Bath House Buddies

We had been warned about a great many things, but the danger of a communal shower had never been addressed. It didn’t even occur to us at the time. “Us” in this case means only Sheila and me, not the whole sixteen of us that were there teaching English. Sometime not far into the time we were there, the school arranged for the American teachers to spend a homestay weekend with various students. We were not actually involved in the selection of the students or really in any part of the decision making process of this venture. Our head teacher was the one who set up the pairs of us and coordinated with the Chinese liaison about which pair went where. I don’t know why, but Sheila and I were paired together. We didn’t really know each other apart from basic introductions at the beginning of the semester, but I could possibly see that in the respective groups we usually hung out in we were each a sort of odd man out. At any rate, Sheila and I got paired to go spend the weekend with a young teen boy named Mao Yue.

We didn’t know it at the time, but we were one of the luckier couples and ended up having, by comparison, a much better experience than the others. Since we were working at a boarding school, the students’ regular schedule had them going to school for a week and a half and then having a long weekend during which they usually went home to visit their families, most of whom lived in the same city. So it was that, armed with a backpack of supplies, we met Mao Yue at the gate to be bundled off for a weekend with his family. His English was not good, and we soon found that he was the only source of translation and communication. He had no older siblings and none of the dozens of “relatives” that visited over the entire weekend spoke any English at all. So Mao Yue was our translator.

Some other time if occasion arises I’ll narrate the weekend itself, the highlights of which, up to Saturday night, were us watching either Jaws or the music video of Superstar more times than I can remember, finding a chicken foot in my soup and the beak in Sheila’s, and getting violently ill on the first day. But the point of this story is to tell about Saturday night.

The whole weekend people kept coming over to visit. Whenever we asked Mao Yue who they were he just said “cousins.” We still don’t know if they were real cousins or if he didn’t know what the term meant because we did at one point spend time trying to track everyone into a family lineage and failed. But the point is, on Saturday night a somewhat larger than normal group had assembled at the house and, after dinner, were clearly congregating for some sort of outing. There was much chatter in Chinese, obviously, while Sheila and I stood off to one side waiting to be directed to do something. Finally Mao Yue came to us to try to explain that something.

We could tell it was important to him that he explain where we were going. This in and of itself was unusual since the previous nights when we went to restaurants or some show or carnival, if he hadn’t known the word for where we were going he had shrugged it off because we would know soon enough. Today he stood trying to come up with the vocabulary for some five minutes. Several times his mother or one of his “cousins” would shout new suggestions, most of which he waved away with irritation. We tried to supply different guesses, but he just kept shaking his head. At last he began making a weird sort of motion. With his left hand above his left shoulder and his right hand near his right hip, he made a synchronized movement along the line that would connect the two points.

“Maybe we’re going to a disco?” Sheila postulated.

“I think we might be going to a bath,” I said. Sheila denies that I ever said this, but I did. The motion Mao Yue was making reminded me of one using a long scrubbing cloth to clean one’s back; I had seen it before. I did not press the idea, though, because it seemed preposterous that we would go to a bathhouse for a family and guest evening.

Mao Yue finally just gave up in exasperation and instead said, “Bring bags.” The only bags we had were the backpacks of our supplies. We fetched them and asked if that was right, and he said it was. Sheila at this point jubilantly hoped that we were being returned to the school, though we had been told we wouldn’t go back until Sunday night.

“We must be going dancing or to a karaoke bar or something as a last party before they drop us off at the school,” Sheila cheerfully forecasted. I think she was still clinging to that hope when we stopped outside the building and Mao Yue made sure we had our backpacks with us. “Maybe the karaoke bar is upstairs?” Sheila’s confidence was clearly wavering.

We walked into a tidy, steam-filled lobby. Sheila and I were both silent. Mao Yue motioned for us to sit down on the waiting bench and told us to take off our shoes. This action alone didn’t raise any suspicions in us, but we regretted it very shortly thereafter because they locked our shoes away, and being shoeless takes more than a little steam out of one’s ability to cope or flee. It was at least very clear to both of us that we were not going dancing. Though we hadn’t really bonded over the last couple of days, Sheila and I were immediately allied in a very sincere discussion of escape.

“We’re at a bathhouse, Sheila. And they have our shoes.” Sheila replied by nodding grimly.

“Are they expecting us to bathe here? They can’t be expecting us to bathe here. Is it co-ed? It better not be co-ed.” This concern took priority, and we desperately glanced around until we both saw a clearly marked separate entrance for men and women.

“I don’t think it’s co-ed, then,” I said. Sheila shook her head. She probably didn’t notice that her head kept on shaking long after her agreement with my statement had been ascertained. “Maybe they have shower stalls.”

“Maybe they do!” Sheila perked up. “How do we check? Is that the women’s room there?”

“I’ll go look real quick,” I volunteered. In a moment I had slipped out of my backpack and stepped over to the thick plastic strips covering the entrance to the women’s room. I poked my head in and instantly withdrew and retreated to the bench.

“Well?”

“I dunno. There’s a naked woman on a couch in there. It’s just a locker room and a naked Chinese woman just laying down in there.” Sheila’s jaw had gone slack, and I was ready to die of embarrassment at having poked my head in on a woman reposing on a couch in a steam-filled locker room. I gripped the bench and told Sheila firmly, “I’m just not going in there. I’ll sit here and wait for them. We’ll tell Mao Yue that we don’t want to bathe here and we’ll just wait. We’ll just wait and they can come out and we’ll leave. It’ll be fine.”

Sheila’s voice was flat, and I could practically hear her brain whirring as she announced to me “Mao Yue and the men all left already. They went through.”

