Author: Qinming Gu
“You’re so good at that,” I said, watching her pull the disposable sheet across the massage bed, straightening its edges and smoothing out the folds.
She laughed. “I do this every day.”
This was, retrospectively, a rather embarrassing way to begin our conversation. While waiting in the small room upstairs, I had been wondering whether someone would have to bring her in, perhaps help her find somewhere to sit. Instead, she had opened the door and walked directly to the bed, laid out the sheet and arranged the supplies.
Her hair had been dyed, though much of the color had faded into a pale shade that I initially mistook for white. After she finished with the bed, she gently closed the door and sat down. She spoke Mandarin with a strong accent, and at times I found myself listening intently to understand her, many times I was still working it out while she continued with the next sentence. She was smiling when she spoke. I began by asking her why and how she decided to learn massage.
At around fifteen she had lost her sight. Someone suggested a school for the blind where she could train in massage and other vocational skills, and although she wasn’t too convinced at first, she eventually discussed it with her parents and went. The training took a year or two. Muscles, pressure points, meridians, and much more; there was a great deal to learn, and then there was the physical work of practicing on clients. Her hands would swell every day from the intensive labor and concentrated work hours. “It was exhausting,” she told me. I could only imagine.
I was still caught on the age she had mentioned. Fifteen. So she had been able to see before then?
"Yes."
How did it happen?
“My eyes were injured.”
I asked a little further, expecting, I suppose, the beginning of an account of the accident. She only repeated her previous answer, that it had been an injury, and didn't explain more.
What she did tell me was that she had hated it at first and about the anger and frustration that welled up inside her. “Every day, I was just so fed up.” She couldn’t get used to being unable to see. Later, at school, there were other people around her living with the same thing, and being with them helped. “Other people were living like this, so I could, too.” Gradually she became more cheerful, she said, and then we were talking about massage again.
I had been prepared to spend a large part of the interview on this period of her life. Perhaps because fifteen was an age I could so easily remember being, and I couldn’t quite imagine having to relearn how to go about my days at that age. But she had finished her answer.
She has been working in massage for around fifteen years now, first in Hangzhou, then Ningbo, and eventually Shanghai. Her day starts at ten-thirty in the morning and ends at ten-thirty at night. Seven or eight clients on a busy day, sometimes ten or more, each staying for a long appointment. I asked if it was tiring, a question which sounded increasingly unnecessary even as I was asking it.
Of course it was. But the customers had paid, she explained, so she had to take good care of them. Otherwise they wouldn’t come back.
When I asked what being a good massage therapist meant, she thought about it for a moment. You needed strength, most definitely, but also the experience and professional knowledge. She became really serious about this last part. There were places where people would just “press here and there,” she said, but at her school they had studied the muscles and pressure points carefully, treated massage as an art and science, for years until mastery.
“We blind massage therapists are the most professional.”
Most of the blind people she knew were in the same profession. Some told fortunes. If she didn’t do massage, she thought she would probably be at home doing housework and looking after the children. “If you can’t see, what can you do?” she asked.
I found myself unsure how to write about her work even while she was describing it, my mind at many times drew a blank. It hadn’t been a career she got to choose from a long list of possibilities, she was quite clear about that. Yet she was also clearly so proud of her skill, and how far she has come. She cared about the feedback, whether a customer liked her techniques, whether they asked for her again. Some of her clients have been coming for three or four years, others four or five, many have known her for so long that they would talk about their families while she worked, occasionally complain about things going wrong at home.
She has three children of her own, eighteen, sixteen, and fourteen. They live back home with her mother, who does most of the looking after them now. Her husband works in a factory in Guangdong. She works here in Shanghai. When I asked about raising them when they were little, I once again found myself asking a question she didn’t seem to think required much explaining.
“You do it every day, you get used to it, don’t you?”
She used her hands. She could feel what she needed to do with her fingers. It was the same with cooking: she knew where the stove was, where things were kept. Yes, she could also chop vegetables and skillfully use a knife and all the cutlery in the kitchen. She had just been slower at the beginning, but after years of practice, she knew how to do everything she needed to.
She had children to feed too and a roof to give them. Now she usually sees them once a year, when she goes home for a little over a month around Chinese New Year when she is given the month off. The high-speed train and the transfers cost more than a thousand yuan for the round trip, and that price is an expensive deal for her. Being so far from her children and parents was what she regretted most, she said. When I asked when she was happiest, she told me it was when she was with the children.
She wants them to study hard and fight for their future, “so they don’t have to go away and struggle like we do.”
She was away earning money to raise them, hoping that doing so would give them a life in which they wouldn’t have to leave in the same way. I asked if she was satisfied with her life, and she gave me an optimistic answer.
“Yes,” she said. “I'm really quite satisfied.”
Sometimes, though, she admitted, her work and her life really bothered her, and so sometimes she was really annoyed. If she had money, she would have just stayed home. She wouldn’t be out here putting up with people and working so hard. When she was unhappy, she talked to friends, and they went out for walks together.
Towards the end, I asked what she liked doing after work. Usually she went back to where she lived, washed, and spent a little time on her phone before going to sleep. Music, short dramas. The dramas were her favorite.
“When you watch them, do you mean you listen?” I asked.
“Yes. There’s software that reads the screen aloud.”She took out her phone to show me, moving a finger slowly across the screen while a mechanical voice read out the words beneath it. I watched her pause, her head tilted slightly to listen, before continuing down the page. Sometimes she tapped the wrong thing and had to go back through the options again. She didn’t seem to mind particularly, although it took a while to find what she wanted.
