Hwang Sok-yong - Princess Bari

“I would like to.”

Xiang and her husband talked amongst themselves for a moment.

“Let’s see if we can get permission from the owner for you to come home with me on Sundays,” Xiang said. “There’s so much to learn about feet. In the meantime, I’ll teach you foot massage techniques whenever there’s downtime at work.”

I’d never told anyone outside of my family about my strange gift. I’d never even told Uncle Salamander, who was practically my legal guardian, about having talked to ghosts while searching for my parents in Puryong. I wanted people to see me as a normal, ordinary girl. Of course, I also never told anyone that I was from North Korea, and even at work, if anyone so much as alluded to it, the boss scolded them: “Bad enough if she gets caught and taken away, but we’ll also get shut down and fined. Which means you’ll all be out of work too!”

Every Sunday, I went to Xiang’s flat and learned meridian points on the foot from Zhou. Xiang would sit down and prop her feet up, and Zhou would point out different spots on the bottom of her feet and explain them to me. He had three different short, wooden sticks that he used to massage feet: one had a rounded tip, another looked like a small chisel and the third was pointier. But most of what I learned was with my bare hands. He taught me how to use the flat of my thumb as well as the tip; how to use the whole length of my fingers; how to make a fist and lightly punch or press my knuckles into the sole of the foot; to press and slap with the palm of my hand; to use both hands to knead the foot; and to pinch, rotate and loosen the muscles in the ankle and the joints of the toes. Zhou told me that while the wooden tools made the job easier, using your bare hands to give a foot massage was much more effective.

“See, just as the rest of the body consists of different parts, the foot is divided into three sections: the sole, the instep and the heel and ankle. It’s the same with the hands, so it’s more effective if you start with a light hand massage before working on their feet. The meridian points for the internal organs are clustered in the sole and the heel, and the points for the head are in the toes. The arch of the foot, here, is the kidneys. The padded part just below the fourth and fifth toes of the left foot corresponds to the heart. On the right foot, it’s the liver.”

Zhou demonstrated all of this on Xiang’s feet and explained it to me again using my own feet. Then he had me practice on him. Whenever I made a mistake, he lifted up his foot to explain again before having me continue. I did this every Sunday as I studied the meridian points on the feet. I memorized the ten steps for relaxing the hands, and the fifteen basic moves for massaging the feet before moving on to the main meridian points for healing illnesses. Zhou taught me everything by example. “A customer comes in drunk,” he would say. “What do you do?”

“The meridian points for the head are concentrated in the big toe, so I would start by applying acupressure to each toe in turn to relieve his headache. Then I would rub the sole of the foot, which corresponds to the intestines, and the heel, to help stimulate the liver and kidneys …”

After eight months at Paradise, I became a masseuse. As I was not a documented resident with a Chinese family registration, I wasn’t officially licenced to practise massage; it was my skill alone that qualified me to take customers. I also wasn’t given a commission the way the other masseuses were, and was paid only in whatever tips I received; but the tips were much better than what I’d made before from running errands and helping out with cooking.

After becoming a masseuse, I realized that I was able to tell what was wrong with a person just by studying their face and touching their feet. It began with my very first customer, a Chinese man. He was husky and a little overweight. After stripping down to his undershirt and rolling up the legs of his suit trousers, he sprawled out on the massage table with his legs dangling over the side. I washed his feet with a mixture of lukewarm water and salt and vinegar, and then let them soak in a bowl of hot water steeped with mugwort while I slowly massaged his calves. I dried his feet off with a towel and started with his left foot. I began by applying pressure to the meridian points on each toe in turn, just as I’d been taught, but his heel had a strange red glow coming from it: I knew at once that something was wrong with his liver and intestines.

Next was an older female tourist. This time, not only were the soles of her feet glowing red and blue, but as I rubbed and thumped her feet I closed my eyes and started to see something: a car, crossing a bridge. Suddenly a truck came racing up from behind, slamming into it. The small car lay upside down in the road, the frame half crumpled. I stopped and leaned over to whisper in the ear of the Korean-Chinese woman working beside me.

“I think this woman was in a car accident.”

“Why? Does she have a weird scar or something?”

“No, it’s not that …”

Some of my customers picked up on the fact that I was good at finding the parts of their feet that needed extra attention, and they became my regulars. Xiang, as well, had guessed there was something different about me, but she assumed it was just that I had an unnatural aptitude for the job.

*

Two years after I first came to Paradise, I turned fifteen and moved to Dalian with Xiang and her husband. Zhou had earned his acupuncture licence and was going into business with a friend who’d opened a foot massage studio there. I felt it was my duty to break the news to Uncle Salamander properly, so I called him up and invited him out to dinner.

“Oh my,” he laughed. “Our little Bari is all grown up now.”

It wasn’t easy scheduling dinner with him. Since he worked as both a travel agent and a tour guide, he was busy ferrying visitors from the airport to their hotels every day and personally driving the small sightseeing bus that shuttled tourists to Mount Baekdu.

He asked me to meet him at a restaurant specializing in skewered lamb. Branches had opened up all over the country. Lamb meat was threaded onto long, metal skewers and rotated over a hot grill using an apparatus that had been invented by an army veteran. Uncle Salamander got there before me. When I arrived, he waved me over to where he was sitting in a booth. He kept dabbing at his sweaty face with a wet wipe.

“Everything okay?” he asked. “Still getting a lot of customers?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, we’ve been short of hands lately and had to hire more masseuses.”

“Good, good. I think I need a drink.”

I pulled the cooked lamb from the skewer and set it on his plate as he poured himself a shot of soju .

“How old are you now?”

“Fifteen.”

“Fifteen already! How time does fly!”

“Uncle, I need to tell you something.”

I told him about Xiang and her husband, and how they were like family to me now, just like him, and that they were planning to move to Dalian and open a massage studio and so I’d decided to go with them. He nodded.

“Since you say they’re good people, I suppose I can trust them. Do you owe Paradise any money?”

I shook my head.

“But have you told your boss?”

“Not yet. I wanted to discuss it with you first.”

Uncle Salamander waved his hands at me and brought his finger up to his lips.

“Don’t breathe a word of it. Just slip out of there when the time comes. Someone in your situation can’t afford to trust anyone. Keep your guard up from now on. Even in this town, people aren’t as friendly as they used to be. Do you know why? Money. No matter where you go in the world, it’s always the same. The electric lights go on, money comes in and kindness vanishes. All the young guys from the North that I used to trade with have become pimps.”