LIFEGUARD, WHICH WAY TO THE DEEP END?

As I exist primarily in my head, it simply does not occur to me how many people exist within the visual realm. In my personal opinion, to exist primarily in the visual realm is a waste of time and often far more deceitful and depressing than beneficial. I remove myself from my mind on occasions of small pleasures and small beauties or on occasion that a man happens to move through space in a way that I find undeniably beautiful. I think of the visual realm as a vacation or dessert; it’s nothing to live on but it’s a nice break from my norm. Consequently, I am often taken aback when others feel the need to demand attention to their existence in the visual realm.

Of late, I go to the gym everyday because it helps me sleep better, it’s the only thing to do outside of my required daily routine (as going to the movies, the clubs, the cafes or what have you is more a place to pick up a mate and show your new money wealth than to hang out and socialize; frankly, it’s the only place I can go in a social atmosphere that doesn’t require “drag queen” levels of makeup and clothing) and as it is a gym, the staring (present though it may be) is actually kept to a minimum -comparably speaking- because most women are in little more than sports bras (stuffed and padded though they may be) and hot-pants. Since I’ve been in China, my diet has been ridiculously healthy (because in the inverse of the US, fresh foods are simply infinitely more available than real junk food) by default. So, as a result I have lost weight. I certainly wasn’t looking to lose weight and my motivation behind all of those factors hasn’t been “to lose weight.” In fact, my weight had nothing to do with it. To tell the truth, I kind of liked my body with all its curves, decent rack and its great ass. Granted, I was constantly berated by people who prefer the lithe look to the curvy look about what a fat pig I was but if you removed that outside influence of shame, I really kind of liked my body. In all honesty, really miss my ass and my rack.

However, my lifestyle is such in China that I am a good deal skinnier. To be totally honest, it hadn’t really occurred to me that I was losing more weight than when I first got here and had to shift my diet; I just noticed that my clothes were even more loose and I wasn’t filling out my bras. In fact, I figured I was merely wearing out my clothes and it was time to get new ones.
In light of this weight loss, however, everyone has come out of the woodwork to tell me how proud they are that I’ve been working so hard to lose weight. It’s been a strange phenomenon and one that is entirely unfounded. In fact, my last bought of food poisoning did little more than serve to prove to me that I need a solid layer of meat on my bones if I am to literally survive another round. To be without food or water for 48 hours is rough on the body, especially when it is already battling serious toxins. Had I been as skinny as is felt to be appropriate here, I doubt I would have survived without some sort of serious organ damage.

My personal perspective in the weight loss of an adult is one of great trepidation. To be frank, it is very rare that a full grown adult loses significant weight for a healthy reason. My gut response when I see an adult significantly skinnier than they were before is to wonder what’s wrong. Usually rapid weight loss is the body’s sign of great distress; either reflecting illness or emotional distress. Consequently, I have certainly don’t feel comfortable bringing it up with anyone who isn’t the closest of friends because I don’t want to congratulate someone on their body’s losing battle with cancer or their great emotional distress at the love of their life having left them. Or even, I don’t want to congratulate them in finally buying into the shame Madison Avenue is selling and for vanity’s sake dropping lots of weight because that deals with the symptom, not the illness. Granted, there are plenty of people who should lose weight for health reasons but that is between them and their doctor but I have no place in that discussion.

Of late, I have been proven to be in a staggeringly small minority. At last week’s West Egg party (5/19) the night before the wedding, after dinner we decided to go to a club in the same hotel as the restaurant after dinner. In the underground tunnel as the lot of us were strolling through the makeshift art gallery, I was pulled aside by one of the women in the group. I went to her and she kept insisting that we get more and more space between the larger group and us. This dramatic secrecy of solidifying the group out of earshot went on for a good minute.
“What?” I kept asking, really curious to know the secret I was about to be let in on. I figured we were planning a surprise celebration for the couple leaving soon.

“You have lost a lot of weight.” The woman who pulled me aside whispered to me in a low voice as she did her best not to move her lips so people couldn’t understand.

“Huh?’ I asked, confused.

“Really, you have. How much have you lost?” She whispered, finally comfortable enough to move her lips.

