On our second-to-last night in Tianjin before an extended stay in Canada, two friends and I went back to the Same Fortune Bathing Garden (同福浴園) to get dizzy in the hot tub and guāshā‘d (刮痧). We ended up getting fire cupped again, too.

Last time we tried the fire suction cups, so this time we thought we’d do guāshā, which is another common Chinese treatment for I’m not sure exactly what… something about your body’s inner fire being too hot or there being too much cold wind in your body. Anyway, for 10 kuai we figured hey why not.

For a description of the bathhouse see the octopus wrestling/fire cupping post. Here I’ll skip straight to the guāshā.

There are three plastic tables in between the hot tubs along one wall and the showers along the opposite wall. That’s where five minutes earlier some older middle-aged guys were getting massaged and soaped down. Me and a Chinese friend come straight out of the hot tub and lay down on two tables, which first get covered in a fresh piece of plastic. The attendant takes my dish towel-sized Chinese towel and wipes down my back before spreading oil on it. Then he starts repeatedly scraping lines into my skin; each line gets maybe ten or more strokes. He doesn’t need the towel while he’s scraping, so he just folds it up and drops it on my butt, which I guess is just convenient.

It doesn’t start to hurt until the last one or two scrapes on each spot. I never saw what he used to scrape with. After he’s made stripes down the length of my spine and rows of stripes across each side of my back, he without warning gives me a quick soap down with the now soapy towel (once down the left side head to toe, once down the right side, and then right up the middle… could have done without that!). Then he rinses me off with a bucket. It only takes ten or fifteen minutes.

While they were guāshā-ing the two of us, the guy suggested we both go get fire cupping (拔火罐儿) since our inner fires were too hot (or something like that). So after a shower to cool down, the three of us all went and got fire cupped. It was like last time, only he used twenty cups this time and stuck them everywhere from the bottom of my neck to the top of my butt. This video is really bad, but you can see his big matchstick and at 0:45 you can hear the suction cups squeaking:

All this happened after a dinner with friends at a superb and inexpensive Sichuan restaurant. Not bad for a second-to-last night in Tianjin (at least for a few months). The hot tub and the just-been-massaged feeling you get after the fire cupping makes you feel really nice and relaxed. The next day it feels like you have a slight sunburn.

PS - added some more photos to Jessica’s birthday karaoke post!

I’ve wanted to spend an evening at a local bath house ever since getting a peek inside one in Tianjin’s doomed hutongs. Watching the movie Shower made we want to go even more. Tonight we finally got around to it, and the “Same Fortune Bathing Garden” (同福浴園) didn’t disappoint! It’s not every day that you return home feeling like you’ve just lost a wrestling match to a giant octopus.

There are three public bathhouses in our area that I know of: the two neighbourhood bath houses and one full-on for-profit business. Everyone, and here “everyone” means Mr. Lu the bike repairmen and Mr Chang the sidewalk barber and their friends, said they don’t go to the 5 kuài ($0.75) neighbourhood ones because they’re too dirty. They all recommended the one that’s a step up from the poor-apartment-plumbing-compensation neighbourhood bathhouses. It’s bigger and costs 4 kuài more. So me and two friends (one American and one local) took their advice and went to the 10 kuài ($1.50) one after dinner tonight.

Tianjin’s Same Fortune Bathing Garden (同福浴園): the Good, the Bad, and the I-Can’t-Believe-I-Just-Saw-That

The three of us met for guōtiēr (锅贴儿; pot stickers) before heading to the “Same Fortune Bathing Garden,” which was next door to the restaurant. We exchanged our shoes for locker keys and flip flops. Paying 12 kuài ($1.75) meant we got a new towel that we could keep; 10 kuài would get you a public towel that you would have to leave behind. We stripped down, stowed our stuff, and walked in our flip flops into the bath area.

The bathing area
There were showers and a bathroom along one wall (each shower had a plastic stand with public soap bars and pump shampoo), three massage tables in the middle, and two pools along the other wall. Each pool was the size of a large public hot tub in North America. One pool was warm, and the other really hot. A sign on the wall listed all the different services you could have: different kinds of massages with different kinds of lotions (using Chinese medicine, green tea, etc.), fire cupping (see below), toothpaste (who doesn’t love brushing their teeth in the shower?), and stuff like that. The most expensive massage used some kind of Chinese medicinal stuff and cost 40 kuài ($5.85). There were maybe six or seven customers in the bath area, and three attendants in briefs manned the massage tables, which were kept pretty busy. Seemed the most popular thing tonight was to get slathered head-to-toes in some sort of soapy-looking lotion. I was surprised — though after almost two years in Tianjin I probably shouldn’t be — at how the masseuses soaped their patrons everywhere. This was no sissy drape-a-towel-over-your-mid-section kind of soap down.

