Scottie Boy

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Between dancing with lady boys and a run in with the Red Guards, I’d say Scott had the full China experience. There’s nothing quite like being accosted whether it be out of fear or love.

We found the lady boys at a Thai restaurant called Banana Leaf. I had the day off, Scott had returned from Beijing and having finished our 90-minute oil massages, Scott and I walked over to the flagship branch of this growing chain. It being Women’s Day, the place was packed. We faced a 20-minute wait for a table, but five minutes into it, I saw the manager, one of my occasional students. He ushered us to a better location where we watched the nightly entertainment, ten young men and women dancing and singing into wooden spoon microphones. A lot of restaurants have musical shows like these, often staffed by Pilipino employees most of whom speak English. Seeing us, two of the boys started giving us suggestive looks. We quickly returned the favor. They upped the ante. They returned with gyrations, tongue tricks, tilted heads, fluttering eyes, squeezed nipples and the like. We gave it right back and all the while, wondering why the heck time in the restaurant just didn’t stop. I really expected heads to turn but no one took much notice. It was a real camcorder moment, unfortunately, Scott’s battery had just died and soon after, the show moved to a different part of the restaurant.

The manager returned and seated us at a terrific table, we being the only male couple in the restaurant. We had dinner, attended to by three waiters, each of whom kept coming by, checking our receipt, nodding and carrying on to the next table. We also had our own chef, an Indian guy named Siva, wearing a tall fluted white hat. He’s been in China for several years and was assigned to be our menu interpreter. After ordering way too much food, we exchanged cards. “Yoga…I think there is some yoga in India, yes?” he asked. “Uh, yeah,” we replied wondering if he was ignorant or just being polite and not bragging about the art that started in his country, “There’s some yoga in India.”

An hour later, the lady boys returned. It was time for a second show but the fellas wanted some more action, one on one. The band was warming up and the main singer was getting going. The cute came over and one used his wooden spoon as you might expect, thrusting it fore and aft saying, “I like it like this….and I like it like this.” Then he invited Scott to dance. “Go man,” I told him. “Give it to him.” By now, we were not holding back. Scott busted out his swing dance moves and gave the cutie his own ride. Seeing this, the taller boy started pouting. “ I don’t love you anymore,” he told Scott. “I hate you.” It was all in good fun.

Dinner finished and the night still young, Scott and I decided the only way to improve the evening was to have another massage. The first night Scott arrive Sean and I took him to the foot massage place near our apartment. He’d quickly fallen in love with Miss Number 20 and had already returned a couple times on his own. This time, I wanted to introduce him to Number 16, one of my favorites. She’s strong, having spent years giving 4 massages a day. The knuckle on her right index finger has a thumb-sized callous. She knows just where to put it. This time we had to wait so we ducked out for a late night coffee and returned. He took Number 16, I received Number 23, my new favorite. For another 90 minutes, we enjoyed their company, ate dried fruits, drank tea and watched the TV. CCTV9, the English Channel, was talking about Women’s Day. Here’s what I learned: Women are advancing in this culture, but they’re still having it tough. Domestic violence remains something “in the home” and so largely beyond intervention. But women did recently get the right to an income and benefits in the case of divorce. And China was making progress toward its goal of having more women in the National People’s Congress the number now stands at 20 percent. (America has 15 percent women in Congress, 14 in the Senate.) Still, women in China are under paid for their equal work. That got me thinking so I asked my “xiao jie” how much she was making. For working four massages a day, she earned 50 yuan, about $6, pretty much the same rate as the employees in my office and at factories. The conversation continued and I pointed at the TV, suggesting they have a look. “We can’t,” she said. “Not allowed.” The consequence for watching the TV while massaging feet, we learned, was a day’s pay. “That’s an effective fine,” Scott said. We tipped them 10 yuan each on the way out; after all, it was Women’s Day.

In addition to twice-daily trips to Starbucks, massages became one of the centering parts of Scott’s life here. As well they should. I’d guess that in two weeks here, he’d had nearly ten. The night before he left, one of our students took us out to dinner and yes, foot massages. Janet is a wonderful woman, age 30, married with 1.0 children. I rode to dinner with her in her Mercedes sport coupe in which she keeps a bottle of Channel No. 5 on the dash as air freshener. Although she married well, she’s also made well. Her husband made bank in the dot.com rage, then lost bank and is back again, with Janet this time in fashion manufacturing. She told me she was working for a government-owned trading company when one of her Australian buyers suggested she join him in a joint venture. Three years ago she did and now their factory employs 450 workers. They’re scaling up, though, with plans to expand to one big enough for 1500. “Ten years ago we never could imagine this,” she told me while stuck behind a knot of busses, on our way to the Holiday Inn foot massage.

In addition to being one smart and hardworking cookie, Janet knows where to find good massages. For $15, her treat, Sean, Scott and I each had another fine experience, this time getting to watch HBO way past bedtime. But running a business in China has its demands. She was still making calls at midnight as we three louts suffered through the deluxe package she’d introduced to us, facilitated again by $6-a-day workers. And she usually only makes it to yoga class once a week. In a very common arrangement in China, her parents are the primary caregivers for her 4-year-old daughter. They see each other on weekends. “I plan to retire when I am 40,” she told me. “I’d like to spend some time with my daughter.”

Chinese obviously have a huge amount of economic freedom and there are Horatio Alger stories all over the place. But there’s always that line drawn over political freedom. Scott stepped close to it in Beijing. The Communist People’s Congress was in session while he was there and as he has been doing, Scott was walking down the street shooting images with his new camcorder. He and his guide came upon a protest, a small clutch of people sitting down near the Congress’s main hall. In seconds, the paddy wagon arrived and burly cops hoisted the protesters into the van. Scott didn’t think anything of taping the scene till one of the guards pointed at him. “Hey,” he said giving him the Chinese version of the standard police “What the hell are you doing?” The cop wanted the tape. “Only there’s no tape,” Scott recounted to Sean and I in the comfort of our dining room. “It’s a hard disc recorder. I showed him as I deleted the image ‘Gone, man. See? It’s gone.’ but he started pointing at others on the screen. That was about the only time I really needed that guide. And boy was I glad he was there.”
Scott had “hired” a friend of my Chinese teacher to facilitate his visit to Beijing. Payment was just the guy’s expenses for travel and meals, an arrangement that paid off.
“You didn’t keep the image?” I asked.
“Nah, man,” he said holding up his hands. “I’ve seen Midnight Express. I ain’t playin around with these boys. Uh unh.”
The story reminded Sean of a scene he observed a couple months ago. He was out with the office employees who had climbed another of the peaks around town. On the way home, they’d seen cops set upon a woman and instead of the usual staring that Chinese do whenever there is an accident or other unusual moment, everyone looked the other way. Sean’s inquiries to our friends were met with denial. “It’s nothing,” people looking the other way told him. “She’s crazy.” It’s not clear if they meant the woman was indeed a head case or simply crazy for acting out. Either way, the result didn’t look good. In every society there are some things you just don’t do. Here it’s a bad idea to go too far against the political grain, you might end up in prison with very little recourse. Kinda like being classified as an enemy combatant. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/11/international/middleeast/11ghraib.html

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Photos

Boy friends
"What kind of yoga teacher would I be," Scott said, "if I wasn't open to new experiences?" Luckily, he didn't run into the stinky tofu.

Comments

[julie]

good on ya mate!