Pretty Woman Spitting: An American's Travels in China Read online

  (Eilish, Paul, a student, Brian and Jean at a karaoke bar)

  THE BATHHOUSE

  Every day that I lived in China could be frustrating, but every day could also be an adventure. It was the possibility of the adventure that forced me to keep leaving my apartment and facing the throngs of Chinese people fascinated with my appearance.

  One night, while eating dinner at the downtown Pizza Hut (said Pisa) with Eilish and Jean from the Aston Learning Center, Dianne, Margaret and I learned about a local bathhouse.

  They said that the Chinese women at the bathhouse walked around completely naked, but Eilish and Jean kept their clothes on in the bathhouse and wore cotton Chinese robes. They insisted that it was a luxurious and relaxing all-day experience, with a buffet of Chinese delicacies like fried rice, sautéed vegetables and dumplings.

  I imagined it would be something like a Roman bathhouse from the movies with large white columns and people lolling about on cushioned lounge chairs in terrycloth robes eating grapes and being fanned by little boys waving humongous white feathers.

  Margaret, Dianne and I arranged to go there the next day after our classes ended.

  The Chinese bathhouse was located inside a ten-story hotel with huge gold columns in front of revolving doors emblazoned with gold dragons.

  Two minuscule women wearing floor-length, royal blue, silk dresses with white fluffy trim stood just inside the doors like statues. They welcomed us, with their arms stretched forward like they were carrying trays, saying something that sounded exactly like “Good morning” in English, but meant “Welcome” in Mandarin.

  The tiny greeters even moved like living statues because of their four-inch, platform, black heels. The added height only managed to put them to my shoulders. They walked, stiffly holding their arms out toward the long, marble, check-in desk. There, the door statues instructed us through pantomime to take off our shoes and socks and hand them to the desk clerks. We were given rubber wristbands with a key attached that opened a locker and functioned as a charge account for the services we chose inside the bathhouse. Then, the door statues started chattering rapidly and herding us forward by waving their stiff arms and shuffling behind us.

  We entered what looked like a giant gym locker room. Inside, there was a line of women in identical, starched, grey uniforms. They gasped when we walked in. Then, they began to giggle, covering their mouths. It was the reaction you would expect in a preschool classroom if Bozo the clown walked in. After a moment passed, they resumed their jobs, while managing to keep one eye on us.

  There were rows of metal lockers and a mirrored powder nook where women in white tops and bottoms with orange, Chinese-pattern trim sat drying their hair and slathering lotion on their almond-colored legs.

  An attendant led each of us by the arms towards the lockers where women were getting dressed and undressed. My attendant led me to a locker around the corner from Dianne and Margaret’s. I immediately felt eyes from around the room centering on me. It’s amazing how people staring can feel like actual weight on your body, like a scratchy blanket that makes you awkward and self-conscious all at once. I wished then that Dianne and Margaret were standing next to me to share the weight of these gazes.

  When we got to the locker, my helper, who stared up at me with gleaming black eyes, began speaking rapid fire Chinese. She motioned with her hands that I take off my clothes. Frustrated by my speechless, motionless refusal, she started tugging my shirt up with her small, strong, hands. I held my shirt down. Saying, “No, No. Bu yao.”

  She pointed to another naked Chinese lady across the aisle that was getting dressed. Then, she pulled up her own shirt to show me to remove mine.

  I got the charade, but I didn’t exactly feel like taking off my clothes right then. I’m no prude and I’ve never been accused of being modest – I played basketball for a public school for crying out loud, but I wasn’t going to do a strip tease for a captive audience of fifty Chinese women right then, even if twenty-five of them were already naked.

  Shortly thereafter, I heard Dianne and Margaret shouting.

  “What? No! I am not taking off my clothes,” Margaret yelled.

  I walked around the corner to see what was going on.

  “I thought Eilish and Jean said that they didn’t take their clothes off,” Dianne whispered.

  “That’s what they said, but it doesn’t seem like they’re going to let us get away with it,” Margaret said.

