Beijing bathhouses can leave you feeling even dirtier
- Source: Global Times
- [23:22 January 20 2010]
- Comments
By BILL SIGGINS
I hope, dear readers, you can appreciate the things I do in the name of research for this column. My dedication to my readers last week gave me the courage to visit a local bathhouse.
This was not one of those opulent spas with Roman columns and fancy hotel lobby false-fronts. My choice, out here in the northern sticks of Beijing, was a dididaodao (locally authentic) place frequented by the bottom half of the laobaixing (common folk). Its exterior is cloaked in blazingly gaudy neon lights signaling a "house of ill repute."
This notion was reinforced by my wife's sneer each time we drove past. She says the place is "bukaopu," which in Beijing dialect literally means "not on the music sheet," but figuratively means unscrupulous and is a message to me that not even in my dreams am I to go into a place like that.
It was my professionalism and dedication to readers that got the better of me (plus my wife was at another evening meeting) and so for research purposes I decided to check it out.
When I first lived in China in the 1980s, few people had running hot water and just about everyone went for their weekly bathhouse shower.
At that time these utilitarian, communal showers were where you soaped up, scrubbed down, rinsed off and got out of there as quickly as you could. Bathhouses back then were always packed and each showerhead was shared by groups of people.
Today, China's bathhouses have cast off the notion of shared drudgery and forsaken the ideal of equality of status. Nowadays, bathhouse patrons get to act like emperors for an hour or two, wallowing in decadence, with pseudo-slaves attending their every need.
My first lesson in bathhouse etiquette is that everyone walks around without the benefit of even a terry towel between what you've got and the gaze of everyone else.
I'm proud enough of my genes so I can live with this practice, although the "look-at-the-foreigner-stare" takes on new meaning in this situation.
Forgoing a soak in the packed cement hot tub and a rigorous scrub down on the marble slab, I choose a pair of pyjamas before entering the co-ed hall. I decline the "yici xing" (one time use) pair for several hundred yuan and go with the standard re-used boxer shorts and kimono top for free.
The theater is dark, which helps hide the grunge of the room and the bulges of my physique. It's 20 minutes before show time and the place is nearly full with 60 or so guests. There are no more than five women in the audience, all of whom are wearing the expensive pyjamas. I'm led not to a seat but to my own recliner and cover myself with a duvet.
