The History Major I Met at a Massage Parlor

Another Visit to the Spa

Yesterday I went to that massage parlor again, booking the same 225-yuan, 40-minute ear-cleaning and massage session on Douyin as always. It had been quite a while since my last visit, and I wondered whether there might be any pretty new faces working there.

The girl who attended to me was a fresh face — I was fairly sure I had not seen her before, though perhaps the parlor simply had too many girls on rotation and she had just never been assigned to me. She wore a black skirt and had long, slender legs. The dim nightlight in the room did not fully illuminate her cheeks, but I could make out a delicate heart-shaped face, still carrying quite a few pimples — she looked to be somewhere in her twenties.

The Session

She leaned over me sideways to clean my ears. To be honest, there was not much in my ears to clean; I was simply there to enjoy the process itself, and enjoy it I did. Her body pressed lightly against my arm, one of her legs resting across mine, and the skin-to-skin proximity of a beautiful stranger was quietly intoxicating. Now and then her breath came softly by my ear, curling around it, and went straight to my head.

After the ear cleaning came a twenty-minute massage. Her hands glided back and forth along my legs, and each touch sent a small current through my senses. When the order ran out, I added extra time, and she offered an additional service.

An Unexpected Conversation

In the end, we actually fell into conversation. I learned that she is currently a graduate student in history at university, and that she had once worked as a history teacher. She had come to our city for a short spell of work before ending up here as a massage technician.

We talked about the city where she studies — Harbin, a sprawling northern metropolis filled with Russian-style architecture, completely unlike the rest of China in character. She had grown tired of the frustrations she faced in the workplace as a history teacher; by her own account, she was a young woman carrying a great deal of grievance inside.

Then the conversation turned to world history. She proved extraordinarily well-versed in Western history, speaking eloquently and at length, her pace so rapid that my brain could hardly keep up with her output. We ranged from ancient Rome to the Slavs, from Catholicism to Christianity. She had even published a few articles — a genuinely talented young woman.

We added each other on WeChat afterward, and if the opportunity arises, I’d like to keep learning history from her. It’s a pity she won’t be settling in our city for long — she’ll move on once her stretch of work here is done.

Harbin — a city of Russian churches and onion domes, where the winter wind carries a different kind of history.

A Note to Future Me

People cross your path for strange, brief reasons. A girl who could lecture on the Slavs with the confidence of a published academic was spending her days cleaning ears in a dim little parlor in a southern city. Life is full of these quiet contradictions, and most of them pass by unrecorded. This one, at least, I wanted to keep.