Hanging Out in Huaiyin

The other day a Chinese teacher offered to take me to a local bathhouse where he’d shout me a sauna and massage. And though I’m not usually one for sitting around in hot steam or being pummeled and kneaded by a stranger, in this country if your host offers to pay for a very expensive gift (and a sauna and massage is very expensive), it is very rude to refuse – so I thanked him enthusiastically.

It was a small shop-front decked out with pine paneling, potted plants and carpets in the foyer, with a kid in a glitzy uniform opening and closing the front door, as well as supplying each of the guests with a glass of green tea.

I was asked to take off my shoes and was given a pair of plastic sandals, a couple of towels and a locker key, then I followed my friend in through the wooden doors into the dressing room.
The moment the door opened, a hot and pungent fug of ammonia, sweat and used steam hit me in the face, fogging up my glasses. My first reaction was maybe I should plead sickness and go, but I figured it would at the very least be an interesting experience.
I took off my glasses, cleaned them, then put them back on and was presented with wall to wall Chinese flesh – hairless, pale, rubbery bodies – standing about scratching themselves, sitting, lying about on couches, sprawled on vinyl massage couches with their legs splayed like dissected frogs.

A man sat bent over on a bench peering between his legs at some fascinating anomaly he’d found beneath his scrotum. And there in the corner in a couple of open cubicles, where two Chinese men squatting over hole-in-the-floor-toilets, contemplating me over their folded arms as they each took a quiet shit.

Now, I’m no prude, but having never been in a football team, my delicate western sensibilities with their secret code of ‘don’t look’ found all this a little confronting - the moreso because almost each of these men was watching me with a long expressionless gaze. I don’t know what was going through their heads – I never do – but the pressure of all those silent eyes was palpable.
So, acting like I do this all the time, while keeping up a stream of light conversation with the Chinese teacher, I opened my locker and got my gear off in a purposeful fashion, then turned around and noticed every eye in the place had immediately dropped to check out the foreigners dick. Nobody gasped…but then, thankfully, nobody smirked either.

One guy gestured at it, then made a speculative observation in Chinese to his friend who smiled, said something back, and for a moment I wondered what kind of exchange it had been then, but knowing that whatever I imagined a Chinese man would be thinking would be wrong, I put it from my mind.
Keeping my face blank, I slipped my feet into the little plastic sandals, slung my towel over my shoulder and followed my host into the larger room where the hot baths were, and all the eyes followed me like so many invisible laser beams.

Now, call me neurotic, or paranoid, and I might well be both, but in the West I rarely feel comfortable being naked with other guys. I’ve got no problem being naked with women, but with men it’s … kind of difficult.
I think it’s because either I’m self conscious, or I sense self consciousness, I’m not sure – but there’s a kind of comparing thing that happens when Western men get their gear off together - a kind of furtive vanity, in which I feel as if each man is secretly grading himself against the other men in some kind of pyramid of power.

And it’s not exclusive to the sauna - I feel the presence of this invisible pyramids of power most times when I’m with groups of Western men. If they’re talking cars, it’ll be about what kind of car they have, what they know about cars and so on – or if they’re talking about their careers, it’ll be all about what they do, how much they make, and so on - each man will be positioning himself in relation to all the others in some kind of dog pack pyramid of power. Whether it’s a conversation about their house, their work, their kids or even gardening, it’s often the same. Many western men are so pathologically competitive I get claustrophobia whenever I’m in a group of them.

And in the sauna, that same dynamic is palpably present. It might be about the size of their gut, or other guys gut, or their dick, or how racked they are, or whether the guy they’re sitting next to is bigger, smaller, stronger, hairier, better looking – whatever - the self consciousness is furtive but persistent, like a vanity driven mind-fuck which makes simply sitting in a sauna a politically fraught event– so I’d rather not be there.

And there’s this other thing – a covert paranoia about being seen to be checking out the other guys dick. I mean, everybody does it, but they try to do it without being seen to do it. I think the only guys that don’t give a shit about comparing dicks are gay guys and football teams – but straight guys – it’s definitely a no-no.
The effect of this is rather odd – you’ll be sitting on benches in a sauna, or hanging out in the dressing room talking, and there’ll be this peculiar ‘dance of the eyes’, as each man tries to keep doggedly aloof from the swinging bits of the other blokes while at the same time struggling with their natural curiosity.

