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  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Bi Feiyu

  A Note on Chinese Usage and Names

  Prologue: Defining the Terms

  Chapter One: Wang Daifu

  Chapter Two: Sha Fuming

  Chapter Three: Xiao Ma

  Chapter Four: Du Hong

  Chapter Five: Xiao Kong

  Chapter Six: Jin Yan and Xu Tailai

  Chapter Seven: Sha Fuming

  Chapter Eight: Xiao Ma

  Chapter Nine: Jin Yan

  Chapter Ten: Wang Daifu

  Chapter Eleven: Jin Yan

  Chapter Twelve: Gao Wei

  Chapter Thirteen: Zhang Zongqi

  Chapter Fourteen: Zhang Yiguang

  Chapter Fifteen: Jin Yan and Xiao Kong, Tailai and Wang Daifu

  Chapter Sixteen: Wang Daifu

  Chapter Seventeen: Sha Fuming and Zhang Zongqi

  Chapter Eighteen: Xiao Ma

  Chapter Nineteen: Du Hong

  Chapter Twenty: Sha Fuming

  Chapter Twenty-One: Wang Daifu

  Epilogue: Dinner Party

  About the Author

  Bi Feiyu was born in 1964 in Jiangsu province, China. Previously an editor for the literary magazine Yu Hua and a journalist at Nanjing Daily, he is a two-time winner of the Lu Xun Literary Prize. Massage won the Mao Dun Literature Prize in 2011 and was successfully adapted for film in 2014, winning several awards at the Golden Horse Awards and the Asian Film Awards.

  Also by Bi Feiyu

  The Moon Opera

  Three Sisters

  A NOTE ON CHINESE USAGE AND NAMES

  In Chinese, a person’s given name always follows the surname. Therefore, the character Sha Fuming has the surname Sha and the given name Fuming. Pinyin, the standard Romanisation method for Chinese characters, has been used throughout this novel.

  Prologue

  Defining the Terms

  COMPARED TO REGULARS and VIP cardholders, walk-in clients comprise about one-third of the clientele at a tuina therapy centre, sometimes as much as half on busy days. In general, tuina practitioners treat walk-ins with special care, which they demonstrate mainly through words – so-called business savvy. If rapport is established, a walk-in might become a regular, who could then be a VIP after purchasing an annual membership card. VIPs are essential, naturally, but you don’t need too many of those; seven or eight VIP clients provide a guaranteed monthly income for a tuina therapist. So their business is vital, but walk-ins remain the most valuable of all clients; though this may sound contradictory, it is a fact. For in the end, VIPs have all been cultivated from walk-ins, with whom the masseuses have a well-formulated repertoire of relationship-building techniques. Take terms of address as an example: the therapists are discriminating in choosing who to call ‘leader’, who should be addressed as ‘boss’, and who may be better referred to as ‘teacher’. In this they are very particular, basing their choices on the client’s vocabulary and tone of voice. They know the moment a client opens his mouth whether he’s a ‘leader’, a ‘boss’ or a ‘teacher.’ They are never wrong.

  Conversations with clients are relatively complex, but revolve mainly around their health. Flattery is the norm; it’s a given that a tuina therapist will comment on the client’s good health, a convention from which none will deviate. On the other hand, it is also their job to point out minor health issues, for if they didn’t, they would be out of work. ‘You have some health issues!’ a client can count on hearing, and what follows will be health tips to deal with the problem. Take, for instance, a shoulder. Our shoulders have particularly intricate muscle masses, a major muscle group that includes biceps, triceps and trapezius muscles. With prolonged repetitive shoulder movement, the tendon fibres stretch, and that can produce muscle effusion. By itself, the effusion is nothing to worry about, because it will be reabsorbed into the muscles. But when it cannot be reabsorbed after prolonged muscle activity, a health problem emerges. The muscle fibres begin to stick together, which leads to inflammation – known as frozen shoulder, a painful condition. Without effective control and therapy, over time the fibres calcify, turning a minor health issue into a major problem. Just think: calcified muscles lose their elasticity, which results in a loss of movement, until you can’t even raise your arm to wave farewell to a friend. A major nuisance, wouldn’t you say? So, be nice to your shoulders. Women, as well as men, must take care of themselves. Exercise is important. But if you really have no time for exercise, no problem; let someone do it for you. Try tuina. It helps to separate areas that are stuck together – a form of health maintenance, with an emphasis on maintenance. These health tips are, of course, common knowledge, but at the same time they are gentle reminders and heartfelt advertisements. None of the information is complicated, and the clients don’t usually take it seriously; the point is, the therapist must offer these tips, for they make all the difference in customer relations, which is why they never tire of offering them.

