“Sku-u-uchno” : Down, and out, in Taipei, take two

The following is cobbled-together bits of what was recently judged to be a bo-o-oring story, so consider yourself warned. The reason I’m putting it up is that I now have pictures of me and Jennifer in post-gua situations and I wanted to share my lobster neck with the whole wide world. If you don’t want to be bored, you are welcome to just swoop down to the pictchas.

I had my first encounter with a local illness a year and a bit ago, on the day before The Neighborhood festival. It was Saturday afternoon and we in the choir were having our last singing rehearsal in an air-conditioned room in the local. The next morning we would perform for the president, the vice-president, the mayor, the scholar popularly acknowledged (along with hot weather) to have led Taiwan out of the SARS trap, and the assembled masses. We had been standing up to rehearse for a long time and in a moment when the women weren’t needed I sat down to rest my knees, which have been bothering me a bit lately.[i] A woman behind me asked if I was okay and someone else nearby said I must have zhongshu.[ii] Although I’d heard of zhongshu before and I knew it happened when it was hot, I was never really clear on what it meant or what you were supposed to do about it. But I was kind of tired, and I’d been sitting around outside all day folding paper origami cranes, and I didn’t feel like going into a long explanation of how my knees start bothering me when I stand up for too long because your knees bothering you does not seem to be a universal and acceptable sort of illness, so I just kind of nodded, yeah, sure, whatever, I guess I zhongshu.

Zhongshu, I ascertained later, means ‘to get heatstroke,’ but it’s usually not something you’re sent to the hospital for—it’s something that happens to you all the time, which is what you’d expect with this weather. “I feel awful today,” one of Jennifer’s bartenders complained to me one day, “I went to bed at three in the morning and slept straight up until I zhongshu.” While we were gathered in a conference room at City Hall waiting for a meeting to start, the community planner who is planning the park for our neighborhood turned to a couple of the women to complain about feeling really out of it. “I probably zhongshu.” At this Zhou Taitai, ever prepared, whipped out some tiger balm that she happened to have on her, along with a plastic tool that somewhat resembled a shoe horn (or maybe a small deer antler), rounded on one side, flat on the other side, and with a discernible edge in between the two sides. She rubbed some tiger balm on the back of his neck, on that flattish place to the side of the spine where the neck is just starting its descent into the throat, and started rubbing with the edge of the plastic deer antler, using vigorous downward strokes, until the skin turned bright red. The planner obediently leaned his head forward and after a few minutes emerged from his zhongshu a new, much more together-feeling, man. Some people use that deer antler thing and other people use the edge of a spoon, but you can also just use your fingers in a pinch.

So I was sitting down and the women around me had decided that I zhongshu. Without a word, one of the women behind me started massaging my neck and shoulders, then another one joined in. It felt terrific. Another hand came up and, thumb pressed tightly against forefinger and middle finger, rubbed the tips hard and fast along that flattish place on my neck, to the side of the spine. That hurt like hell. The singing teacher noticed all the attention I was getting and looked surprised: “Only now do I know that foreigners can zhongshu too.” Upon which I suspect all eyes turned to me. I don’t know if that increased the heat I was feeling. We finished practicing shortly thereafter and as we were leaving the classroom, a whole gaggle of women gathered around me. Everyone was talking about how to deal with zhongshu and some people just went ahead and dealt with it—I don’t know how many hands I had rubbing vigorously up and down the back of my neck, at any rate I there was no room on my neck for any more hands. I think people may have been switching off but since I couldn’t see them behind me I can’t be sure. I just stood there obediently with my head bent forward. Someone took out some tiger balm which she just happened to have on her and rubbed it on my neck, and people continued rubbing for several minutes.

At this point I was realizing that I did, actually, feel kind of out of it, and that I had, actually, just spent the entire morning outside in the heat, and so I myself was starting to suspect that maybe I had zhongshu. The vigorous rubbing continued to hurt like hell unabated, but it also felt really good in some weird way, like it was getting all that heat that was stored up in me to rise up and escape through my neck.[iii] By the time they were done, I felt cool and light and peppy, and ready to go back out in the heat (with an umbrella, of course) and practice singing in the park.