But in a Chinese sauna I’ve discovered, it’s a very different vibe.
Strangely enough, for all the blatant scrutiny, I didn’t feel self conscious at all. It felt different, and when I thought about it, I realized it was because the power pyramid was not here – which is a paradox, because outside the doors of this room, the power pyramid is very much a part of Chinese male life, engendering a whole repertoire of subtle precedents, manners and body language.
But then it also occurred to me that perhaps I was just not conscious of the power pyramid simply because I was an alien.
But still, it definitely felt different – as if male competitiveness had taken a holiday within these walls.

All these Chinese men, stripped of their usual power-dress uniforms of black and grey, lolling about with their cocks out, gossiping about stuff, inspecting their balls, taking shits – they seemed comfortable together.

And I remember that comfort from when I’d been a boy with my mates, all of us leaping about in the river with no clothes on, comparing dicks, farts and whatever else came to hand – the innocence and joy of it. Well, a bit of that was here too – these blokes and their frank curiosity with me and each other – they lacked the adult vanity that makes it all go weird. We were simply a room full of men – some skinny, some well built, others flabby or with sunken chests or weird lumps, some squat, some long and thin, others fat – a room full of naked men enjoying some leisure time.

Hanging Out With the Chairman

Speaking of ‘frank curiosity’ - I’d had a similar experience a couple of months before, in different circumstances. A day after I arrived in Huaiyin, Alex, the assistant to Ms. Dai, our supervisor, had rung me and requested that I attend a medical examination in an hour.

Now, I’m not overly keen on doctors, or with being probed with rubber gloves. There’s something obscene about being poked, probed and peered at while being treated as possibly toxic at the same time.
Also, there was an icy blizzard raging outside and the freezing fingers of the wind where everywhere, so I didn’t fancy the idea of taking my clothes off in some draughty communist surgery.
“Why do I need a medical examination?” I asked peevishly.
Alex’s calm Chinese voice smiled patiently down the line.
“To see if you are ill,” he said.
“Do I look ill?”
“No … but maybe the doctor can help you.”
This curly logic made me pause.
“But I’m not ill.”
“Aaah, how do you know? You might be ill inside.”
“Inside? No. I am very healthy inside.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
It was Alex’s turn to pause – then he said quietly, “But Mr Roger, the doctor is expecting you.” As if the poor doctor would be heartbroken if I didn’t turn up. But what could I say?
So I pulled on two sweaters, two coats, two scarves and my woollen hat and leather gloves and, swaddled in this way, I waddled out into the blizzard to meet Alex at the front gate where we caught a taxi.

Skidding to a skewed halt in the slurry of ice on the road, the taxi delivered us to an imposing grey building with chipped Corinthian columns – the usual dilapidated remnant of communist-classicist grandeur left standing in towns like Huaiyin all over China.
With its high ceilings and damp concrete floors now channelled from wear, and most of its internal doors and windows cracked, it was the worst possible place to have a medical centre on a day like this.
Added to which, the foyer was packed with young Chinese men in terrible suits – and they were all smoking strong cigarettes, the thick smoke of which combined with the vapour rising from their clothes, sticking in my throat like noxious clag.

Alex told me they were all prospective coal miners waiting for their examinations. I joked they must be preparing themselves for the lung diseases of their chosen profession.
But Alex didn’t smile.
“Lung diseases?”
“Yes, you know … smoking?”
He thought about this, then nodded earnestly and said, “Yes, it is very bad for the health.”
I left it at that. It was a bit obscure, I must admit, and besides, it was too cold for laughing.
We joined the queue at a sliding window where Alex picked up our form and gave it to me to fill out. On ancient yellowing paper in rickety typed English, it was headed:

‘PHYSICAL EXAMINATION RECORD FOR FOREIGNER.’

The form then asked me to ‘truthfully’ tick yes or no as to whether I had had a long list of things, many of which I had never heard of, like ‘Brucellosis’ and ‘Relapsing Fever’.

And then it asked me a more interesting question:
‘Do you have any diseases or disorders endangering the public order and security’ and listed toxicomania, mental confusion, and other varied psychoses.

