Massage by Bi Feiyu

Author:Bi Feiyu
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780143800026
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2015-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Gao Wei

DU HONG FOUND it hard to believe that she could so quickly establish herself at the tuina centre. Fortunately, she had enough self-awareness to realise that her skills alone were insufficient to attract many return clients; the key, already revealed, was her looks. As this was her first job, she had yet to accurately comprehend the importance of a woman’s looks. But she knew that appearance was linked to productivity.

One fact closely related to her looks was that all her return clients were male, mostly in the age group of thirty-five to forty-five. She was happy and proud of her appearance, and, naturally, found it strange, a new experience for her, one that made her happy, the natural delight for women. If she’d stayed home, she’d never have known how pretty she was. She’d known she was good-looking, but not that she was pretty. They are not the same; they embody different qualities. That is what made her proud. Then another fundamental fact occurred to her; young, single men rarely came to her, and that gave her an indescribable sense of loss until she found a convincing explanation: young men are usually in good health, and so hardly any of them showed up for tuina therapy. It wasn’t that they did not find her attractive, but that she never had a chance to encounter them. If they showed up – a big if – who knew what would happen?

It was good to know she was pretty, but there were times when it wasn’t. She sensed that she was becoming ‘complicated’, which is common among girls, whose worries all seem to stem from knowing how they look. Du Hong actually sort of wished she didn’t know about her looks.

The busier she was, the more contacts she made with people, which complicated matters. People truly are strange creatures, and there are all kinds. How can the differences be so huge? It is no exaggeration to say that no two people are alike. She could not see them, but their differences were clear to her as she worked on their bodies and talked to them. Some were heavy, some skinny; some strong, some frail; some genteel, some rude; some laughed a lot, some were quiet; some stank of alcohol, some of cigarettes. But no matter how different, they had one thing in common: they all carried mobile phones, which came equipped with the owners’ favourite jokes. The first one she heard went like this: When a farmer went out into the field, his wife’s lover showed up. But before they could get anything on, the farmer came home for his hoe. The panicked wife had an idea: she told her lover to hide in a hemp sack behind the door. Picking up his hoe, the husband spotted the sack as he was walking out the door. It looked full, so he gave it a kick. ‘Hey, what’s in there?’ he wondered out loud. ‘Corn!’ the wife’s lover yelled out.

Du Hong was in stitches when she first heard the joke, but things got complicated after listening to a few more.

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