by Bi Feiyu
Wang laughed, as he realised that Sha was giving his experience full play in front of his employees. Even Xiao Kong, who was standing behind him, heaved a soft sigh.
Rather than let the praise go to his head, Wang replied with a smile, ‘Boss Sha is being nice to me. He’s the one who’s a master of theory and practice.’
It mattered little to Sha when people commented on his skill, but he cared a great deal about theory; he wanted to be known as someone with ‘theories’. Wang’s words brought a smile to his face.
For his part, Wang was not being flattering, since Boss Sha was good at what he did. Within a few minutes, Wang could see that Sha had good business sense and that he ran the place well – in an orderly and disciplined way. It put Wang’s mind at ease, for, as an employee, he cared about two things – order and discipline.
Wang was spot on about the place. One thing about the Sha Zongqi tuina centre was the fact that clients weren’t all they cared about; they were also serious about employee training. It was an ingenious design on Sha’s part, because training was actually a pretence for employee management. Ten o’clock in the morning was usually a downtime at tuina centres. Back when Sha was working for someone else, he would use the downtime to take a nap, since sleeping on the job could not have been easier for the blind. When sighted people close their eyes for a nap they can be spotted straight away, but not the blind. All they have to do is to sit down and lean their heads back; no one can tell that they’re napping. Yet people will know they’re sleeping if they are startled awake, just from the way they speak, for nappers all have something in common: they either sound sluggish or they talk too fast. One way or the other, they react differently, which Sha had noticed years ago. He’d placed a strict demand on himself: if he became a boss one day he would not give his employees the chance to sneak in some sleep in the centre. He would never allow that to happen. If the employees were in the habit of napping, to the clients it looked as if business was bad, not that the employees were loafing. In contrast, holding a meeting during downtime to talk about their trade gave the lounge a different feel; it showed that they were into self-improvement. The atmosphere in a place is critical: it has a rippling effect that can reach from one person to ten, and from ten to a hundred. Sha had begun by working for someone else, and after learning the ropes of being a hired hand, he knew all about employee management. What it boiled down to was simply knowing each employee’s weakness; finding that weakness was what personnel management was all about.
Fuming showed Wang Daifu and Xiao Kong around the centre, looking into every room. Wang gained a pretty good idea of the size of Sha’s business; with thirteen or fourteen employees and seventeen or eighteen beds, it wasn’t especially large, nor was it small. He’d have had a comparable business if his money hadn’t fallen into the stock market trap. The thought depressed him so much he started cracking his knuckles.
After they visited the last room, Sha took a step back and shut the sliding door, a sign to Wang that they had reached the critical moment when they would discuss the important matters. Fuming began in an emotional tone, expressing his heartfelt happiness and a sincere welcome to his old friend, who had come to lend a hand; but the essence of their conversation rested on equality. Wang knew what Fuming was getting at; he would be like all the other employees and would enjoy no special treatment. So he decided to be frank and open.
‘Don’t worry, Boss,’ he said softly. ‘This isn’t my first time working for someone.’
Now that Wang had opened the door, Fuming rubbed his hands together and said, ‘Well, then go buy what you need, daily necessities and so on. I’ll phone the dorm and tell them to prepare two beds for you.’
Wang patted Fuming on the shoulder; Fuming responded by patting Wang’s shoulder in return and said, raising his voice, ‘The Sha Zongqi tuina centre welcomes you.’
Wang cocked his head and wondered out loud why he used the name Sha Zongqi and not Sha Fuming.
‘It’s like this,’ Fuming offered an explanation. ‘Zhang Zongqi and I each put up half the capital to open the centre, so naturally it’s called Sha Zongqi.’
‘Who’s Zhang Zongqi?’
‘Someone I met in Shanghai.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘In the employee’s lounge.’
‘I should go pay him a visit.’
‘What’s the hurry?’ Fuming said. ‘There’s plenty of time for that. And there’s really no need to pay him a visit. Talking to me is the same as talking to him. He’s in a meeting.’
Wang looked up, a gesture of ‘Ah, I see’, but said nothing. Feeling that a load had been lifted off his chest, he touched Xiao Kong’s hand briefly. So Sha Fuming had a business partner and owned only half the centre. One thing was certain: Sha had done no better in Shanghai than Wang had done in Shenzhen.
After seeing Wang and Kong off, Sha Fuming stood out in a cold wind, his head raised to look at his business facade, which was a source of dissatisfaction. Strictly speaking, the Sha Zongqi tuina centre did not have a prime location, barely managing to be placed among the second tier of Nanjing’s business districts. In fact the area had been farmland barely two decades earlier. These days, a city was nothing but a woman dead set on breast enlargement – size mattered, as did placing breasts in places they hadn’t been before. The enlargement added value, turning rice paddy land and cotton fields into secondtier business districts. I’ll just have to keep at it, Sha told himself. Once the business got going and grew bigger, he’d open his flagship tuina parlour in a first-tier area, no matter how high the rent, how unaffordable. He’d open it in either the Drum Tower or Xinjiekou business district.