I paused over ‘mental confusion’, wondering what would happen if, in all truthfulness, I ticked ‘yes’. I mean, hasn’t everyone had mental confusion? (Voice from above: “No Roger, you’re the ONLY ONE!!!)
Then I thought, maybe they’re all trick questions, because as any seasoned psychotic knows, you’re always the last to know. So maybe the most indicative response from a total nutter would be to deny everything.

But all musings aside, I knew what they expected. In all reality, they didn’t give a damn if I was sane or totally nuts so long as the semblance of public order could be seen to be maintained – and that meant giving the right answers rather than the correct ones.
So I denied everything.

Basically, the examination consisted of wandering from room to room, each another grimy cold store, in which there seemed to be the same ancient and anonymous nurse bundled to the nose in white cotton with a cap pulled down over her eyes so she looked like a bag of washing with a human trapped inside – and each of these apparitions would curtly order the queues of young Chinese men in terrible suits about – getting them to lie down on beds with their shirts up while she slid a freezing stethoscope over their chests, or pushing them to stand in front of ancient, clanking X-ray machines.

It was all okay, even entertaining, though I had momentary uncertainty when we pushed through the door to one particular room, beside which was a large bin full of stained swabs and used syringes spattered with blood. And there was that same old nurse, drawing blood from a the arm of a pale young Chinese man.

With the wind whistling through a crack in the window, the room was like a relic from the Korean war, cluttered with rusting metal benches, racks of glass bottles and old paper packages of swabs. The concrete floor was covered in dusty footprints and trodden in swabs from where she’d missed the bin.

But still, I figured I’ve seen worse in my travels so I took my turn at showing how manfully I could keep chatting with Alex as the needle went in and took three small test tubes of blood, each one of which she dutifully labelled.

Then I noticed her turn to the section of my medical form listing a whole lot of diseases including HIV, venereal disease and the plague among others, and quickly tick all the boxes denoting that none of these diseases were present.
‘But … how does she know?’ I thought, looking at my three untouched test tubes of blood among all the other test tubes of blood in the rack. It was all very mysterious, but then, I’m the last to know correct procedure in a Chinese medical lab.

So where are we going with all this?
Well, I’m simply setting the scene I suppose – and where it’s all leading is to the next room, where the last page of my medical form had to be filled out.

It was right down the end of the corridor, where a large circle of men milling about puffing on powerful Chinese cigarettes as they gaped at me coming toward them.

Inside it was dingy, the only light coming from a grimy louvered window high up on one wall. Next to the door as I came in was a huge cast iron weighing machine, an eye chart and a gilt framed portrait of Chairman Mao as, along benches on either side of the room, men waited, whispering to each other, the hissing Chinese consonants reverberating in the air like the sound of water over rocks.
At the end of the room was a rickety old wooden desk behind which, on a swivel stool sat a stern old Chinese man in a white coat, his round spectacled face brown and weathered like a walnut.
He and the desk were surrounded by more young men in bad suits, all whispering and watching the goings on as they waited their turn.

I sat down on a vacant stool and slowly got an idea of what I was in for next.

One by one, each of these guys was pulling down their pants and bending over for the doctor to matter of factly spread their cheeks and squint through his spectacles and mutter to himself at whatever he found. He’d make a small and meticulous note in their form, then slap them on the bum to turn round so he could paw at their scrotums while once again squinting and muttering to himself.

Now, as I have said, I’m no prude, but the idea of this close examination of my foreign anatomy within a ring of gawking Chinese coal miners was a bit shocking.

I turned to Alex.
“I’m not doing this.”
Alex drew his eyes away from the scrum around the old man’s desk and frowned.
“Oh, but you mus’. You mus’ be examined.”
I pointed to the old man.
“But ... he’s not washing his hands, or wearing rubber gloves.” I said in a restrained panic, quite forgetting my phobia of rubber gloves.
Alex smiled. “He is very clean,” he said, waving his hands reassuringly. “He is a doctor.”
I pointed to all the men standing around.
“But … they might have crabs.” I said.
Alex did a double take, stepping back.
“Crabs?” he said, “What is crabs?”
This stopped me. How do I explain?

Then the door opened and Chairman Mao stepped in.
Well, he looked like Chairman Mao - a big man in an old khaki army coat, with the same round and benign features and panda ears of white hair – the same smiling eyes and that kind fatherly thing going for him. I looked up at the portrait of Mao on the wall and he was the spitting image. He pushed through the door as if he’d just dropped in from the Long March to check on the troops.
He spotted me as soon as he came in and immediately began talking to me with great interest. He was holding a lit cigarette daintily between the ends of two fingers and he had the easy confidence of authority, which added to his resemblance to Mao. My temporary distraction and his strangled English was such that I didn’t notice he was speaking to me until Alex told me the old man wanted to know where I was from.

