heard the click of the lighter, and a
bright, quavering glow leapt up in the room, as if a centenarian’s birthday
cake had just appeared. Plainly, some
sort of pyre was now alight on my back.
I could have read by the illumination, if I’d had a book.
It’s strange, the thoughts you have at
times like these—I mean times when absolutely nothing in your previous years of
existence gives you any guidance on how to behave. A random phrase swam up through my
consciousness from those faraway years at Cherry Chase Elementary: “Stop, drop, and roll.” Well sure, if it comes to that, why not?
From the tops of my eyes it looked as if
Juen were waving her hands, but I couldn’t tell how or why. I waited for her to say something (“Oh
shit! Oh shit!”), and was reassured when
she didn’t. Nor had there been a shriek
and clatter of fleeing feet—good signs, these.
But then, as my back began to roast a new thought occurred: “Disgruntled employee?” I asked myself. What better way to tell the boss to go to
hell than by calmly bar-be-queing a foreigner in the main parlor? (“Let him try to get the smell of that out! Ha!”)
And there had been that
disconcerting giggle when the ashtray went off like a grenade. Perhaps not an entirely full deck here, young
Juen.
But meanwhile my back was beginning to
smoke, and I wondered how long I was expected to hold out. Newspaper headlines formed themselves
unbidden in my imagination:
Massage
Business Gutted by Fire: Foreigner
Blamed
“He
moved his body,” worker says
“Uh, it’s getting a bit warm,” I
remarked, and Juen instantly flipped the mat up over the flame, snuffing
it. I was enormously relieved, of
course, and she, of course, repeated the process twice more. She wasn’t disgruntled, I decided. She just wanted to give me my money’s worth,
and perhaps she had a marshmallow that she was determined to finish toasting.
But eventually it ended and I heaved one
or perhaps two relieved sighs. Then I
heard the click of the tackle box being opened, and a line from a movie flashed
through my mind: “What fresh new hell is
this?” There was the tinkle of jostling
glass, and I turned my head to see Juen extracting hundreds (apparently) of the
small globes my feet had met previously.
This was clearly the grand finale, so I turned my face down again and
dumbly waited for what was to come.
It didn’t take long: the click of the lighter, and a moment later
I felt a very sharp pinch on the lower right side of my back; another click and
a matching pinch on the left. And so on,
marching up my back, until there were eight or ten globes, each trying to suck
up as much of me as they possibly could.
Now, dear reader, please think back to the tormentor of your
childhood—the one who loved to pinch you just to see your reaction. Maybe it was a teasing uncle, or maybe a
sworn enemy at school. Think how you
writhed under their ministrations and tried to get away. Now imagine that feeling multiplied by eight
or ten up and down your back—strong, cruel, tireless pinches that never weaken
or move off the spot that they’ve seized.
I shifted slightly—I couldn’t help it—and discovered I now sounded like
a woeful wind chime, as the globes clinked against one another.
“How, uh, long do they stay there?” I tried to sound conversational, unconcerned.
“Ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes!?”
“Okay, okay. Five minutes.”
“Ah, God.” I took deep breaths and tried to distract
myself with memory exercises, but those five minutes still dragged out
interminably.
“It’s very red,” Juen said after a while,
just making small talk. “Very red.”
“I’m sure it is,” I conceded, and we
lapsed into silence again.
At last, pop, pop, pop, off came the
globes, and I heard Juen replacing them in the tackle box. I turned over and looked wanly at her. I was as relaxed as a person might be when
leaving a bruising but walk-away car wreck.
“Okay, that’s all,” she told me, and
then remembered something. “Oh, 24 hour,
don’t—“ She made scrubbing gestures on her arms. “It’s not good for your healthy—for your
body.”
“Don’t wash. Absolutely,” I agreed immediately. “Give the tissues a chance to re-attach
themselves. No point losing flesh
unnecessarily.”
“Okay, that’s all!” she repeated,
smiling.
The hostess was smiling too, as I paid,
and she delivered the speech she had clearly been rehearsing. “We welcome you back to our massaging!”
I smiled warmly in return. “Yes!
Don’t hold your breath!”
This pleased her. “Sank you!”
“You’re most welcome.”
Back home I stripped off my shirt in
front of the mirror to see what hath Juen wrought, and my mouth dropped
open. There on my back were two rows of
tennis-ball-sized hickies, the worst the color of ripe bing cherries. “My God, I’m disfigured!” I sputtered, probing
them gingerly to see if they might not be just hideous illusions. I had seen these marks before, on men in the
dressing rooms of other massage establishments, and had assumed they were the
symptoms of some horrible disease—perhaps the consequences of a lifetime of
debauchery. But now I had them, and I
understood. I had paid good money for
them, moreover.
That was last week, and these souvenirs
are still visible, though mercifully fading now. Still, I have decided not to contract for any
more massages here in Jinan—the practitioners are too addicted to pyrotechnics for
my taste. I’ll save my money for
Thailand or Vietnam where the only things they set fire to are perhaps candles
for ambience and the occasional stick of sandalwood incense.