“Oh, I don’t know.” I said, clear that this conversations was just going to suck. It is precisely the mate conversation to this one right here that causes all that shame and self-loathing that I have experienced all too much firsthand and frankly, is a waste of time. Bodies are bodies and they come in many shapes and sizes. If you work out regularly and eat as good a diet as you can, you can only help so much what your body looks like and still live your life. Consequently, the more I am praised for being “skinny” the more I know I am shamed for being “fat.” I’m still the same me; nothing has changed and I was under the impression that my value as a person had very little to do with what was going on with the exterior amongst my friends and acquaintances.

“Come on, you can tell me. We’ve all been talking about it. You have lost a LOOOOT of weight.” She insisted.

“I don’t know. Really.” I hadn’t planned on losing weight, the weight loss is a side effect of larger, probably transient changes in my life and I certainly hadn’t placed much value on the size of my waist.

“No, really, it’s a LOOOT of weight. You’ve lost a LOOOT of weight.” My friend kept insisting and then looking at me like I’m supposed to provide another half of the conversation.

I really don’t know what to say to that. Clearly there was some dialogue I was supposed to provide but I don’t know what it would be, so all I could say was “Okay.”

“No, really!” She said one finally time.

“Okay” I said, utterly helpless. I didn’t want to offend her with my perspective on it all as she clearly thought she was doing something very kind and friend-like but I had absolutely no idea what the appropriate response to her perspective of me as a former fatty was. I had the sneaking suspicion I was supposed to express gratitude but the sum total of the conversation as I saw it was that she was informing me that A) I had been a fatty and therefore had something to formerly be ashamed of and B) she and lots of people were in agreement that my formerly shameful self was now an infinite improvement, despite the fact that the only difference I see in me is that I think I’m wearing clothes whose elastic has worn out. I certainly don’t feel like some butterfly released from her cocoon because I’m merely doing the best I can to cope with this incredibly taxing lifestyle. And what’s going to happen to their opinion of me and our relationship when I return to a life of more comfort and pleasure? For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to thank her for.

To be fair, that comment has not been the usual response by people in my inner circle. My Brazilian Angel has commented that I’ve lost a lot of weight but only as proof positive of how little there is to do around here and she has also made it abundantly clear that she feels there was nothing wrong with either the before or the after of said corpse. And, while I was in the before stage and would be crippled by the daily onslaught of “You’re fat” from my students, she would always tell me, “Chris, there is nothing wrong with your body. Do you feel there is something wrong with your body? Why are you listening to them? If you do feel that there is something wrong with your body, we can take you to a trainer or change something about your diet if you want. Do you want that?” she would ask, rhetorically, knowing my answer.

And, at the gym itself, I have been receiving a lot of attention for my weight loss. In fact, the only person who works at the gym who has regular contact with me who hasn’t brought it up is Tank. The only thing he has ever commented on about my physicality is my height as he is on the shorter side of Chinese men and I am on the taller side of American women, which, despite our flirting and mutual attraction, makes us infinitely, traditionally lopsided. However, I have noticed an inordinate amount of smaller Chinese men with very tall Chinese women who always wear heels making them even taller, so I suspect there’s much less of a stigma in China about dating a women twice your height.

This commenting reached a fever pitch at the gym the other day while my Brazilian Angel was on the bike and I was on the elliptical trainer. One of the customer service-type reps whose job it is to wander about, make friends and make sure everyone has everything they need stopped by to chat with us. Her grasp of basic English is decent, however her breadth of English is not large (I find that it is more important to understand the conceptual perspective of a language at first than it is to have a dictionary bulk of words; she has that conceptual understanding but not the dictionary bulk.). Consequently, she hangs out with my Brazilian Angel (whose Chinese is quite good) to talk with her about both herself and me. On this particular day, it was clear from the gestures, her topic of interest was me.

My Brazilian Angel started translating her questions about my routines, which I though nothing of as I’m one of the few regulars at the gym who does not work with a trainer and does not need help either to understand the machines or to use the free weights properly. In fact, the trainers have all taken a social interest in me because, from time to time, I have a few tricks up my sleeve in terms of muscle development or new moves they haven’t seen before because I come from a culture where women aren’t afraid of developing feminine muscles. In my world the “chopstick” body isn’t the only desirable one for a woman and so the commonplace training for Western women is infinitely different from the one taught by Chinese government in school where the singular body image seems to have left weight training for women as merely light toning. In fact, I’ve noticed that a lot of the female weight training is merely modified male weight training with no allowances for the feminine form. Case in point: the idea of developing the Beyonce butt is literally a foreign notion to the Chinese and so the backwards lunge is absolutely something new. As I’ve always been interested in athletics, I pay strict attention to anything any trainer has to say about anything physical to see if I can incorporate it into my routine so I’ve got a fair amount of information to provide, especially for the development of the female body. Consequently, it’s nothing new that people want to know about the specifics of my routines and how I change things up et al.