I told him I was from Australia, and he nodded appreciatively. The room had gone quiet, and everybody was watching us as, between puffs at his cigarette, he asked me in fair English what I was doing in China, then nodded thoughtfully over my brief answer that I was here as a teacher at the Institute.
“You will be examined?” he asked, pointing to the old doctor who was still at his desk, diligently ploughing through a steady procession of obediently spread bottoms and Chinese scrotums.
“He is a very good doctor,” he said grandly. “He is my very good friend.”
He threw a loud quip in Chinese over to the doctor while pointing to me and everybody in the room laughed – well, everybody except me, who was still panicking at the idea of having to drop my pants in the middle of this scrum of Chinese blokes.
But the combination of my ever-present pride and Chairman Mao made it such that I couldn’t back down now. I had to go through with it or risk looking like a wimpy foreigner with something to hide – couldn’t get his drawers off like the other blokes – that kind of thing.

So I calmed myself down and waited.

I noticed then that new young men kept coming in through the door, but nobody was leaving. I wondered why they weren’t when their examinations were over – why were they loitering and glancing occasionally at me?

Silly me.

As more men came in the atmosphere became more expectant until finally the old doctor gestured for me to come to the scales to be weighed. By this time the room was jam packed and they were all watching me, and right up the front was Chairman Mao, beaming down through the smoke of yet another cigarette.

After having my eyes checked, I took off my two coats and my two scarves and stepped up to the old metal machine to be weighed. Then I was measured, and my big moment came. With a hiss and a poke in the ribs the old doctor hustled me behind his desk, where he sat down and gestured for me to drop my pants, which I did.
He then gestured with a twirl of his forefinger for me to turn around and bend over. I obeyed and heard the shuffling of many feet as the entire room moved in. The doctor kindly parted my cheeks for their pleasure. There were no gasps or exclamations so I figured everything was fine.

A slap on the bum indicated for me to stand and turn around, so I did, and found myself cocooned within in a wall of Chinese faces, at the front of which stood Chairman Mao, still smiling exuberantly, with his cigarette poised thoughtfully to the side.

The old doctor matter of factly grabbed my scrotum in one hand and lifted it up to peer beneath, prodding with a finger at whatever he was looking for. As he did the crowd all shuffled for position, craning their necks to look over his shoulder - no gasps of surprise or admiration – just the stilled hush of absorbed fascination.
It was then that Chairman Mao, also up on tiptoes, made a comment in Chinese which caused the doctor to pause. With my scrotum still cradled in his palm, he turned and laughingly responded, and a lengthy conversation began.

This conversation went on about a minute, during which time I stood blank faced, gazing intently at a spot high up on the wall as the audience remained equally transfixed, blinking thoughtfully as they gazed me.

Now, when your bag of jewels is resting in a Chinaman’s palm while his attention is elsewhere, time goes rather slowly - so I found myself wondering how many scrotums and bums this old bloke inspected closely each day, and got caught up with the mathematics of it all.

Assuming a rate of about six scrotums and bums an hour, with an eight hour day, that gave me the impressive figure of 48.
And then if you extrapolate that to a week – 240
And for a year (assuming a month holiday), I came up with the astounding number of 11,520 scrotums and bums the old bloke had pawed and peered at.
I was sure I must have calculated wrongly, but just as I was about to begin again the old Doctor remembered where he was and, turning back, released me and gestured curtly for me to pull up my pants. Evidently all was okay.

I pulled up my fly, and seeing the crowd still gazing opened mouth, I gave them all a deep bow, murmuring an ironic, “Thank you gentlemen, thank you so very much…”
To my surprise, they all burst out laughing, then everyone loudly applauded. And once again, as happens so often in this strange, alien place, my heart filled up with the wondrous lunatic joy that blindsides me so often in China.

So, back to the sauna.
Me and the Chinese teacher found ourselves sitting in a tiny wooden steam filled box on one of three benches, surrounded by naked Chinese guys all talking at me in Chinese, with the teacher translating.
It was the usual stuff: ‘where are you from’, ‘I like kangaroos’, ‘are you married’ and so on.