From the first day he started working, living by the sweat of his brow was not what he had in mind; he was simply accumulating capital. Living by the sweat of one’s brow was an absurd, arrogant and conceited expression created by normal people, which was what the blind called the sighted, who were actually anything but normal. Be they teachers or government officials, they were forever telling the disabled to live by the sweat of their brow, gaining self-satisfaction from the sound of their inculcation. As if only the disabled needed to live by the sweat of their brow, that they themselves never had to; as if they had everything laid out for them and all they had to do was pick up their chopsticks to feed themselves; as if all the disabled had to do was live by the sweat of their brow, and that it would be an incredible feat if they didn’t die of hunger or from the cold. Well, fuck living by the sweat of your brow. Those people could never know of the powerful, resilient heart pumping in the chest of a blind person.
But Sha Fuming’s capital accumulation process suffered a miserable defeat. Karl Marx said that primitive accumulation is accompanied by evil, but Sha’s capital accumulation did not even qualify for that; it was simply out of his reach. What accompanied his accumulation was sacrifice, the deterioration of his health. He was still young, and yet he’d been afflicted with severe neck pain and gastroptosis, a stomach condition. Over the years, he’d worked on countless people with stiff necks, but his own gave him so much trouble that sometimes he’d be nauseous from dizzy spells. Whenever he felt dizzy, the only thing that flashed through his mind was money. What did he need money for? Not to accomplish the damned living by the sweat of his brow, but to accumulate capital. He needed capital, he was madly in love with capital. Each time he had a dizzy spell, he felt his eyes brighten; so many spells later he finally saw it. He saw the truth about life, which entailed a simple logic; you either worked for someone or someone worked for you. It was that simple.
Sha was convinced that if he hadn’t been born blind, he’d have been capable of dealing with the world all by himself. He excelled at schoolwork, which was why he thought so highly of himself. He was a good student. An example: when they were studying the energy channels and acupuncture points in Chinese medicine, his classmates, including Wang Daifu, were still struggling with the various acupoints – heart, lungs, liver, small intestine, bladder and stom
ach – while he, with help from his teacher, had begun studying anatomy in Western medicine at a medical school. By examining the skeletons, various systems, organs and muscles of cadavers, he quickly gained a structural grasp of the human body. Chinese medicine is good, but it has its flaws, for it starts and ends with philosophy; the human body is frequently associated with the universe, with yin and yang, and with the five elements. Beginning with something simple, it gets increasingly complicated and arcane; the more you learn, the more esoteric it seems. But not Western medicine, which is the other way around. Everything begins with complexity and ends in simplicity; the human body in the view of Western medicine is involved with materiality and empiricism, not fanciful thoughts and arcane meditation. In a word, anatomy is more practical, more effective, more efficient. A future tuina therapist, a blind one, no less, can take good care of a living person if he learns everything a cadaver has to offer.
He had been progressing well with his studies, but with a different style from the other top student in the class, Wang Daifu. Wang also excelled; he knew exactly what he wanted, which, in a word, was to earn a living from his own labour. Which was why he never stopped bodybuilding; he spent just about every waking moment outside of class in the gym. With a goal of having strong arms and powerful fingers, he could bench press a surprising one hundred and twenty-five kilos. His arms were as thick as the thighs of a female classmate, his thumbs so powerful they could seemingly put a dent in wood.
By contrast, Sha Fuming had never worked at any of the basic skills. One thing was clear to him: no matter how skilful, a therapist will always have to live by his hands. However accomplished, a therapist will only be a good soldier. Sha wanted to be a general, so why waste energy in the gym? He’d be better off learning some English and Japanese, far-reaching, unique and strategic foresight that would later be borne out by reality. When he’d started working in Shanghai, the blind therapists would cower to the side each time a client wafting perfume – that is, non-Chinese – walked in; they would be reluctant to speak with the client. That was when Sha showed his edge over the others. Using his limited English or Japanese, he greeted the newcomer, who naturally became his client. No one could complain that Sha had taken a client away from them; on the contrary, his co-workers envied, even admired him. That was like an epiphany to Sha, whose confidence in his language ability began to grow. He even employed his broken English or Japanese in discussing the issue of tips with these foreign friends; he was, in a word, bargaining with the clients. Back in the dorms, he’d repeat what he’d said to his co-workers, who were stunned by his audacity. To them, this was not bargaining; it was international trade, pure and simple. They were so startled their jaws dropped. Sha Fuming was in the big league now, and he had so many clients he wished he could be torn into many selves.