The bath house crowd
The bath house patrons were all middle-aged and up, and true to Tianjin form, they were happy to chat and were a lot of fun. Some said they go there every weekend, others said once a month. Some of them knew the staff and other patrons by name. This is one of my favourite aspects of Tianjin: people love to chat. You can sit naked on the side of a tub with people you’ve never met before and have a grand old conversation all evening long if you want. And in every group there’s always a couple of real characters to who love to joke around and have fun. We decided we definitely want to go back to this place.

I’m including this next paragraph only because it was a notable part of the experience. In addition to the “xiǎo jies” in another section of the bath house, there was another aspect of this public bath that I wasn’t particularly impressed with. There is a very handy squatty potty right next to the showers, but guys standing in the middle area where the massage tables were didn’t seem to feel the need to use it, as if taking the four seconds to walk over to it weren’t worth the effort. I suppose since we’re all wearing flip flops it doesn’t matter? Also, exfoliation is a popular aspect of going to public baths. The side of the tub has a pumice stone for people to use, and if you look in the water you can easily see that it gets a lot of use. The water doesn’t have any chemicals in it, at least not any that I could smell. We noticed all this when we first got in, but just instantly put it out of our minds for the rest of the evening and had a great time.

Getting a little sketchy…
Once we were dizzy from the heat (and still bloated from all the guōtiēr), we took showers, dried off (big towels provided), and put on some boxer shorts and a shirt (also provided). Then we walked out of the bath area into another section of the bath house. It was a large, very dimly lit room with booths of two beds each, all facing two big TVs on the front wall that played Chinese soap operas. Maybe 20 or 30 beds total. Middle aged men were chatting, smoking, or getting foot massages from young pretty girls. The second floor was rows of private rooms that ringed the main floor, like in a hotel. Hanging greenery obscured the view from the main floor. When Mr Lu and his buddies were discussing this bath house, they mentioned that there were xiǎo jies (小姐; “little miss” or “little sister,” also a euphemism for prostitutes).

Fire Cupping — 拔火罐儿 — bá huǒ guànr
Imagine losing a wrestling match to a giant octopus who pins you on your stomach for 15 minutes. That’s the best way I can describe what it feels like to bá huǒ guànr (拔火罐儿) — get fire cupping done to you. A guy lights a match under a class bulb and then sticks in on your skin. The heat creates really strong suction and it stays stuck to you until he pulls it off with a big sucking noise 10 minutes later. I’m not totally sure what it’s all supposed to do for you, other than give you a bunch of really big hickeys, but it’s a really common East Asian health treatment. It’s not uncommon to see people with red marks showing above the back of their collar, especially in the gym. It cost 10 kuài ($1.50) to have it done.

I waited on one bed and my Chinese friend waited on the other. Rob, the American, came in from the bathing area just as an older guy brought a plastic tub full of glass bulbs and a lighter. I laid down on my stomach and he stuck seventeen of them to my back, each time lighting the lighter inside right before he pressed the rim of the bulb down onto my skin. It wasn’t painful, but the suction was really strong. Once they were all on he put a heavy blanket over top. Ten minutes later he removed the blanket and pull the cups off one by one, leaving seventeen big puffy red welts behind.

The swelling has mostly gone down now (about three hours later), and some of them feel like a slight bruise. They’re still really red; don’t know how long that will last. Jessica’s on the way home from the night out a some friends’, so I’ll get to show her in a few minutes!

[PS - It snowed in Tianjin tonight!! So instead of showing Jessica my new hickeys when she got in, we went right back out for a little romantic midnight walk through the snow. See how much fun Tianjin is??]

Related Posts:

• Tianjin bathhouse guasha: OWW!!!
• Getting guasha’d (刮痧) and octopussed (拔火罐) in a Tianjin bathhouse
• Fire-Cupping & Guasha for Dummies
• Chinese Medicine: Getting a Clue (Part 1)

When Jessica was sick a while back, I went to the vegetable market and asked the lady who sells tea what Jessica should drink for her cough. She gave me this:

It’s more interesting than drinking water, and it looks cool, too. The little brown nut-looking thing turns into the big see-through brown blob in the cup. The top photo is one cup’s worth of stuff, and how much of each thing you should put together.