It was very exhausting, so after a few minutes I said I was going out to sit in the pool. So they all followed and sat around me in a wide ring in the hot blue water and, with our voices echoing loudly off the tiles, the questioning continued, meandering endlessly through the usual fascinations with the mundane and inconsequential:
‘Do you have brothers and sisters’; ‘yes’; ‘how many’; ‘four’; to which there was much widening of eyes and looking at each other with incredulous shakes of the head.

It’s an amazing and somewhat piteous side-effect of the one-child policy that wherever I go in China people are astonished by the fact that I have four brothers and sisters. At least once a week, I am asked this question, and the effect is always the same – amazement, bafflement, incredulity and sometimes, especially in children, a muted yearning.

The only other thing that gets the same incredulous effect is when I am seen writing left handed. This also provokes hisses of amazement, largely because Chinese schools, for reasons no-one has yet explained, actively discourage left handedness in children.
By now the heat was getting to me. Everything was hot – the sauna, the pool, and when I went to cool down under the shower I found it was also set on hot. So I staggered out into the dressing room, to find the air conditioner was blowing hot air and the attendants were all smoking, which mixed with the powerful melange of other odours, making a particularly noxious atmospheric soup.

My heart was pounding and I was sweating like a pig, but still this procession of naked Chinese men followed me wherever I went, sitting when I sat, going wherever I went, and all the way the Chinese teacher was translating questions, swapping quips in Chinese, and selling me into slavery for all I knew. But by this stage I didn’t really care, because everywhere I went was hot, hot, hot.

I decided I had to get out, so I told the teacher I’d had enough, and thanked him.
“Oh no, you cannot go.” he said brightly. “You mus’ have massage.”
I looked over at where men were spread like latex rubber dolls over wet vinyl couches as attendants scrubbed them vigorously with salt and coconut oil, and I shook my head.
“No thanks. Think I’ll pass on the massage.”
He cocked his head quizzically and I realised he didn’t understand the idiom, ‘I’ll pass’.
“I don’t need a massage, thank you.” I said, pointing to the couches.
He shook his head.
“Oh no, no, massage is not here,” he said, then pointed to the roof with a finger. “Massage is upstair.”
“Ooooh,” I said.
I hadn’t realised they had an upstair.
Then I remembered a story a friend of mine had told me about his experience of an ‘upstair’ massage in Da Qing.

Being Businesslike With Hector

I’ll call him Hector, and this story is told from memory so it’s not his exact words – but as close as I can recall.
Hector was a portly bloke who’d spent his transient life reeling throughout the world on various intoxicants working as a musician while making a buck wherever and however he could. So now he was in China, living in an apartment around the corner from the hotel where I lived, doing the same thing I was doing – teaching in the hellish ghettos of the Da Qing Middle Schools where a single 40 minute class could suck the life out of you, leaving only an empty skin bag clutching a briefcase.

One day, soon after his arrival, Hector came trundling down the hall to my rooms for a visit. He sat down on the couch, lit a fag, and I offered him a cup of tea which he accepted.
He waited for me to sit down, whereupon he declared enigmatically, “I just had a massage.”
“Uhuh. So what?”
Now, Hector has a yen for the dramatic – he talks very slowly and particularly, as if stitching his sentences together with string, with many meaningful movements of the eyes implying ‘things better left unsaid’.
He leant forward with a little smile flickering on his lips.
“Well Roger, I have found that a Chinese massage is … um… somewhat unique…”

So he told me this story.
He’d gone to a bathhouse that most of us attended in Da Qing, particularly in the winter. It was similar to the bathhouse in Huaiyin, only much larger and more luxurious, with many hot and cold pools and the usual rows of vinyl covered tables which were always covered with naked guys being scrubbed with salt and coconut oil. (Seems to be a national pastime - I tried it once, but found it a little unnerving to have a bloke rubbing salt and coconut oil all over the place.)

Now, I knew there was an extra facility for massages upstairs, but as I’ve never been one for massages, I’d never bothered with it, and knew nothing about it. But this particular day Hector had done the sauna and hot bath thing, so he decided to give the massage a go as well. He paid the money and, briefly wondering why a massage should be so expensive, wandered on up the stairs.