  Finally, I looked at my attendant and motioned that we wanted to eat. I held a make believe sandwich and started munching. That didn’t get through. The Chinese don’t eat sandwiches. I pretended I was holding a bowl close to my mouth and shoveled food into it.

  “Oh,” all three attendants said in unison, rapidly shaking their heads.

  My attendant gave me a huge brown toothy smile, and went to an area full of linens next to the powder room. She brought back a white cotton top and shorts I’d seen the other women wearing in the powder area.

  After I got dressed and locked my locker, she grabbed me by the sleeve and led me to the stairs up the buffet we had heard about. Dianne and Margaret’s attendants did the same.

  The buffet was a smorgasbord of Chinese foods. There was a table of hot rice dishes, noodles, vegetables and meats, a table filled with fresh cut up fruits and a table of egg rolls and sweet breads. Tables surrounded the buffets where the largest Chinese people we’d seen yet were eating. They were all watching us load our plates. We filled them up, excited to be eating fresh fruit and food that seemed more similar to what we’d find at the Chinese buffets at home. Then we did something to really get them chattering; we ordered a bottle of wine - which I’d made sure to learn how to do in Chinese the first week we were there.

  “Wo yao jiu.”

  While we ate, we talked about how we would get to the massage tables without being stripped naked. We decided to try to get robes one more time.

  Slightly buzzed and extremely full, we went back down to the bath area. Before we could pantomime that we wanted the white tops and bottoms, the pressure started again for us to strip. The same attendants surrounded us, pulled up their own shirts and tugged at ours.

  Finally, resolving that there was no way around it, I whipped off my clothes, tossed them in the locker, and, making sure not to look at any of the faces staring at my ample white body, I charged toward the shower with the tiny hand towel that had been given to me by my attendant. Blushing as I swiftly passed through the locker room, I headed towards the bath and wondered why I hadn’t bothered to shave in the two months that I’d lived in China.

  The bath area was a huge room with a panel of showerheads on one wall. The faucets had detachable heads positioned over a mirror that spanned half the room. Walking past the mirror, I saw a row of short, pink marble benches in the shape of elephants. Naked Chinese women were perched on top of them, washing their long black hair and watching me in the mirror. I felt like I’d stepped into a Calgon commercial.

  I bypassed the herd of women on elephants and headed towards a maze of showers that looked like tall tiled cubicles. Spanning the center of the room was a huge Jacuzzi pool. On the far side of the bath were massage tables, where several naked women were getting massages.

  I stepped into one of the showers with three walls. Another attendant wearing grey in the bath area followed me, eyes roaming over my body along the way. Outside the cubicles, there were rows of large soap bottles in different dispensers. As I stood in the open shower wishing I had a curtain, she pointed at each bottle and pantomimed what each was used for. She rubbed her hair once and pointed at the shampoo, rubbed it again and pointed at the conditioner. Then, she rubbed her body and pointed at the bottle of soap.

  When I finished rinsing my hair, there was a different woman in grey standing right next to me, speaking and shaking her hands and her head at the soap bottle and motioning towards the massage tables. I didn’t know what she was saying, but I decided to follow her. Still conscious of the
throngs of women looking at me, I felt myself hunch forward and scurry after her like a teenager ashamed of her new breast buds. She led me to the row of massage tables. Even though I was feeling more naked and exposed than I ever had before, I couldn’t wait to flop on the table and get a relaxing massage. The growing crick in my neck from the daily frustrations of living in China and my hard pillow was yearning to be kneaded out.

  My attendant pointed towards a table and a woman wearing biking shorts and a tank top, my masseuse. I laid my face down into the hole on the end of a long, black, padded massage table and she started exfoliating my fingers with a small rag that felt like sandpaper. I jumped up and started to protest.

  “I want a massage,” I said as I kneaded the air with my hands, but she shook her head and lightly pushed me back onto the table. Starting with my fingers, she rubbed me down with the sandpaper like I was the mangiest dog on the planet. I could feel my body slowly turning bright pink as layers of my skin were sloughed off.

