“Excuse me, did one of you lose something?” I asked.
The Korean-Chinese women translated what I’d said for the Han Chinese women sitting next to them. They looked at each other in silence, and then Xiang raised her hand.
“Did you find my ring?” she asked me in Chinese.
I answered in Chinese: “What does it look like?”
“Well, it’s gold … and it has a lotus flower engraved on the front.”
I smiled and pulled the ring from my pocket. A few days later, Xiang slipped a bill, folded neatly into a square, into my hand after one of her massage appointments. I went to the kitchen and unfolded it. It was a twenty-yuan note. I’d received one-yuan and five-yuan tips before, but never so much at one time. When Xiang finished with a difficult massage and was resting in the lobby, I brought her some warm, sweet jujube tea. That’s how we became friends.
One Sunday, when she had a day off, Xiang got permission from the owner to take me to her house. She lived in a small flat with a front room and a kitchenette near the Eastern Market. Even before we reached her door, I could smell food cooking. As soon as we stepped inside, I saw a man standing at the kitchen counter with his back to us. He was dressed in a sleeveless undershirt and was stir-frying meat and vegetables in a wok.
“I’m home!” Xiang called out.
Xiang’s husband kept flipping the food in the wok and said, without turning to look at us: “Welcome back. Did you bring Bari with you?”
We sat down in the front room, which was furnished with only a table and four chairs. When he brought out the food he’d prepared, I stood and introduced myself timidly. I tried to help him with the food, but Xiang tugged me back by the hem of my shirt. She seemed to be saying that, in their house, whoever started a task had to finish it. They were Han Chinese, so of course the food was Chinese too. There were two types of stir-fried vegetables, pork and fried fish. They were chatty and talked fast, but I was only able to manage a few simple words.
Xiang’s husband, Zhou, listened as she told him my story, and then he told me how they’d left their hometown in Heilongjiang Province together. He had worked there as an assistant to a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine while learning acupuncture from him, and recently he’d been taking classes at a private institute to get certified as an acupuncturist. Then he would be able to move to a larger city and make more money. Each time he smiled, his sparse facial hair made his mouth look huge, and his eyes, which were much smaller in contrast, looked like two lines drawn in pencil.
“He taught me the meridian points for the feet,” Xiang said.
“Meridian points?”
“They’re not visible to the naked eye, but every part of the human body is connected to a point on the bottom of your feet.”
Xiang poked her husband and told him to stick his foot out. He reluctantly offered up his dirty foot, and Xiang pointed to different spots with a ballpoint pen, identifying meridian points for the heart, stomach and liver. It was hard for me to understand all of it.
“You should learn this, Bari. You could make good money giving massages.”
“I would like to.”
Xiang and her husband talked amongst themselves for a moment.
“Let’s see if we can get permission from the owner for you to come home with me on Sundays,” Xiang said. “There’s so much to learn about feet. In the meantime, I’ll teach you foot massage techniques whenever there’s downtime at work.”
I’d never told anyone outside of my family about my strange gift. I’d never even told Uncle Salamander, who was practically my legal guardian, about having talked to ghosts while searching for my parents in Puryong. I wanted people to see me as a normal, ordinary girl. Of course, I also never told anyone that I was from North Korea, and even at work, if anyone so much as alluded to it, the boss scolded them: “Bad enough if she gets caught and taken away, but we’ll also get shut down and fined. Which means you’ll all be out of work too!”
Every Sunday, I went to Xiang’s flat and learned meridian points on the foot from Zhou. Xiang would sit down and prop her feet up, and Zhou would point out different spots on the bottom of her feet and explain them to me. He had three different short, wooden sticks that he used to massage feet: one had a rounded tip, another looked like a small chisel and the third was pointier. But most of what I learned was with my bare hands. He taught me how to use the flat of my thumb as well as the tip; how to use the whole length of my fingers; how to make a fist and lightly punch or press my knuckles into the sole of the foot; to press and slap with the palm of my hand; to use both hands to knead the foot; and to pinch, rotate and loosen the muscles in the ankle and the joints of the toes. Zhou told me that while the wooden tools made the job easier, using your bare hands to give a foot massage was much more effective.
“See, just as the rest of the body consists of different parts, the foot is divided into three sections: the sole, the instep and the heel and ankle. It’s the same with the hands, so it’s more effective if you start with a light hand massage before working on their feet. The meridian points for the internal organs are clustered in the sole and the heel, and the points for the head are in the toes. The arch of the foot, here, is the kidneys. The padded part just below the fourth and fifth toes of the left foot corresponds to the heart. On the right foot, it’s the liver.”
Zhou demonstrated all of this on Xiang’s feet and explained it to me again using my own feet. Then he had me practice on him. Whenever I made a mistake, he lifted up his foot to explain again before having me continue. I did this every Sunday as I studied the meridian points on the feet. I memorized the ten steps for relaxing the hands, and the fifteen basic moves for massaging the feet before moving on to the main meridian points for healing illnesses. Zhou taught me everything by example. “A customer comes in drunk,” he would say. “What do you do?”
“The meridian points for the head are concentrated in the big toe, so I would start by applying acupressure to each toe in turn to relieve his headache. Then I would rub the sole of the foot, which corresponds to the intestines, and the heel, to help stimulate the liver and kidneys …”
After eight months at Paradise, I became a masseuse. As I was not a documented resident with a Chinese family registration, I wasn’t officially licenced to practise massage; it was my skill alone that qualified me to take customers. I also wasn’t given a commission the way the other masseuses were, and was paid only in whatever tips I received; but the tips were much better than what I’d made before from running errands and helping out with cooking.
After becoming a masseuse, I realized that I was able to tell what was wrong with a person just by studying their face and touching their feet. It began with my very first customer, a Chinese man. He was husky and a little overweight. After stripping down to his undershirt and rolling up the legs of his suit trousers, he sprawled out on the massage table with his legs dangling over the side. I washed his feet with a mixture of lukewarm water and salt and vinegar, and then let them soak in a bowl of hot water steeped with mugwort while I slowly massaged his calves. I dried his feet off with a towel and started with his left foot. I began by applying pressure to the meridian points on each toe in turn, just as I’d been taught, but his heel had a strange red glow coming from it: I knew at once that something was wrong with his liver and intestines.