He said he’d been met at the top of the stairs by a very grim looking middle aged Chinese woman in a long white cotton coat like doctors wear, who’d directed him into a small cubicle to the side. She followed him in and, closing the door, indicated he should get his gear off.

So Hector stripped to his underwear and laid down on his face on the cotton couch, and the woman in the white coat gave him a very vigorous massage.

At that point in the telling, a new smile crept onto Hectors face. He lit another cigarette, then continued.
“So I’m lying there and … well, it had been a long time since, you know, the touch of a woman, so…”
He gestured indistinctly with his hands.
“What?”
He pursed his lips and looked to the side.
“Lets just say I experienced … a distinct swelling of the gland…”
“You got an erection?”
He winced. “Not in such words, Roger, please…”
“Yeah, yeah … so go on.”
The woman finished doing Hector’s back then nudged him to turn over, which he did.
“So I’m lying back, with what is by now, um … well … quite a bit of a tent, and…”
He paused.
“And what?”
“Well, she whipped the front of my underpants down, scooped up some massage cream from the pot by the couch, grabbed my cock and jerked me off in a very businesslike way.”
We both sat in silence for a second.
“A businesslike way?”
“Yeah. Businesslike. No mucking about. Just whoop! Like milking a cow. Finished me off, pulled my pants up and continued on with the massage. Very efficient.”
“Huh. No warning?”
“Nope. Took me quite by surprise.”
“But you lay back and took it.”
“Well, of course. It was most welcome.”
“Was she good looking?”
“Roger, she was wearing a white coat. Like a doctor.”
“Oh.”

She finished the massage, told him to get dressed, then hustled him out of the cubicle with him feeling very much more relaxed than before. The two of us had been very amused by this practical handjob. Somehow it seemed quintessentially Chinese. Sensible and … businesslike.

We found out later that this event was not exceptional – that in fact, in bathhouses throughout China this service was the norm, carried out without a flicker of lasciviousness or sham eroticism. Simply a practical part of having a massage.
We speculated that perhaps this practice had to do with the lack of women in China – that this inclusion of an orgasm as part of a massage was a practical means of assuaging a national need. I mean, I don’t know how far back this practicality goes in China’s history, but it definitely serves a purpose now.

In 2000, the statistic showed that there were 18.07 million more boys than girls in the age range of 0-14, so the problem is quite extreme, to the extent that Chinese men are now buying North Korean women as wives, and even going further afield to Cambodia, even though many Chinese regard South East Asian people as inferior.
The reasons for this imbalance of the sexes are largely related to the combination of the one child policy and the continuing myth of male superiority. Though superficially the revolution gave lip-service to the equality of women, human culture remained impervious, such that even now most men do not know how to cook, and they do not participate in cleaning.
So many couples try to avoid having female children. In extreme cases, in rural areas, female babies are discreetly killed, though this practice is dying out now.

More usual is the use of abortion. While the country has laws prohibiting gender identification through scientific means (unless it is medically required), there are still no laws to prevent a girl embryo being aborted once the gender is ascertained. A pregnant woman can find out the sexuality of her future baby by spending 40 yuan (about $6) to do an ultrasonic check in a hospital, followed by an abortion. And though this is strictly illegal, the penalty of a small fine is not a deterrent.
But anyway, I digress.
Where was I?
Oh right.

So when the naked Chinese teacher pointed his finger to the roof and said: “Is upstair,” I got to thinking of Hector and his practical ‘upstairs’ wank, and found myself in two minds.
The loudest mind was my ‘dog mind’ which is keen on any kind of stray sex, wherever it comes from.

But this mind was moderated by the more sophisticated ‘Roger’ mind which overrode ‘dog mind’ to decide that I just didn’t feel like being jerked off in a businesslike way. Not in some little cubicle with a stern Chinese woman in a white coat anyway. There was something demeaning about it, the idea of a businesslike orgasm.
It was all very complicated.

But then I thought, well I’m assuming a lot here – perhaps it’s just a straight massage after all, though I knew that wasn’t likely – the ‘upstair massage’ was now well known to all the foreign teachers.

But anyway, I was hot and tired, and sick of being stared at, so I figured I’d take the risk of offending the Chinese teacher.
“No thanks,” I said, “I think I'll go now.”
He nodded seriously, then said, “It is very good for the health to have a massage. You will feel more relaxed.”
“Yes, you're probably right,” I said formally. “And you have been very kind, but it’s time for me to go.”