In My Country and My People, 林语堂 (Lín Yǔtáng) contrasts Chinese and Western thinking this way: Westerners are more inclined to logic, reason, the scientific method, and analysis; the Chinese are more inclined to intuition, reasonableness, and common sense. Here he gives a historical example of what happens when you apply an intuitive approach to, say, human biology and comparative religion.

…the logic of common sense can only be applied to human affairs and actions; it cannot be applied to the solution of the riddles of the universe. One can use reasonableness to settle a dispute but not to locate the relative positions of the heart and liver or determine the function of the pancreatic juice. Hence in divining nature’s mysteries and the secrets of the human body, the Chinese have to resort largely to intuition. Strangely enough they have intuitively felt the heart to be on the right and the liver to be on the left side of the human chest. An erudite Chinese scholar, whose voluminous Notebooks are widely read, came across a copy of Human Anatomy translated by the Jesuits Jacobus Rho, James Terrence, and Nicolaus Longobardi, and finding that in the book the heart is placed on the left and the liver on the right, decided that Westerners have different internal organs from the Chinese, and deduced therefrom the important conclusion that since their internal organs are different, therefore their religion must also be different — this deduction is in itself a perfect example of intuitive reasoning — and hence only Chinese whose internal organs are imperfect could possibly become Christian converts. The erudite scholar slyly remarked that if the Jesuits only knew this fact they would not be interested in preaching Christianity in China and in making converts of half-normal beings.

Such assertions are made in perfect seriousness and in fact are typical of Chinese “intuition” in the realms of natural science and human physiology. One begins to believe there is something after all in the scientific method … He could have at least felt the palpitation of his heart by his own hand, but evidently the Chinese scholar never descended to manual labour.

Thus free from the stupid drudgery in the use of his eye and his hands, and having a naive faith in the power of his “intuition,” the Chinese scholar goes about explaining the mysteries of the human body and the universe to his own satisfaction.

[from pages 90-91 in my 2002 edition.]

We’ve kicked off our research practicum and anthropology readings, and that means a lot of cultural study. It’s one thing to read about East Asian worldview and thought process, but being able to read it and see it in action at the same time makes for an infinitely richer learning experience. The people and this place are starting – ever so slowly – to make sense. It’s such a blessing that our practicum supervisor is willing to invite us in to areas of the culture like this.

Observing Traditional Chinese Medicine
As part of our research practicum we have weekly debriefing interviews with our on-site supervisor to discuss our readings, research, and experiences. Tuesday he had an appointment scheduled with a traditional Chinese doctor and suggested that we come to observe the proceedings. We really appreciate him inviting us to something like this; aside from doctor visits being personal, he knows that Westerners typically look down on this kind of thing. It was also his suggestion to debrief over a hot-pot lunch afterward. That’s my style of education!

First Impressions

Walking in off the sidewalk, the smell of the medicine was the most immediately noticeable thing. It wasn’t bad at all, but it is distinct. We walked past the counter where they mix the various herbs and ingredients to a waiting area. The walls and doors were wood-paneled with a few calligraphy works here and there. A large TV was playing the Discovery Channel (it just happened that the one about the infamous penis-gourd tribe was on when we walked in). There were some nice woodwork designs in various places, beautiful orchids, a few technical-looking medical reports showing the effects of certain traditional medicines on patients’ organs, and a testimony board of people his treatments had healed – some that the western-style doctors had given up on. Judging from the appearance, this guy seemed to be doing pretty well. He’s been practicing for about 30 years and is considered a master.

Maybe 15 people were waiting. Everyone except for one teenage boy was grandparent age or older. Our supervisor was easily the youngest and strongest-looking patient. Pretty much all of them noticed us and our supervisor got some funny comments about coming in with wài guó rén. We ended up waiting for about an hour, so we had lots of time to ask questions and have him explain things. All of it fit with our readings.

Check-in

There are four aspects of a traditional doctor exam: observe, “smell” (in a multi-sensory kind of way), ask, and 切, which he couldn’t translate. First, at a desk in the waiting room, the doctor had him hold an electrode while touching another electrode to various places on his hands, wrists, feet, and ankles that correspond to internal organs. The readings from the machine were recorded on the form you see above – the columns indicate organs while the rows mark the reading. Feet, hands, and ears especially are said to contain these corresponding points: it’s not uncommon for people to address internal complaints with foot massage (apparently rather painful), or to walk barefoot on small stones in the park for health. Some parks have diagrams describing which parts correspond to what. It took the doctor about one minute to gather the readings he wanted and check his pulse (using both hands).