We went through the standard “What do you do in a regular day” and the usual “How many days a week do you do X,Y or Z” but then we got to a section about my measurements and alarm bells started to go off in my head. Actually, alarm bells didn’t go off, as my version of alarm bells seems to be the inner monologue of, “Hmm, that was a strangely incongruous question within the parameters of the discussion as I understand us to be having.”

I explained I didn’t know my measurements and my Brazilian Angel translated.

From the confused look on the Customer Service reps face, it was very clear to me that we were having two very different conversations and here is precisely where our two conversations ceased to dovetail.

“How much weight have you lost?” My Brazilian Angel asked, knowing I didn’t know and had no interest in knowing. We had, not ten minutes before the customer rep showed up, been having a conversation about how I should weigh myself “for fun” just to see how much weight I’ve lost. With years of torment as the tallest girl in my school who always got mocked when it was time for the class weigh-in, more years spent in “fat therapy” complete with weekly “Tsk Tsk”ing at the weekly weigh-ins by my skinny counselor and the nickname of Shamu, despite my high school bought of anorexia you can be assured my fat ass is never getting on a scale again. There’s nothing fun about the wide-eyed, “Oh my god” that tumbles out of people’s mouths as they see the number, not realizing that I am not all otherworldly dense fat but a lot of muscle as well. Regardless of how fat or slim I look, I always weigh a hell of a lot more than I appear to because I am a hell of a lot stronger than I look, and I look pretty strong. In fact, those people at carnivals who guess your weight for a living have never once guessed mine even remotely properly. Though I didn’t dive into details, I had simply explained to my Brazilian Angel that I had no interest in weighing myself.

“I don’t know,” I repeated in order to give her something to translate.

She turned to the Customer Service rep and explained that I didn’t know. The Customer Service rep then blinked a couple times out of shock, shook her head and started to speak rapid fire with a slightly higher pitched voice. You know, the kind of voice and face that your mother might make if you told her you liked to have unprotected sex with lots of partners to pay for your IV drug use instead of going to the Ivy League college you claimed to be attending every semester.

In that moment, I realized I was being interviewed for their monthly success story at the gym. With the monthly calendar is the monthly weight loss story. I believe they’re called the gym’s “Customer of the Month” or some such thing. They publish, for all to see, the weight, the dimensions, the exercise routine and various photos of the champion in action with their personal trainer. From the first time I saw one of those, I thought, “Good on them for embracing fitness as a lifestyle” but I was unnerved at the idea of all of that for the world to see and felt great relief that I would never know those dimensions about myself so it would never even be a question about me being in that monthly publication.

Interviewing aside, my Brazilian Angel engaged in some of the heated dialogue for a bit. I watched her fight the losing battle I have fought so often about explaining that the Chinese and the Western perspectives on body image are very different. When she couldn’t convey these things and bumped up against the dogmatic wall of “China is the only right choice to make because our choices have survived 5,000 years of testing” (despite the fact that for most of China’s imperial history, the Empresses were zaftig women and there was a time when the Phoenix eye, not the Western Wide Eye, were also idolized as the West was shunned… to just name two of the consistent “5,000 year old standards”) she punched out, furious.

“You know, I’ve had my Chinese lesson for today. I don’t need to have this conversation.” She said, frustrated. “I tried to explain that there’s nothing to do around here so we come to the gym. She doesn’t understand that Westerners come to the gym not just for their bodies but also for their heads. She said she could understand that you didn’t want to share your weight but she didn’t understand how you didn’t know your weight!” My girl huffed even more. “She’s just so stubborn. She refused to listen to anything!”

In that my poor girl had to be subjected to the silly, single-mindedness of the Chinese dogmatically self-assured right answer, I felt bad. In that she finally saw just how hard it can be to converse with many Chinese when by simply existing, you challenge said dogma, I found comedy. In that she finally had a glimpse into the uphill battle that is a very large portion of my daily experience, I found solace.

