Su Longing

Zhong Ke is thirty-five, the section chief everyone at the Japan branch fears: baggy sweaters, long skirts, and a vocabulary that mostly consists of one word: redo. On the second glass at the Osaka celebration drinks, her twenty-five-year-old subordinate Yi Chen asks her cup size. She says D. He doesn’t believe her. She says: if you don’t believe me, come feel for yourself. At eleven that night, wearing nothing but a hotel yukata, she takes the stairs up to the twelfth floor.

Ruan Li is thirty-three, an English tutor for grad-school entrance exams, in a flat marriage to a husband who is always on the road. He Chuan was once her one-on-one student—twenty-one, a college junior—and nothing happened during those lessons; the chats just got dirtier afterward. The summer he graduates at twenty-three, he asks her to dinner, and she goes knowing exactly what it means. Four times in one night. Then her husband leaves on another trip, and at eight on Friday morning a message lights up her phone: Free tonight?

Yang Ting is thirty, a full-time mother four months postpartum, and her programmer husband will not touch her. She goes in for pelvic floor rehab, and on the second visit the male therapist, A-Jie, stops and asks: press any further and this stops being rehab — do you want it? She says she does. He transfers her remaining eight sessions to another therapist on the spot and tells her he gets off at five thirty. The half year that followed, she typed into her phone one line at a time.

Day eighteen postpartum. Her husband is in Guangzhou closing a three-million-dollar deal and has not come once. What comes instead is the confinement center’s only male masseur, there to do abdominal repair, his hand stopping eleven seconds above her pubic bone. She books one extra session, then nine more. The baby goes down to the nursery, the nurses knock at the door, and he drives into her from behind. The day she checks out her husband pulls up in his Mercedes, and there is a new contact in her phone saved as “Postpartum Repair.”

Zeng Xue, thirty-five, creative director at an ad agency, E cup, one nodule in her left breast. Her husband is a corporate executive, eighty flights a year. A colleague tells her to go for a breast lymphatic detox; the manager says the best therapist is a man. Xiao Kai is twenty-eight. He says: Sis, you’ve got a nodule here. The first time he does the deep-tissue, she comes clutching the sheet. After that, every Wednesday, Room 3, extra sessions, deep-tissue, doubles.

Zheng Wan, thirty-four, a bank branch manager. Her husband drinks with clients till the small hours and comes home only to sleep. She goes alone to the foot spa across from the Wanda mall, and Xiao Liu, the twenty-six-year-old technician crouching at her feet, asks: “Sis, want to extend?” She extends. From her feet to her calves, from her calves to the tops of her thighs inside her stockings, from the private room downstairs to the soundproofed suite on the second floor. She starts going every week, then three times a week, and then she brings her husband along.

Wang Qi, twenty-nine, a tour leader for a travel agency, 75E, one meter sixty-eight. Her husband is a middle school PE teacher: twice a month, three minutes a time. She takes a group to Bangkok, the whole group goes for Thai massage, and so does she. Ah Ti, a thirty-year-old Thai masseur, jams his knee in and spreads her legs apart. The next day she goes back to the shop on her own and tells the front desk: I want the special. On day four, with her group singing next door, she gets fucked front and back by two masseurs at once in a private room upstairs.

Luo Ya, a thirty-two-year-old history teacher, is married to a tax clerk so by-the-book he’s by-the-book in bed too. A bad back walks her into a blind-massage shop, where the male masseur Old Sun is blind, his hands unerring. One line—“I can’t see, you can take it off”—presses her, step by step, onto that pink massage table. Extra time, requesting him by name, the lights blazing over the mirror—she sinks deeper and deeper, until the glint in the gap of the door curtain.

Feng Chuchu, thirty-three, regional manager at a multinational, skirt suit and black stockings, sees her university-lecturer husband fewer than sixty days a year. Her flight is delayed three hours, and the masseur in the VIP lounge says: Your flight has been delayed. I can help you relax. Fifteen minutes on the neck and shoulders is free; a private room is two ninety-eight. She says: Full body. When the boarding call sounds, she is on her knees on the massage table, stockings torn open, and she does not stop.

Han Miaomiao, a kindergarten teacher of twenty-seven, buys a 12,800-yuan pre-wedding body package thirty-one days before her wedding. The male therapist, Ah Wei, says: Bride, the whole body has to be done. The first time his hand stops at the top of her thigh, the second time his fingers go into her, the third time she asks for the intimate care herself. The day before the wedding, the dress hangs on the wall of room three, and she kneels on the massage table and says: shoot it inside. The next day, walking the red carpet, what she thinks of is the sweet almond scent of room three.

Three years married, and for the first time we book a couples spa. Two beds side by side; I watch a pair of hands wake him, and he watches me. When the therapists step out, behind that closed door there is only the two of us, and a room full of frangipani oil.

I signed us up for a couples massage lesson. The therapist taught us a few moves, then left us the oil and the room. He learned to knead me; I learned to knead him. The second half of that lesson stopped being a massage a long time ago.

Five years married, our days gone flat as boiled water. I booked a suite with a private onsen and a couples spa, betting on one thing: whether, in the rising steam, I could find the man who once made my heart race.

Wednesday evening, the private studio — just you and him. He says he is going to make you get reacquainted with your own body — and you soon realize the point of this session was never the workout. Second-person immersive: you are the protagonist.

For ten years of spa visits I only ever booked women. That night, on a whim, I booked him. The moment his hands landed on my back, one quiet "is this pressure okay?", I knew this time was different.

Third night of the trip, my back aching too much to sleep, I dialed the hotel massage line. When the bell rang, a male therapist stood at the door. That night a keycard, a locked door, and one line, "want to add an hour?", took on another meaning.

At the gym, sports massage means he stretches me. He folds my leg back and makes me breathe with him. Each time goes deeper, until one day the stretch crossed a line.