I’m sitting on the dusty steps of a Kodak camera shop on Bai Se Road, just down the street from my apartment, looking through some black and white photographs. They’re the first pictures I’ve taken in China and I’m so excited to see them that I can’t be bothered with getting on my bike and making the five-minute trip back home.
After a couple minutes, a shadow passes over me. I look up and I’m face to face with a woman in her mid-30s, barefoot, dressed in a short yellow skirt. She mutters something in Mandarin and positions herself behind me to look over my shoulder at the photographs. Her eyes are glowing with fascination—a look I’ve seen many times before, mostly from disbelief that blue-eyed Americans exist and are walking around suburban Shanghai.
In a gesture of modesty, I shuffle through the rest of the photographs and put them in my backpack. The woman steps down to the street and leans even closer, like she wants to kiss me. I can taste her breath and her short hair brushes my face. A barrage of Mandarin emanates from her mouth, like she’s trying to feed the words to me, and I can’t seem to slow them down, no matter how many times I fill the spaces in between her sentences with “Wo bu dong” (I don’t understand). For the moment, I can’t say anything to her that she’ll understand, and I can’t look her in the eye because she’s only a few inches from my face.
Once she determines her one-sided conversation is leading nowhere, she takes a pen out of my hand and begins writing Chinese characters all over my hands. Once she’s filled up the space on my skin, she tears a few scraps from a newspaper and continues to write. I gather as many of these scribbles as I can carry, stuff them into my backpack, silently excuse myself, and make my escape down Bai Se Road in the direction of my apartment.
Half an hour later, I walk into the office of my friend Arnold and show him my hands. At first, he can’t read the sloppy characters, but slowly a smile of recognition crosses his face and a story emerges. The sentences on my hands are mostly questions: “Do you speak Chinese?” “Are you married?” And then, the most mysterious, an invitation: “When you’re happy, come over to my house.” Finally, an address—not enough information for me to determine whether or not I was just propositioned for sex.
Most Chinese women tend to be much more modest with their body language, because they live in a predominantly non-touching culture, where couples are the only people permitted to hug each other in public. (Try to hug a casual female friend in China and you’ll get a cold, stiff-bodied response as though you’re an incestuous uncle instead of a friend.) Moreover, prostitution, while considered a perfectly acceptable profession in China, is nevertheless officially illegal. Consequently, brothels must thinly disguise their true purpose by fronting as “hair salons,” to avoid occasional visits from police arbitrarily enforcing the law.
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