A few days after the argument, I took my first trip to the gym’s massage/spa type place. After the brutality and bullshit of my last masseur, I was in no mood to have to suffer through another bought of therapeutic laying of the hands. However, before the customer rep lady started fighting with my Brazilian Angel, she gave us each a free pass to have a sample “Feet Steaming.” So, I went to spa to have my feet placed in a wooden bucked with a steam machine attached and just sit for a half hour. It was kind of weird and I guess relaxing in the Chinese sense of things but I just felt like my feet were on a top of a steam kettle for a half hour. Frankly, I’m getting a bit tired of the correlation between others inflicting agony and relaxation. I was less than impressed.

Then the masseur who sat with me and talked while my feet became dumplings offered me a half hour introduction to the massages they do. I turned him down, telling him I have no problem and no need for massage, despite my re-wrenched neck but then my Brazilian Angel popped in and she pushed me to try. She had just finished up her massage and kept insisting that, while it was therapeutic, it was okay.

“The last massage guy was just too painful. I don’t want to do that again. It really, really hurt.” I told her. I was also less than pleased with the notion of being taken advantage of physically, as I suspect my massage got entirely more friendly than it needed to be once he started insisting that we get married. Granted, it all remained within the realm of “professional” however, it just felt all too intimate under the context of a man trying to get me to accept his marriage proposal.
My Brazilian Angel explained the situation to the masseur and he replied.

“He says you have to be careful. He says that many people set up stores and think because they’ve had massage done they can do it themselves.”

“No, this guy was a professional and a teacher at a school but I still didn’t like it.”

“Why don’t you give it a try, Chris? My masseur, there are parts that are really painful but especially at the end it is very relaxing.” She pushed me and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about Xi’An, it’s that my Brazilian Angel knows best and I should just say yes.

“Okay.” I consented and she sorted out having me get my sample massage promptly after the foot steaming.

My girl left, having an infinite number of errands to run before her trip to Macau and areas further south and I climbed onto the massage table, incredibly trepidacious.

As I put my face into the round hole, I decided that if I was to try this, then I should simply commit. There’s no point in staying all tense on a massage table. Either commit or get off the table, as it were. So I lay there, dropped my arms off the table and relaxed my body as much as I could.

The masseur placed the sheet (they use a sheet over your clothes in lieu of nudity and oil to reduce friction in China) over my back, lightly ran his fingers across my back having already been informed by me that my alignment is fucked and he instantly found the problem. It never fails to amaze me how obvious my body is to professionals. Hairdressers all over the world know exactly where the part in my hair is and masseurs all over the world know exactly where my alignment is fucked up. Language, cultural and aesthetic barriers aside, my body is consistently billboard-obvious to professionals.

On the table, he set about rubbing me down firmly enough to have some serious effect but not so hard as to literally bruise my skeleton. As he worked, his hands never completely left my body, despite taking the occasional cell phone call (rest assured that people always take cell phone calls in China; my last masseur would take them in the middle of a session however, instead of continuing to work on me like this new masseur, he would simply leave the room while he chatted) which managed to keep my level of relaxation the same. It was the perfect therapeutic massage; I was relaxed enough to let him work the muscles and he was strong enough to do something with them. It wasn’t so soft that it sent me to sleep and it wasn’t so hard that I was literally breaking a sweat to resist the pain (as I have in the past).

We finished up and he asked how old I was.

“28” I told him.

The look of surprise shot through him (highly uncharacteristic of the Chinese who are always so well guarded about their surprise with strangers and so it must have been a real shock) and he immediately said (in Chinese), “Your body is in excellent condition.” Granted, if I interpreted what happened correctly, he was shocked at how old I was and how well my body has been maintained, however, I never before thought that “28” was shock-provokingly old… except in Hollywood and even there 30 is the new 20. Regardless, it was a marked change from the outright laughter I received about how I was so fat my masseur couldn’t find the pressure points on my body and the fact of the matter is, I haven’t lost all that much weight.

It certainly is strange to have so clearly passed some sort of marker for other people and have it be absolutely nothing to me. Somehow, I have passed that invisible line between “unacceptable” and “acceptable” and now I’m being treated like one of the worthy and for the life of me I couldn’t tell you how the fuck I got here. It’s very strange and frankly, it disgusts me more than a little.