A Shower for the Masses

"You don't have public showers in America? But what if you don't have a shower in your house? But what if you don't have indoor heating in your house? But what if your shower breaks? That is so crazy..." – my roommate, shocked upon learning that my trip to the local shower house was my first such experience.

A couple days ago, I wrote a blog post about a typical day in the life of me during the winter. In the post, I talk about the torture of showering at home. One day during a run at the university track in the beginning of February, I wanted to cry I was so cold. When I came home and my roommate told me that it was -8 degrees Celsius (17 degrees Fahrenheit), I caved. I know 17 degrees might not sound cold, but try living in a house without heating for a couple months during the winter in Nanjing first, and then come back and we can talk.

I couldn't bring myself to go through the torture of showering at home. I said to myself, "Sarah, there are some things in life that are worth spending money on. And spending 10 yuan on a shower is something that you need right now." I know, I know you probably think I'm crazy because 10 yuan is less than $2. But it just goes against every fibre of my being to pay for something that I can do for free. But I packed up my backpack with shampoo and conditioner, grabbed my towel and clean clothes, and went to the public shower, a discovery that made the rest of my winter much more bearable. Lesson 29,452 learned from China: don't be so stubborn.

When it got cold enough after that day (usually around -6 to -4 degrees Celsius, or 21 to 25 degrees Fahrenheit), I would sometimes shower at the public shower house when I had time. I say public shower house because it is a group shower that is open to the public, but it is not funded by the state or by tax dollars. It is a private business that charges the men 8 yuan ($1.25) and women 10 yuan ($1.50) to shower, with other perks such as pedicures, exfoliating, skin peels, and foot massages, all for around 8 yuan. There are several shower houses within walking distance of my house, scattered throughout Old Nanjing, since the majority of residents lack either a shower or indoor heating.

The shower houses vary in quality and price: the cheapest ones, 7 yuan per shower for women, have only lukewarm water with low water pressure, while the 10 yuan showers provided hot water, shower shoes, and lockers. My shower house is tucked behind the neighborhood supermarket in a back alley, with an illuminated blue sign that reads "Shower for the Masses" (dazhong yushi).

Throughout the day, you can see people of all ages walking down the street in their pajamas with their hair wet, carrying a plastic tub with shampoo. Considering the sometimes fanatical attention that Chinese people give to staying warm, it still amazes and confuses me why Chinese women don't use hair dryers and Chinese people in general don't wear hats (older people will wear hats when it gets really cold, but generally, people in Nanjing don't wear hats and often make fun of me for wearing one).

The public shower house was also a good research experience. 3 things I learned about Chinese women while showering:

1.) They take incredibly long showers and wash their hair at least twice

2.) They brush their teeth and wear their glasses in the shower

3.) Body tattoos are a lot more popular among Chinese women than I previously assumed

The only drawback to the public shower was the expense and the fact that it takes longer: while a shower at home took 2 minutes with a total of 15 minutes max spent to get dressed and blow dry hair, the typical public shower house trip, however, took at least an hour, since I have to pack, walk there, unpack, get everything situated and whatnot, and walk back. That was partially my own fault because sometimes I would just stand in there and bask in the glory of being warm for a moment. Here is a typical experience at the public shower house:

I open the door to the shower house, and the big boss sitting behind the front desk gets this huge, crinkly smile on his face. His son recognizes me, and they immediately start asking me a bunch of questions: Have you eaten? Did you have class today? Where have you been recently? Were you cold today? How much money do you make?

They make fun of me for bringing my big backpack again. Between my American-style towel and various winter clothes, my backpack puffs out behind me, and makes me look like a nerdy school child. Every time I come in, they ask why I have such a large bag and don't seem to quite understand my feeble attempts at an explanation. The female shower attendant (ayi, which means "auntie", a term for service attendants, especially nannies, that was popularized during the Mao-era) is cooking dinner on a stovetop in a broom closet next to the lobby and it smells fragrant: certainly onions and garlic are involved. I pay for the shower and order an exfoliating treatment. They give me a small piece of metal the size of a popsicle stick to indicate that I've paid, and I push back the heavy, thick curtains to enter the women's locker room. 

My hands are frozen immobile today and I'm having trouble undressing, so ayi helps. "You're not wearing enough clothes!" she scolds me. I explain that I just got done exercising, and exercising makes me hot so I can't wear too many clothes. She gives me an apprehensive look and tells me I should wear more. One of the other women says, "jintian man du de," and I sigh. She said the shower was "du" today, the same word used to describe a traffic jam or a clogged toilet. It means that the shower is crowded.