My head snapped up. Our translator had gone, our shoes had gone, and so had our moment for effecting any sort of escape attempt. Instead there stood Mao Yue’s mother. She approached us timidly and pointed that all the women were going into the locker room and we should accompany them. I shook my head. The locker room had not, as far as I had seen, been vacated. Mao Yue’s mother must just not know that there was a woman currently occupying the locker room. Whether she knew or not, she clearly had undertaken to be our guide through this and had started on Sheila once I shook my head. I can only think that Sheila was in a mental happy place by this time because she allowed herself to be escorted from the bench towards the locker room. Everything from here on out was very fuzzy, but I can only think that I determined not to abandon Sheila. In any case, moments later there we were standing in the locker room.

Sheila remained in a trance. She was just standing there holding the kitchen towel Mao Yue’s mother had handed her. Her jaw was still slack and she was just staring, alternately at me and at the woman who had neither vacated the locker room nor put on any stitch of clothing. The six or seven other women in our party were already disrobing and putting everything in their respective lockers. I just stood there too.

Mrs. Yue must have thought we were stupid, but she was very kind about it. She came over to us and, talking slowly in Chinese, tugged at our clothes and pointed to the locker then pointed to us and pointed to another entranceway covered by more plastic strips. Sheila was useless this whole time, but I began trying to argue with Mrs. Yue or at least demonstrate that I was not an imbecile.

“I know how it’s supposed to work, lady. I’ve taken showers before. But I’m not going to strip down right here and just go take a shower!” I don’t know what she thought I had said, but Mrs. Yue retreated for a few minutes to begin undressing. Sheila had taken off her backpack but then had resumed standing still holding her towel and staring. Most of the women in the party had lost little time undressing and had disappeared through the second doorway. Once again hoping for shower stalls, I stuck my head through the curtain into a large rectangular room with some twenty shower heads positioned at intervals around the walls. No stalls. No curtains. Just shower heads.

I returned to my locker and fumed. Mrs. Yue came once again and tugged at my sleeve and pointed at my locker. She was saying something I couldn’t understand but I did catch one word—“Meigua”—which simply means “America.” Understanding that one word set me off on a rant using that one Chinese word I had recognized. “Meigua! Meigua! In Meigua we don’t freaking do this! In Meigua we shower in private bathrooms with normal-sized towels and not a freaking audience! In Meigua we don’t go out to the bathhouse for a freaking outing! But we’re not in freaking Meigua now are we!”

By the time I finished my rant two things had happened. First, Mrs. Yue had left to take her shower. Secondly, Sheila had undressed down to a tank top and panties. The latter had been the catalyst for me shutting up. She hadn’t said a word since we left the lobby and now she was standing around in her underpants, still holding the hand towel. I was hyperventilating after my outburst but was now trying to wrap my head around the fact that Sheila, my one ally, was now nearly nude. The woman on the couch watched on in silence. Suddenly something inside Sheila snapped. Her jaw clamped shut, she stood tall and straight, looked directly at me and said, “It’s all part of the China experience.”

Off went her top, bang went the locker door, and away marched naked Sheila, head held high, into the steamy abyss. I’ve never felt so abandoned in my life. “All part of the China experience” was nowhere near an appropriate reason in my book for participating in a communal shower, but there was now really nothing to do. If I went out into the lobby there was no telling how long everyone would take showering, and I would have to wait alone and shoeless and feeling ridiculous. Besides, I’d have to pass the woman on the couch. Obviously I had passed her on the way in, but I couldn’t remember it whereas now she had nothing better to look at than me. So with a sinking feeling of resignation, I undressed, took my shower products in hand, and, sighing, stepped into the shower room.

Sheila had mercifully taken a shower head at the far end of the room. I joined her in that corner leaving a courtesy empty shower head between the two of us. From that moment on I don’t think I said another word. Sheila took over and courageously kept up a running monologue trying to point out the many positive aspects of this experience. I knew she was just talking for the sake of talking when she claimed that one good thing was that the shower head was tall enough as opposed to the one at the school where she had to crouch to use it. Clearly she wasn’t paying attention to herself because the shower head wasn’t tall enough and she was having to scrunch down anyway, but I wasn’t about to correct her for fear that she might come to and realize where she was.

To be entirely fair, it was the best shower I ever had in that country. The hot water supply in our apartments was dreadful, and I distinctly remember learning to shower in under four minutes so as not to freeze to death during the winter months. Apart from the gaggle of Chinese women on the other side of the room who kept staring at mine and Sheila’s much larger body parts and then back at their own, the shower had been not altogether unenjoyable. Sheila and I did not linger though. We finished in twenty minutes and waited for the others in the lobby for a further forty.

As we drove back to Mao Yue’s house that night, Sheila was as chatty as ever. I was much more inclined to try to forget the experience as soon as possible, but that didn’t seem to be Sheila’s approach. She made up for her mute half hour during the ordeal by talking about everything now. It was my turn to just carry on in silence. Just before we reached the house she had nearly finished.

“Thanks for letting me borrow your conditioner, by the way. I lent mine to Beth, but she never gave it back. I think she’s used it all up by now. We might have to go get some from that hair salon down the street. Did you see them checking us out on the other side of the room? I wonder what they think of us being bigger than they are. Did you see them? It’s funny how they’re smaller than us, huh? I mean it’s all still proportionate, but I wonder what they think.”

I was glad she never paused to wait for responses to her questions. I hadn’t wondered any of those things and had gotten quite distracted by her borrowing my conditioner, though it’s true I didn’t mind her using some. Thankfully we were expected just to go to bed when we returned to the house, and we did precisely that. As I turned out the light and curled up under the blanket, Sheila’s voice carried drowsily over to my side of the bed. “Good night, Bath House Buddy.” She’s never abandoned that title from that day to this.