And then recently I tagged along with Jennifer’s malady, manifested in a general lack of pep and a tight feeling in the back of the neck that was uncured even by the blind massage place down the street, [iv] and which was universally interpreted as having zhongshu. This time Vany applied the cure with a ten-yuan coin (roughly the size of a quarter—so you can try this at home). Vany, a taciturn t, is one of Jennifer’s three employees. (T as in “tomboy,” as in butch.) She lives with her sweet, soft, po girlfriend near a popular adolescent shopping area where the girlfriend sells jewelry and little wooden figurines and wooden keychain hangies that she inscribes herself with a tiny little pen-sized blowtorch. (Po as in 婆, old woman, wife, mother-in-law: femme).

Apparently sick of Jennifer’s complaints, Vany finally went out and got the tiger balm that she just happened to have in her scooter, took Jennifer into the other room, and started to guasha, which is what the scraping-rubbing action is called. She progressed from the neck all the way down Jennifer’s back, and even to her upper arms, right around the shoulders. Jennifer was going “Ow ow ow that hurts!” but that, of course, is the point. As Vany rubbed the first stroke on her upper back, the skin turned bright red instantly, and within two more strokes it was a kind of grainy, bumpy red that was a little painful to look at. The skin’s turning so red so quickly when being rubbed vigorously is proof of the fact that the person has indeed zhongshu. This strikes me as kind of Salem witch-hunt logic, but Jennifer buys it. I ask if there is any skill to the gua-ing, and Vany explains that you have to rub downwards, and outwards, never up or in. And you have to rub hard, she laughs, as Jennifer yelps again. Once Jennifer was red and bumpy all over and feeling great, it was my turn. I had actually been feeling a little tense, but hadn't bothered to give it any local-illness type interpretation. But my neck was bright red in no time. I mention how when I first got to Taiwan and saw all these women with bright red marks on their necks (it was summer then, and ghost month too, and there was a typhoon, just like this time), I thought, "Boy, the men here are really rough on their women," which cracks them up (and leads Jennifer into a typical, disparaging, "Please, Taiwanese men?"). The bottom line, the end of the day, the long and the short of it is: it works. I feel great. Loosened, lightened, clearer, brightened. I’ll teach you when I get back and then we can all walk around looking pummeled, but feeling energetic.

[i] It’s okay, it has to do with some really stupid stretching maneuvers and my typical over-enthusiasm for elongating muscles without thinking about the things that keep the muscles connected.
[ii] Zhōng first tone is ‘middle’ but zhòng, the same character with a different tone, means ‘to hit a target’ and, by implication, ‘to achieve, to get, etc.’ Shu is ‘summer’ and also ‘hot.’ So I think of it as being hit right to the core by the heat. At any rate, that’s what it should be, given the summers here.
[iii] Which is, of course, what is supposed to be happening.
[iv] For some reason real, trustworthy, professional masseuses in Taiwan are supposed to be blind; others are suspected of not knowing what they are doing, or of being prostitutes. Teri Silvio told me once about seeing on TV that a bunch of seeing masseurs were protesting, claiming the same respect as their blind colleagues. A few years ago, Taipei’s extremely clean-cut mayor Ma Yingjiu, in a quest for decency, wanted to find a way to punish people who offended public morality more heavily than the standard fines and punishments for merely the offenses themselves (mostly gambling and prostitution) allowed. The way that was found was to use the City Planning Code’s zoning regulations—the fine for disobeying zoning codes is much higher than the fines for gambling and prostitution themselves. Insofar as gambling and prostitution are illegal in any zone, this method seems a little strange to me; at any rate the net effect is that the 1st Division of the Department of Urban Development spends a whole lot of its time examining these public decency charges (brought by the police), determining whether they are justified (based on police reports, mostly, though occasionally also on field trips to the place), fining the people, collecting the fines, and turning off their water and electricity if the fines are not paid within some limited period of time. Everybody hates doing this and insists that it is not their job; people have said that about a third of the projects or cases they handle are now of this kind, though it’s not like anyone is doing an inventory. Anyway, the point is simply that one of the public decency infractions I have seen listed has been non-blind massage; which is strange because I’ve seen totally open, public non-blind massage places. I don’t think it’s a euphemism for prostitution, because there is a category of ‘sex work’ that is separate; it’s probably a euphemism for what in America is euphemized as ‘full release’ massage. I guess I could ask, but…