I walk in to the shower, a large room filled with steam and 8 spickets lining the wall. It's hot and humid like a sauna, making it almost difficult to breathe. Everyone stares at me like a deer in the headlights for a couple seconds, and then quickly go back to what they were doing. I stand under a spicket in the corner, and the women next to me and I keep bumping into each other. She doesn't seem to notice.

Two young girls in their mid-teens have white facial masks on and chat loudly and happily the entire time in the local dialect, exfoliating each other's backs, horsing around, making jokes, and giggling.

Someone hacks up a loogey. A girl squats down to pee next to the shower drain. The 5-year-old girl next to me points and tells her mom that there's a foreigner in the house. A 2-year-old boy splashes in a big plastic tub while his Mom showers. Another Mom scolds her daughter and the daughter starts crying loudly, while the other aunties in the shower say to the Mom, "Kids these days are something else, aren't they?" 

While showering, I think about how communal everyone is here in China, and how individualistic we are in the States. We Americans are just so much more comfortable minding our own business and just living our lives inside our own houses, with our own private toilets and our own private showers. 

I was talking to my Chinese friend Sun Xiao about this, and she really hit that point home. I met her in Nanjing last year, when we were both juniors in college and were looking for language partners. She is studying to get her PhD in Hong Kong now, and she came back to Nanjing briefly for the Chinese New Year and we met up for lunch. She told me that she is so used to doing everything with a million people all around: showering, eating, studying: "I've always had at least 6 roommates! And now in Hong Kong I live by myself. It is so crowded and yet so lonely, I'm not used to living alone like this." Something that is so strange and foreign to an American, like taking a shower with 10 other people or squatting in a trough with no stalls, is just normal and expected here in China. And when Chinese people do go abroad, they consistently tell me how lonely it is and how individualistic everyone is. In China there isn't a sense of private or personal space as much as it is understood and valued in the States, though that is changing rapidly with the marketization of the property market. Anyway, I digress.

I ask the ayi to start my exfoliation. She puts on gloves made of a coarse material. I stand there while she scrubs me head to toe, and white shavings that look like the bits of eraser come off of my skin. She tells me I'm really dirty today. I ask her what the health benefits are to exfoliation (Chinese people always have the most interesting perspectives on health) and she says there are no benefits, "it's supposed to be relaxing like a massage." And indeed it is. Kind of like that "hurts so good" kind of pain. I rinse of the eraser pieces that were once were a part of my skin, and exit the shower to get dried off. A woman follows with her daughter and tells me that I shower very quickly and I laugh, telling her that today was the longest shower I have ever taken. She tells her daughter to hurry up: "Be quick like auntie here so we can go home and eat with Daddy."A woman relaxes on a day bed in the corner and smokes a cigarette, filling the already steamy room with smoke.

While I dress, I chat with ayi. She, like the owner of the shower house, is from Hangzhou, a city in Zhejiang Province (but she and the boss have no blood relations, she said). She beams with pride when she tells me about her son, a student at a university in Zhejiang. She goes back home to Hangzhou every summer to see her son. She lives above the shower house in a small room just big enough for a twin bed, which she doesn't have to pay for as it's part of the job benefits. She works 12-hour days, 7 days a week and makes at least 1,000 yuan ($158) a month, but more if there are a lot of customers. The boss, meanwhile, has told me that he makes 400,000 ($63,000) a year.

A Chinese woman next to me asks ayi, "Is it enough to eat?" and ayi says yes, and as long as she cooks for the boss and his family, she gets to eat a portion of that meal. The Chinese woman says, "Oh, as long as you have enough to eat, then that's just fine (zhiyao gouchi jiuxingle). As long as your room is big enough to live that's all you need, a big house is unnecessary." It is as if she was trying to comfort ayi somehow, saying that's all you can really ask for, food and shelter... that's all you really need, right?

I walk out and the boss and his entire family, all male, are eating in the lobby. They stand around the front desk clutching a rice bowl and chopsticks with a few meat and vegetable dishes in the middle while they pick-up bite size pieces of everything. Ayi eats with them. They politely offer me a rice bowl, but I refuse and they immediately accept, a sign that they didn't really mean it. While exiting, I hear someone inside say, "Did I just see a foreigner in here?"

Chinese word of the day: 

洗澡- xi3 zao3- literally "to wash and bathe" aka to shower (verb)

浴室- yu4 shi4- literally "washing room" aka shower (noun) 

Took me a long time to realize that in Chinese the verb and noun for shower are different words....