He seemed relatively unfazed by my refusal, so I got dressed, then thanked him and, after shaking the hands of all the other blokes and promising to come back, I left him sitting on a bench, still naked, smoking a cigarette and gossipping loudly and happily with the attendants.

...........................................................

PS
On this fine point of Hector's businesslike wank, and how it was applied so matter of factly by the stern middle aged woman in the white coat... I've had some extra thoughts, which are perhaps not entirely relvant to what I've been writing bout...but most of what I write about it entirely irrelevant anyway, so what the fuck.

I was thinking that if it had have been a western working girl in that room with Hectory it would have been different. There would have had to have been a whole fake erotic dance involved - to flatter, titillate and tickle the sexual ego of the western customer.

Which got me thinking, ‘maybe that’s what is so offensive to the Chinese (and the Thai’s for that matter) about foreigners and sex (because they do find our western relation ship with sex quiter repulsive). It’s not the sex organs, or the orgasms or the simple ‘fact’ of sex that offends them, so much as the whole charade of eroticism that westerners feel compelled to apply to sex, which forms a major part of our culture – in films, fashion, and the way we relate to each another.'

In the West we're kept in a fairly constant state of erotic tension by the media and advertsing. Women dress to create an erotic charge in men, and men live in a culture which, compared to Chinese male culture, is hyperactively sexual

But there’s none of that here – not yet anyway. (But it’s coming, I’m sure).

People here don’t dress for the ‘wow’ factor – they don’t give a shit about brands or standing out in a crowd – they simply wear clothes. Men don’t care about the size of their dicks, and women don’t care about the size of their breasts, and they don’t swap stories about how good last nights pickup was in bed, simply because there was no last nights pickup. The majority of mature men and women can count the lovers they’ve had on one hand.

I had a class recently, (and remember - we're talking about university students here - 21-22 years old), where I spent the class telling them all about the sex habits of Australians, and the reaction was shocking. When I told them that it was common in Australia and most western countries for boys and girls of sixteen to be having sex with different partners their virginal squeals were deafening, and many of the guys had their hands to their mouths in shock and disbelief.

“For Christ’s sake, you’re all adults,” I said finally in frustration. “What’s the problem?”

As usual when everyone was embarrassed, there was a prim silence, so I pointed to the monitor, who was also spokesman for the class.
“We think this is bad,” he said. “We think love is more important so we will not have sex with anyone but our wife.”
“Rubbish!” I said, “I see many of you kissing and holding hands …”
More giggling and squealing (remember again, these are 21 year old men and women)
The monitor cut in emphatically.
“But we don’t have sex!” he said “Sex should never be abused! Love is more important”
And all the class nodded, and some girls cooed, and in a cynical moment it occurred to me that he was getting lots of brownie points for this little speech.

But, from that final statement, they wouldn’t be budged any further. My class plan of an enthusiastic disclosure of the illicit sex habits of Chinese youth flew out the window. I reached for plan ‘B’ – a discussion about divorce, and how it is growing exponentially in China.

But you see where I’m headed? There’s a paradox here.
In this country, even wearing a short sleeved shirt in the supermarket is considered risqué, and hipster jeans on a girl with her belly showing?
No way!

In this city, if not in most of China at the moment, sex is simply not important – not like food, which is of supreme importance.
In China the whole day seems to be filling in time between the highlights of the meals.
Even in greeting each other, the concern of food comes first for the Chinese.
“Ni chilla ma?” (have you eaten?)
To which the common response is, “Hao chilla!” (good food).

When I first came here, I thought this was odd. I asked why this was a common greeting. My students explained that it had to do with the powerful theme of starvation in Chinese history.
Put simply for thousands of years the majority of Chinese have been very, very hungry, and everyone remembers relatives who have died of starvation. It’s only recently that food has been relatively plentiful.

But sex? No problem there – it’s always been plentiful. So why make a big deal out of it? Why indeed? Perhaps the only reason we foreigners make such a big deal about it is because of our Christian past, in which sexual expression was polluted with shame.

So we have this paradoxical situation - on one hand the face of sex in China is covered with a sentimental and very moralistic mask, as was indicated by the students, yet on the other it’s considered normal behaviour for a female masseur to jerk a guy off as part of a massage.