  I heard a commotion around the corner and looked up to see Dianne and Margaret slinking towards me. Five Chinese women surrounded them and they had the tiny hand towels draped in front of their breasts and their privates as they hunched over and futilely tried to cover up their bits. I wondered what the Chinese thought of our modesty. After Dianne and Margaret face planted on the two tables next to me, they started complaining about the rub down too.

  “How do you say ‘massage’ in Chinese?” Margaret yelled.

  “No, no, I want a massage. A mas-sage,” Dianne said slowly to her masseuse.

  While every inch of my backside, bum included, was exfoliated, I felt like a slab of meat being shaved at the grocery store deli. I was told to flip. Then, the Chinese torturer exfoliated the front of my body. The entire front. Bosoms included. She ran the sandpaper cloth over my breasts in a circular motion like she was following Mr. Miyagi’s instructions. Wax on. Wax off. I was afraid she was going to knead my nips away.

  Margaret was even less comfortable. She kept balling up on the table like a roly-poly and laughing uncontrollably. At one point, Margaret looked over at me and said,

  “Hey, do you have an audience?”

  In all the confusion, I hadn’t noticed that another woman in grey had come to watch me get a full body scrub down. I tried to remember that most of these women had never seen anyone in real life that wasn’t Chinese, unless they saw our friends, who hadn’t taken their clothes off.

  I shut my eyes and pretended she wasn’t there. I was getting over being completely naked and having a stranger touch me. My tormentor was very professional. She did her work and didn’t make me feel uncomfortable, but the extra person staring at my now raw, naked body and thinking who-knows-what did bother me. Finally she left.

  After half an hour, when I had become numb to the scrub down, another woman tapped my shoulder. She was carrying a clipboard. She began saying numbers in Chinese to me. I guessed they were the prices of our “massages.” I knew most numbers in Chinese by then, but my computation time was slow. I had no idea if bargaining was appropriate in this case, but when the final figure came out to be eight dollars, I decided that was an acceptable price for the humiliation we were suffering.

  Thankfully, after the two-sided exfoliation, we got full body massages too. But these weren’t the relaxing, knead-you-into-dough experiences we had been hoping for. They were pounding of horse hooves; tenderize-the-big-white-slabs-of-foreign-meat massages. The minute they started, I found out that my masseuse was the strongest woman on Earth. Ten minutes in, I got over the fact that she was hammering on my breasts. Twenty minutes later, I was as loose as a square of Jell-O. Then, I flipped and she pulverized my whole backside.

  After the tenderization came the salting of the meat. With our pale bodies now bright pink from losing layers of skin and being pummeled, we were salted with what felt like searing acid. We couldn’t help but complain again.

  “My God this hurts,” Margaret yelled.

  “Shit,” I yelled.

  Our masseuses giggled and we joined in, laughing at our own pain. The coarse salt was rubbed into our bodies until we were perfectly seasoned. In a Grimm Fairy Tale this would have happened just before we were thrown into the kiln and cooked by an old Chinese witch.

  Next, the masseuses washed the burning salt off with warm water that relieved our searing pain.

  During the last part of our massage, we were slathered with lotion that smelled like ripe melon and lemon grass. They squirted it in huge globs on my backside. Then, the masseuse worked it into my body. This was what I had wanted all along. I drifted off into sleep as she rubbed on my breasts.

  Two and a half hours after they started, our massages were over.

  It’s strange how quickly experiences that we never could have imagined for ourselves can become normal. Now completely relaxed in the bathhouse, Dianne and I had a Jacuzzi swim in the buff. Margaret headed straight to the sauna. We sat on the Jacuzzi ledge, propped our backs over the jets of water and laid our heads on the side of the pool. By then we didn’t even mind all the women in the bathhouse watching us like we were sharks circling the Jacuzzi.