Contrasting Eastern and Western Medicine

After this the three of us waited for about an hour, during which time we saw a woman pay $11,000 NTD ($375 CDN) for a bag of herbal medicine. Our supervisor explained that unlike Western medicine, which seeks to isolate and treat a specific problem (“attacking the one place only”), traditional Chinese medicine is more concerned with addressing the environmental imbalances both inside and outside the body that are causing the problem in the first place. The substances within the body must be brought back into proper relationship, or balance, with each other, the body as a whole, and the daily environment of the person. Western medicine is more specific, discrete, “tunnel-vision”-oriented; traditional Chinese medicine is more contextual, holistic, and “big picture”-oriented. He mentioned that for surgery people will go to Western-style doctors, but for most everything else they want the long-term fix of the traditional approach. Traditional medicine prescriptions are slower to take effect, but are considered less harmful (more natural) and better in the long run.

I asked about a man there who was wearing a bracelet – a “niàn zhú” (sp?) – around his wrist that I knew to be a sort of talisman (he was the only one in there that I noticed had this sort of thing). Our supervisor drew a distinction between those kinds of things, which he referred to as accessories and religious business inventions, and Chinese medicine. You couldn’t buy things like that at the doctor’s office; that kind of thing comes from the folk-remedy shops in the night markets.

In the Doctor’s Office

His number finally came up. We followed him past everyone (and their stares and good-natured comments) and through the office door. Inside looked more like a regular office than an examination room. There was a desk to the left with an extra chair beside it, and two chairs off to the right backed by a large-ish atrium filled with plants and flowers. More orchids, too. Two thumbs up for atmosphere. We waited off to the side.

The doctor checked his pulse again with both hands. They talked and our supervisor said something to him about sleeping (so much for our listening comprehension!). The doctor had him stand up and turn around. While holding onto his leg, the doctor pushed with his thumb really hard along his spine. More questions and answers. He checked his blood pressure. After saying some more things and writing a prescription, we left.

The diagnosis? “The fire in your heart is too strong.” Chinese doctors have a bank of descriptive terms like this for specific conditions. Our supervisor described this as, “not overheating” but basically just too stressed and exhausted.

The visit cost $1,200 NTD ($41 CDN), and with the medicine (which he would pick up later) the total could easily hit $5,000 NTD ($170 CDN).

From there it was off to a hot-pot lunch before Jessica and I split for the 3pm English tour and the National Palace Museum.

Geeking out
Don’t you wonder how the heavily Confucian Tang dynasty (618-907 A.D.) could not only produce art depicting noblewomen playing polo but also China’s only female emperor? How can you be big on Confucianism and push women’s lib at the same time? Anyway, we made our second trip to the National Palace Museum in time for the English tour. There were four of us plus the guide, an Aussie, and we had a fascinating two hours. Doing that two or three more times should cement the general order Chinese history into our brains. And they change the exhibits every month!

These scenes are daily images of life in Yonghe. When I get to the park at 7am it’s already full, and the largest groups are formal clubs performing tai-chi with various weapons. Most of these shots were taken over two mornings between 7-8am as I walked from our apartment to the exercise bars I work out on, which is why the sky is gray and it’s a little dim. The last four were taken out the front door of PEI, around 8:15am. I reduced the file size on all of them so they’ll load faster.

The second morning workout gallery is below this one.

Every morning the park across the street is full from before 7am (when I show up) until after 8 with people exercising. There’s lots of tai-chi, low-impact aerobics set to music (everything from traditional Chinese to cheesy primary school synth to sassy Britney Spears-ish Taiwan pop), ball-room dancng classes, dog-walking, and countless individuals doing their own personal exercise regimen – much of which we didn’t recognize as exercise at first (the tire pictures are a great example, as are the ingenious ways people try to stimulate circulation by repeatedly slapping themselves or rubbing their legs/arms/shoulders/backs/heads/necks/butts against trees and metal poles). All this not counting the old folks yaking it up and the kids shooting hoops.

Exercise a big part of life here that we see everyday, and is one place where the worldview differences between the Taiwan and the West become apparent. Exercise for us is entirely a biological/emotional enterprise; for the Chinese their concepts of ‘health’ and ‘wellness’ include a spiritual component that is manifest in how they exercise. Tai-chi aside, much of the other physical exercise reflects these beliefs, like by activating certain pressure points in the step-aerobic choreography.

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