  On this particular day a walk-in client appeared at noon. With airs of self-importance, he asked to see the owner, drawing Sha Fuming out of the therapists’ lounge.

  ‘You’re the owner?’ the man asked.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ Sha replied respectfully. ‘My name is Sha Fuming.’ He smiled broadly.

  ‘A full body massage. And I want you to do it.’

  ‘It will be a great honour. This way please,’ said Sha, leading the man into one of the therapy rooms.

  Xiao Tang, one of the receptionists, quickly and expertly prepared the massage couch. With a flick of his hand, the client tossed his key on the bed. Though blind, Sha had an unerring ability to judge sound, and his ears told him the direction and distance of the thrown object. With precise accuracy, he picked up the key and appraised it by its size. Clearly, the self-important client was a driver, a truck driver whose body gave off the faint odour of petrol, no, of diesel fuel. With a smile, Sha handed the key to Xiao Tang to hang on the wall, then cleared his throat and felt the back of the client’s head, which was cold, some twenty-three or twenty-four degrees Celsius. Obviously, he kept the air-conditioning in his truck so low he’d turned it into a refrigerator.

  Kneading the client’s nape, Sha raised his head and said with a smile, ‘Your neck is a trouble spot, Boss. Be careful with cold air.’

  The ‘boss’ sighed. ‘I’ve got a fuck-your-dear-mother stiff neck. I’m dizzy and I’m groggy. Why else would I come here? I have another two hundred kilometres to go yet.’

  From the man’s accent, Sha could tell he was from Huaiyin. Like everyone else in the country, people from Huaiyin loved to fuck someone’s mother, but those from Huaiyin had a higher standard and a stricter requirement – they only fucked dear mothers. They wouldn’t fuck anything less.

  Sha Fuming began by relaxing the man’s trapezius muscles, using a method called stripping. Then he used the heels of his palms to rub the driver’s nape at a rapid speed, like sawing something or cutting off a head with a dull knife. Soon the back of the driver’s head began to warm up, which made him feel so good it was ‘fuck your dear mother’ over and over.

  ‘Your neck’s all right. The main problem is the cold air in your truck. When you’re on a long distance run, be sure to turn up the temperature, Boss,’ Sha advised.

  Just like a boss, the man stopped talking, and he was soon snoring away.

  ‘Get on with your work,’ Fuming told Xiao Tang softly. ‘Close the door behind you.’

  ‘If he can sleep with all that loud snoring, why lower your voice?’ Fuming smiled. Xiao Tang was right, so he said nothing more and gently finished the hour-long massage. Then he covered the man’s neck with a heated salt pack, which woke the driver into a pain-free healthy state, like a clear blue sky. The ‘boss’ sat up, blinked
, and ‘wrote’ a Chinese character in the air with his head.

  ‘I feel good! Fuck your dear mother. I feel great.’

  ‘You feel good, then that’s great,’ Fuming echoed.

  But the boss wasn’t done; he ‘wrote’ another pattern in the air, drawing out the last stroke carefully with his chin twisted all the way to one side, like a calligrapher who is expert in the style and aesthetic feel of his writing. Finally he drew his ‘brush’ in and happily moved his chin back to where it belonged.

  ‘I went to a bathhouse two days ago. The girl touched my head here and there, and it felt great, but did no good. Fuck your dear mother, it was as effective as a fart, and I had to pay for a private room. Now I know that you blind folks give the best massages.’

  Fuming turned to face the boss. ‘We don’t do massage here. We do tuina, it’s not the same. Come back any time you want, Boss.’

