The Chinese Foot Massage

Today, after a long wait in the Taipei airport, a short hour-long hop back to Hong Kong (where they actually feed you on the airplane - in the States an hour flight gets you a couple of ice cubes and, if you're lucky, only minor leg cramps), and a quick wade through customs, the entire day seemed to have evaporated. 

Eddie, a Hong Kong native who's helping me get around on this trip, suggested we get a traditional Chinese foot massage after dinner. So we headed over to this small shop whose characters translated as "The Big Bucket." We were ushered to two large lounge chairs where we ordered our massages from a yellow paper menu (one of the options was the traditional Thai massage, a brutal arm-twisting affair that Eddie described by twisting his arms behind his back and saying "CRAACK!").

A few minutes later the big buckets arrived, wheeled in on carts by our masseuses. These wooden buckets, which looked like something you'd churn butter in, were filled with a hot water mixture of foot relaxing herbs. I had chosen mint; Eddie went with ginger. The idea is that you take off your shoes and socks, roll up your pants, and soak your feet in these baths for a bit. It was very nice and, surprisingly, tingly.

While soaking, my masseuse motioned for me to get out of my comfy chair, turn around, and sit on a little bench, all the while keeping my feet soaking in the big bucket. Once I did that, she started kneading my neck, gently for about two seconds, and then suddenly, without warning, her fingers turned into unbendable titanium rods and starting punching my back as if she had evil robot karate hands from the distant future.

Gah! She started digging in so deep under my shoulders and along my spine I thought I'd seen her fingers erupt from my chest any minute. Somehow she found every nerve and jammed them with her iron hands, tracing their pathways into my brain, and then twisting them so all I could say was "unghaaa gaaa."

"More gentle?" asked Eddie, but I couldn't nod or shake my head or reply in any human way. I simply enduring the mechanical grinding and brutal, non-stop fingers of fury.

Twenty minutes later I was told to sit back in the comfy chair for the actual foot massage. Now this part of very nice, but poor Eddie sitting next to me was in unbearable pain. "It's my head," he said. "That part of my foot is connected to my head. Big headache!"

I guess I wasn't reacting the way I should to the massage since I was laughing because I found it ticklish. The masseuse said I was pretty tough, and then she cracked something weird on my big toe and instantly bright flashes of incendiary pain shot up my leg. I lurched forward and almost kicked her backward, but she was strong and had my foot in some kind of judo grip that no man could escape.

My masseuse laughed, and I realized this was the response she had been looking for. Then she told me to relax, but my entire body was on alert, stiff enough I could have levitated, so relaxing was out of the question.

So it was: the non-relaxed, spine-cracked, nerve jangled foot massage applied with diligent intensity by a Number 30 because this is what her name tag said.

I wonder if she soaks her steel fingers in tubs of mint after work to relax them for the next day. Strike that. Instead I bet she polishes them with steel wool and hones them to a fine point on a brick sidewalk. All the better to crush innocent spines on her next shift.

Comments

[suzanne]

Sounds like a mild version of the infamous "Arnie massage"!