Xie Yi and I relax in the warm spa water, our uniformed attendants at the ready with a towel and bottle of water the moment we emerge from our bath.
It’s a weeknight and the Beijing massage club is virtually empty. This place is the newest and most extravagant in the entire city, with its secret indulgences. Eventually, the men in diapers would emerge, but only later, when we were ready.
This place, and its pampering, is a facet of Chinese life that has always amazed me the most.
For many years, this city of 21 million residents has bruised a wound of poverty that sometimes hurt your eyes — a Dickensian world that exists right alongside fantastic wealth. Wretched families in oxen-pulled carts labor among the entitled few in their European sports cars. Things are now changing, of course. China’s major cities are developing their own middle class. There’s an explosion of cars on the freeways that just a few years ago were the sole domain of the wealthy. There are malls and restaurants teeming with couples and families with money to spend. Every day, Beijing looks a bit more like some American city.
But tucked away in this corner or that are the spas, these fantastic expressions of wealth and privilege that only the very few can afford — out of reach of most Chinese, and even some foreign visitors.
And on this night, we have the place to ourselves.
My brother-in-law is a self-made businessman. At first, as a young man barely 20, he made his fortune in quasi-legal gambling enterprises and, later, in less-risky investments such as pool halls and restaurants. Now he’s a partner in mining operations in far-away Xinjiang province, as far away from Beijing as Anchorage is to Manhattan.
Most friends assume that my time in China is played out in some cramped tenement with various relatives. In reality, my brother-in-law’s lifestyle far outpaces my own. He lives in a 6,000 square foot house in the city northern suburbs, in a community mixed with other wealthy Chinese and visiting foreigner businessmen. As his wealth grew, he moved from a small apartment to a series of ever-larger chateaus. Finally, a few years ago, he retreated to the far north, not far from Capital Airport, taking refuge from Beijing’s masses among the city’s wealthiest inhabitants, where guards mind the gates. His three-story house includes a spacious home theater. Each trip, we stock up on bootleg DVDS (some yet to be released in the U.S.) and movie-binge for hours. There are eight bedrooms, two housekeepers, and a cook.
For Xie Yi, business is good. And with business in China comes quanxi, the exchange of favors. And so every year, Xie Yi and his girlfriend/business partner offer free passes to the newest massage place for us to indulge ourselves.
The massage spas have always been one of our Chinese rituals. My joke has always been that there aren’t enough hands in China for this body. (And there aren’t.)
In the early years, when Xie Yi’s business was getting started, we’d go to neighborhood foot massage places where workers would soak our feet and then apply pressure points, informing what corresponding body part — liver or heart — might give trouble, depending on where your foot was most sensitive. Outside Beijing, the foot massage places were often in large darkened rooms, where you could luxuriate in a stranger’s touch, floating in your own world. We went to places where the workers were all blind, with a supposed closer connection to the body. Without sight, they had a profound sense of touch.
Most afternoons, we went to salons where for $4 you could get a full head and shoulder massage by young girls hired for their beauty. The girls would wash your hair and then rub your head, neck and shoulders for an hour. I’d flirt with my masseuses, with my wife translating from the next chair.
In 2001, the year I brought my parents here, I promised my father that within hours of our arrival, he would have an 18-year-old girl walking on his back, an exotic form of massage pleasure for a father of seven raised during the American Depression. The next night, my parents, Lily and I sat in a row at a salon inside the exclusive China World Hotel as four young women massaged our feet.
My father turned to me.
“She’s looking at me, Jay.”
“Look back,” I said.
He did.
That year, my father-in-law had a massage woman come to his home. She warned my father to beware of his health. Little did we know, that it would be my mother who would die, just seven years later, but in an automobile accident, an eventuality far outside a massage woman’s realm of prediction.
Now, every year, another exclusive massage place opens that tops the rest. This year’s gem is called “Winding River” and includes a lavish six floors of expansive pools, saunas, steam rooms, exfoliation services, a five-star restaurant and massages given in hotel-like rooms with flat-screen TVs and kingsize beds. Men and women separate for their sauna time and then meet in the restaurant for dinner before a massage on one of the upper floors.
One splurge costs $400 or more per person. (That’s where the free coupons come in.)
Each time, the pre-massage regimen is the same: After a dip into the sauna, trying out the various jets, with dips into pools both frigid cold and nearly scalding to the touch, I offer myself to them.
The men in diapers: The exfoliation crew.
They wear shorts, actually, but the room is so humid the workers strip down to the minimum for their labors. A plastic sheet is placed over a platform that resembles an autopsy table. I lay on top, still very much alive. And then the men go to work, scrubbing off the dead skin with a rough cloth. The sensation is good, a cleansing I could never give myself. They scrub away the grime on the neck, ankles, elbows and feet.
Each time, the men call out to my brother-in-law at the next table.
The “lao wai,” or foreigner, is very dirty. I look to see flakes on the floor as though a snake had just shed its skin. The dirt of American life finally come clean in China.
And each time the same issue arises: the bollux. The men scrub hard, which is good, except for that bang of the groin that always sends me leaping off the table.
I have come armed with phrases, such as “Please be careful down there.” They nod and get to their work. And them Boom! The bloody bollux slammed again.
But this night, those moments of pain are the least of my concerns.
For Xie Yi and me, during these times in the sauna, there are no interpreters, no one to make things easy. If we are to talk, we must make use of our own infantile command of one another’s language.
When I struggle for a word in Chinese, Xie Yi is often there with the right word, or something close, in English. He knows more of my language than he lets on.
And on this night, he has a matter he wants to discuss.
I look at him. Go on. I’m all ears.