  Chapter One

  Wang Daifu

  THE FIRST POT of gold for Wang Daifu – blind tuina therapists are called daifu, or doctor – came in Shenzhen. He plied his trade near the Shenzhen train station at the waning years of the twentieth century, a golden age for blind therapists. Golden age may sound more like something a student would say, but for Wang Daifu there was a crazed quality to money, which frantically found the gaps between his eight fingers.

  Why was it so easy to make money at the time? The most immediate cause was the handover of Hong Kong to China. Hong Kong residents are devoted fans of Chinese tuina therapy; it is a deeply ingrained component of their personal and cultural traditions. But the cost can be prohibitive. Tuina is manual labour, pure and simple, and the average resident of Hong Kong, given the high standard of living there, could not afford it. The return of Hong Kong to China changed everything. People swarmed across the border to Shenzhen. Making the trip was as easy as a man and a woman sharing an embrace. Return to the mainland – isn’t that a form of embrace? The passion for that embrace flowed from the workers – gold-collar, white-collar and blue-collar – all of whom wriggled into the bosom of the motherland. The residents of Shenzhen immediately grasped this business opportunity, and in no time, tuina therapy began to take off. When you think about it, no matter what sort of business you’re dealing with, once manual labour is involved the residents of mainland China will corner the market so fast it could make ghosts and demons weep. And don’t forget that Shenzhen is a special economic zone. What does that mean? It means cheap labour.

  There was yet another reason why tuina therapy flourished: a century had come to an end, and on the eve of the millennial change people experienced a powerful sense of dread; coming out of nowhere, this anxiety had no basis in reality, and was not a true dread in the normal sense of the word. It was more like a fire deficiency as described in Chinese medicine, something that had an aggressive impact on people and made their muscles twitch. Bright lights shot from their eyes. Go for the money! Go now, or you’ll miss out! It was as if the people had gone crazy. And when they went, money followed, which intensified the craze among the people. Madness can wear you out. Then what? Chinese-style tuina therapy is one of the better remedies.

  Set against that background, tuina by blind therapists thrived in Shenzhen. It took hold with incredible speed, a phenomenon like surging clouds in a strong wind or a raging firestorm. China’s blind population quickly got wind of this exciting good news, telling them that a new epoch was at hand for the sightless in Shenzhen, where the streets were paved with gold and money bounced and hopped around like fish out of water. Outsiders were treated to the grand sight of a flood of blind people arriving at the Shenzhen train station, a new city that was not only a window into China’s reform and liberalisation policies, but also a home as well as a paradise for the blind, who were exuberant behind their dark glasses as they negotiated the left side of roadsides and bridge paths with their canes, half of them heading from west to east, half from east to west, or half from south to north and half from north to south. They walked in single file, this way or that, on each other’s heels, an army on the move. So happy! So busy! When the lights dimmed, another contingent of people passed by. Dog-tired Hong Kong residents, dog-tired Japanese residents of Hong Kong, dog-tired European residents of Hong Kong, dog-tired American residents of Hong Kong, and, of course, all the dog-tired mainland Chinese – the new breed of capitalists and parvenus, who never counted their money in public by first licking their fingers – descended like a swarm of bees. They were tired, oh so tired, worn down by fin-de-siècle exhaustion. They were tired, so tired their muscles cramped up. When they showed up at a tuina clinic they lay down on the massage couch and fell asleep before saying how long a session they wanted. Choruses of snores, foreign and domestic, rose and fell. The therapists loosened up their clients, and many of the rushed clients simply spent the night in the clinics, not getting up from the tables till daybreak. Once they woke up they tipped the therapist and went out into the world to make more money. Money was their constant companion, swirling around them like snowflakes and never more than a sword’s length away. They needed only to reach out, take a step forward, and their sword tips pierced the heart of money without spilling a drop of blood.