And this fits perfectly with a people who are obsessed with safety and security yet find it normal to ride their motorbikes at top speed without a helmet, with their baby nestled in their lap, and their wife riding side saddle on the pillion - hurtling headlong into cross-traffic without a look left or right.

And its the same with the government and the authorities – on the face of it, they’re heavy handedly authoritarian and moralistically rigid. And yet, on the streets and in the alleys, in the houses and in their heads, the Chinese, like most Asians, are in a constant state of spontaneous improvisation – and in that perpetually mischievous state they’ll bend any law if it it’s practical to do so.

Of course, it must be remembered that the two cities I have lived in here are Da Qing, and now Huaiyin, and in neither place is the local culture even a fraction as cosmopolitan as Shanghai or Beijing, where bare bellies, sex toys and promiscuity are now approaching Western standards – not to mention drug use, divorce and depression –but that’s another story.

Added to this, I recently found out that the sexual conservatism I have been alluding to has not always been a characteristic of Chinese life. In ancient China, before the sexual conservatism of Confucius and then Mao’s revolutionary council, erotic sex was an important part of the Tao view of health and life.

During the Chou Dynasty (770 BC to 222 BC), in line with Taoist doctrine men and women were divided into the yin and the yang aspects of human life. In this, life was seen as essentially an energy field in which the female was said to have an inexhaustible supply of yin essence.

Men however, had a only limited supply of yang, so it was forbidden for men to use up their yang essence without acquiring plenty of yin essence. That meant that before a man was allowed to ejaculate, he had to prolong sex, to give the woman the opportunity to orgasm several times, so her yin essence would be powerful enough for the both of them. So if a man ejaculated or used up his yang essence before he got a chance to take in enough yin essence, it was said to cause him health problems and even death.

As a consequence of this a culture of eroticism and sexual artistry was an important thread of Chinese life, all designed for the practical (that word again) function of maintaining people’s health and wellbeing.

Another interesting point is that female homosexuality at that time was widespread, whereas male homosexuality was rare – though not for moral reasons. Male homosexuality was avoided simply because it they thought it would cause a loss of yang essence and harm both the man and the community as a result. But since women were said to have an unlimited yin essence, there was no loss of yin in female homosexual relations, so they could make love with each other to their hearts content – and apparently they did.

It must also be remembered however, that this culture of the erotic was not widespread in China - as in many western countries, it was largely restricted to the aristocracy. For the peasants, like peasants the world over, sex remained something covert and animal.

So, how can I finish this long, meandering postscript?

I’ll just tell one more story ... loosely connected to the Chinese yin/yang thing, where men were supposed to restrain their orgasm.

When I was in Da Qing in 2002, I was accommodated in a suite of rooms at the back of a large hotel. Various other teachers had other similar suites upstairs, but I was the only one downstairs.

Anyway, right next to my suite was a room which was always empty during the day, but very busy at night, because various bar girls from the clubs down the road used to bring their clients there. So, because the walls were very thin, I got an interesting 6 month aural excursion through the sexual antics of drunk Chinese men and bar girls.

Now this would not be at all interesting, except for the fact that, for all the appreciative noises the girls would make during sex, I never once heard anything signifying release from the many men who visited that room.

It was very strange.
The soundscape would go something like this.
Slam of the door … then talking.
Then the bathroom, then more talking, then the television.
Then they’d start. Rhythmic thumping of the bed against the wall together with her doing the ecstasy thing, “ … oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, OH! OH OH OH!!!!
And I’d be lying in bed on the other side of the wall thinking, ‘okay then, this is getting somewhere,’ and I’d wait for the final climax - but then it’d stop.

I’d hear the low drone of more conversation. Then the television would change channels. Then it’d start again, with her going, “ … oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, OH! OH OH OH!!!!” again.

Then it’d stop.

More conversation, laughter, changing channels on the television, then the bed would start thumping again and, “ … oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, OH! OH OH OH!!!!”

So this would go on for a couple of hours, or until I fell asleep. And as I said, not once in the six months of listening to Chinese sex did I ever hear any of the men make even a grunt. I figured either they were cumming with their teeth clenched or they were saving it up.

But gee, the girls sure worked hard for their money.

So what’s the point of all this?

Buggar all. But it’s all very interesting, nonetheless …

The Bloke in the Coat