  As I sat in that pool, with the deliciously warm water coursing around and into every crevice of my limp body, my every sense was overloaded. I felt drunk from the wine, the humidity of the bath and my own adrenaline. I was an adventurer in a foreign land, and I felt sure that I had changed that day. I was more independent, more daring and more alive than ever.

  After our dip, we joined Margaret, who was sitting on her hand towel on a teak ledge inside the dark steam room with fifteen Chinese women surrounding her, staring. There, Dianne turned to me and said,

  “You know those shops where you have to undress in a big room with a bunch of other women?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve been to those kinds of places before.”

  “I never went to those shops at home…on purpose,” she said with a grin.

  After she said this, Dianne looked down at me and I looked down at her little sixty-year-old body sitting naked on a tiny hand towel in a dark steam room filled with Chinese women gawking at us and speaking loud Chinese and we threw our heads back and laughed until salty tears leaked out of our eyes.

  Margaret never returned to the bathhouse, but Dianne and I started going once every two weeks and then once every week as a treat after a hard week of teaching. I never got over people staring at me in the bathhouse or in China for that matter, but my experiences there in that open bathhouse, while humiliating, were some of the best times I had in China.

  BUMPER CARS

  The mayhem of a crowded Chinese intersection – where people weave in and out of traffic, bang into other cars and use roadsides as lanes – reminded me of crazed middle-schoolers in a bumper car rink.

  I was eight years old the first time I ever got into a bumper car at an amusement park. My family had gone to the Spartanburg Spring Fling. I was so nervous my hands were shaking. My older sister, Jennifer, was in another car coaxing me to drive. She whizzed around with her black, curly hair flying, unafraid of the onslaught of tiny cars and vicious pre-pubescent youth that seemed possessed. I was terrified and stayed in the middle of the rink looking around wildly until I was suddenly thrown forward by a boy with spiky blonde hair and a long rat-tail curling around his neck like a snake. He had a demonic grin. He kept pounding me with his little, green, electric car until mine was pushed up to the side of the track. I kept trying to move, but before I could get going and get away from him I was pummeled again by a jarring hit from his car.

  At some point, he must have realized that he was not going to actually be able to smash me into pieces because after the zillionth hit he finally got tired of beating me into the guardrail and sped off after someone else.

  Then, I put the pedal to the metal and started circling the outside of the track, hoping to avoid all of the other cars and the rat-tail boy. Then, in my haste to avoid being hit, I smashed into someone by accident fo
r the first time. I flew forward with my car’s momentum and landed back in my seat with a “thonk.”

  It was exhilarating. My heart racing, I looked up to see that I had bashed into a pink car with a chubby man and his daughter stuffed inside. They were weaving slowly around the track, unable to turn the wheel due to the man’s massive girth. His knees stuck up in the air like sails. It was a pitiful sight. I started to feel that same creepy grin I saw on the little boy’s face spreading across my own. When I reared back to hit them again, I knew that I had mastered bumper cars.

  Riding in a car in China was nothing like this, probably because my life was at stake. I was afraid every time I got into a car, van, three-wheeled truck or other kind of makeshift vehicle. I would hold on to anything available and wished the cars had seat belts or that the seat belts would work and not just leave dark stains on my shirts. After having lived in New York, I thought that I could handle massive traffic anywhere, cars going at mach speed and herds of people crossing roads. But even New Yorkers follow rules like no passing using the opposite side of the road.

  Standing at an intersection in Wuhu was like being at a bicycle expo, a motorcycle rally and a NASCAR race all at once, only no one wore helmets and the bystanders weren’t safe. When I got ready to cross an intersection, I would become disoriented and scared. There were bikes pulling wagons piled ten feet high with bags, there were tractors, motorcycles with four passengers and three-wheeled trucks clogging the roads without following any noticeable traffic laws.

  When crossing congested streets in China, I made sure that I was in the middle of a large group as we dashed across.

  Wuhu traffic was even scarier than the streets of Beijing or Shanghai because the big cities actually had cops bringing a semblance of order. I never once saw a policeman or traffic cop in Wuhu. I definitely saw my fair share of wrecks, though.