  Wang Daifu also began earning money, a small sum, to be sure, but since poverty had always been his lot, he was amazed by Shenzhen’s wealth. How can money be made this way? It’s scary. He’d always survived by his own labour, which meant having enough to eat and clothes to wear. But now he was more than just getting by; it was like sleepwalking. Not only did he take in Chinese yuan, he was also given Hong Kong dollars, Japanese yen, even US greenbacks. The first time he’d held US money in his hand had been early one Saturday morning. His client, a delicate, soft-skinned Japanese with small hands and feet, tipped him with a bill that felt smaller, shorter and narrower than the others. A suspicious Wang thought it might be fake. But as the client was a foreign guest, it didn’t seem appropriate to say anything. At that pre-dawn hour, he had been on the verge of collapse from fatigue, but concern over the fake bill had him feeling taut as a stretched tendon as he stood there rubbing the bill suspiciously between his fingers. When the Japanese client noticed Wang’s hesitation, he assumed he’d given too little and handed him another bill. It too was short and narrow, intensifying Wang Daifu’s suspicions. Why had the man handed him a second bill? Does money mean so little to him? He remained motionless, money in hand, as the befuddled client took out a third bill and slapped it into Wang Daifu’s palm.

  ‘Good work!’ he said, holding one of Wang’s thumbs up in front of him. ‘You’re really this!’

  After such effusive praise, Wang was even more reluctant to say anything except thank you. Convinced he’d been cheated, he was quite unhappy, but he remained too embarrassed to mention it. He held on to the three bills till that afternoon, until he could stand it no longer and asked a sighted acquaintance to tell him what he had. It was American money, a total of three hundred US dollars. Wang Daifu’s eyebrows arched, and his mouth fell open and stayed that way for a long time. He started walking and didn’t stop until he’d drawn three circles around the nation’s Southern Sea.

  Crazed, that’s what money was. Unreasonable. One bill after another, like flying carpets, leaping and gliding through the air. They soared high, they turned and tumbled, then they dove earthward with a whistle to settle right into Wang Daifu’s hands. He could almost hear the eerie engine that powered the money. It roared, accompanied by a sharp trill. Each day was more exciting than the one before, an ongoing battle. That’s how Wang Daifu became rich.

  Then Wang’s springtime arrived in the midst of his battle. He fell in love. It was the dawn of the new millennium, a new century was about to begin. On the last night of the old year a blind girl called Xiao Kong, from the town of Bangfu, arrived at Shenzhen train station on the other side of town to visit Wang. Since there were no clients, the clinic had a lonely, desolate feel that seemed at odds with the last night of the millennium. The therapists crowded in
to the lounge, slumped over from sheer exhaustion. No one spoke, but the room filled with silent grumblings. Why couldn’t the boss give us this day off?

  ‘How could I even think of giving you the day off at a time like this?’ he said. ‘Other people’s days are light, yours are dark, and that’s the difference. On their days off they wear themselves out having a good time, and here comes your chance to make some money. Who knows whose legs are going to bring in the business? No, we wait! Everyone.’ Well, they waited, but business suffered a broken leg, for no clients showed up. Wang Daifu and Xiao Kong sat in the lounge with time on their hands. After a while, he sighed softly and went upstairs. Xiao Kong heard him leave, and a few minutes later felt her way over to the stairs and followed him up to the therapy rooms.

  The therapy rooms were quieter than the lounge, so they sought out the innermost room, opened the door and walked in, each sitting on one of the tuina beds. Most of the time, these rooms were packed; never before had they been so quiet. For that to happen on the eve of the millennium was especially disconcerting. It felt staged, like a carefully constructed backdrop. Like lying in wait. Seemingly in readiness. But ready for what? Wink-wink. Wang Daifu and Xiao Kong smiled. Private smiles mirroring private thoughts. They couldn’t see, but they each knew that the other was smiling. That went on for a while before they each asked, ‘What are you smiling about?’

  ‘What are you smiling about?’ One question on top of another, back and forth, until it felt comical and frivolous, playful. But serious as well. They drew closer to a possibility, and could get even closer, but now all they could do was keep smiling. Before long their cheeks showed the strain, began to stiffen. Not at all natural. From then on, smiling took real effort, but to stop would not be easy. Gradually, the atmosphere turned suggestive, moved in a new direction; ripples appeared in a small corner. Then more ripples, quickly evolving into swells. At some point, the swells began to crest, gaining momentum like a stormy sea. A mighty force. Surging to one side, then reversing direction. Signs of approaching danger loomed. To keep from being swamped by the waves, they clutched the sides of the massage bed as tightly as they could, so tight their equilibrium suffered. They stayed like that for a long time, moments caught up in internal struggles. Finally, he said what was on their minds.