He worked hard, day and night, all but killing himself in the process. His finger techniques were not particularly good, a fact that was not perceived by the non-Chinese clients, who knew only about biceps and triceps, pecs, latts, trapezius and abs, with no knowledge of the many acupoints, let alone the tuina techniques of push, press, knead, rub, pinch, knock and split. Everything his clients felt, Sha Fuming conveyed orally – he was personable, witty, knowledgeable, and a source of unexpected humour due to his half-baked foreign language ability. A case in point: once a client, noticing that Sha wasn’t wearing warm clothes, asked if he was cold. He said, no, that he wasn’t susceptible to cold. But when rendered in English, it came out as, ‘I am a hot man.’ A hunk, that is, which tickled the client endlessly. All his clients were delighted to discover a blind therapist who could be expressive and witty in their language. In a word, Sha Fuming’s presence changed people’s stereotypes of the disabled, even stereotypes of the Chinese held by foreigners. ‘Mr Sha’ is so eloquent, so upbeat, open and humorous. As a result, his clients needed to make appointments two or three days in advance; they could not just drop in and get him to work on them. In truth, the appointments really did not have to be made so far ahead. Yet Sha was ostentatious and extravagant; he had flair. The harder it was to get an appointment, the more eager the clients would be to wait. He was doing so well he stopped worrying about domestic demand and focused exclusively on international trade. Many foreigners knew of a tuina centre at the intersection of Minfeng and Sixiang Roads where they would find a terrific Dr Sha with fantastic massage and conversational skills.
But hidden troubles began to creep in; his business showed signs of slowing down. One day he realised that his foreign clients were bargaining with him. Unknown to him, they had been instructed to do so by Sha’s co-workers. ‘You can haggle with him,’ said one of them to a foreign client, ‘cut the price after cutting it in half.’ What did it mean to cut the price after cutting it in half? The client cocked his head to ponder the suggestion. Language can present a barrier, but the desire for expression in language can never be blocked. So another of Sha’s co-workers, by way of demonstration, touched the client’s abdomen with one hand and, using the outstretched palm of the other to form the shape of a knife, chopped down, cutting him in half. Before the frightened man recovered, the hand rose and fell again, this time landing on his knee; now all that remained was a hairy calf. He looked down at his feet and saw that he could still wiggle his hairy toes. He got the picture – he hadn’t encountered a modern-day boxer warrior. Their discussion was on international trade, with strong Chinese characteristics – about how to reduce the ‘one’ number to a quarter, to one-eighth, even to one-sixteenth. What a fascinating way the Chinese had in dealing with numbers, as splendid as their prose from the Han dynasty or poetry of the Tang. ‘Yeah, I got it, I really got it now. Fabulous!’ he exclaimed, making the word sound like flabulous.
Fuming’s business took a nosedive. He made a serious error, as an inflated ego interfered with his judgement. Mirroring Wang Daifu’s blunder in the stock market, he did not stop when the going was good; in wanting to save his ‘international trade’, he made the fatal mistake of using Chinese logic. In his mind, he had a solid relationship with these non-Chinese clients; they were old friends. They would be embarrassed to switch to someone else, wouldn’t they? Well, he was wrong. They did that with ease; in the end, it was he who wound up being embarrassed. And it got worse; he was mortified whenever he heard English or Japanese being spoken. He felt as if he’d been abandoned – and he wanted to find a place to hide. Why was he mortified? Why did he have to hide? He had no idea, only that he was mortified that his business had tanked. And this was the moment bad health raised its sinister head.
Sha Fuming had suffered from poor health even as a student. How had that happened? He’d studied too hard, never realising that it could be detrimental to a blind person’s health. A sighted person can study all he wants, day and night, like the proverbial scholar who poked a hole in the wall to read by a neighbour’s light, or by burning the midnight oil. But no matter what, there is always the demarcation between day and night. But not for the blind. They live outside the confines of time. A sighted person will feel eye strain after prolonged reading, a problem that does not afflict the blind, since they read tactilely. Which was why Sha could read with no regard for day or night. He read everything – medicine, literature, history, the arts, science and economics; he read what was written over the past five thousand years and what was written all over the world. He had to. He set great store by the lines of the poet Wang Zhihuan that ‘One must go up another floor/ To see far into the distance.’ Everyone knew those lines. But to Sha Fuming they weren’t poetry, they were philosophy, they were an inspiration. A book represented a floor and he, Sha Fuming, would be able to ‘see far into the distance’ once he reached a certain level. ‘One’s heart stirs at the roiling clouds/ One’s eyes strain at the sight of homeward birds/ Wu and Chu are separated by a vast lake/ Its surface reflects the boundless universe.’ Sha Fuming believed he would regain his sight, as implied in the name his parents had given him, fu – to recover, and ming – b
rightness. They had hoped he’d be able to see again. He was convinced that everyone had another pair of eyes, in their hearts, and he wanted each book he read to help open those eyes. With limitless ambition, he lived outside the confines of time.
He read. For him, dawn never came; conversely, darkness never descended.
As a student Sha Fuming was simply too young. The blind normally start school later than the sighted, so he was older than those who had gone through the same educational process. But no matter how much older he was, he was still very young. Being young has its advantage; you can abuse your body without suffering the consequences. A bit of abuse today, nothing happens. A little more tomorrow, no problem, and some more the day after that, still no sign of trouble. Tolstoy was right to say that the body is the slave of the mind.
But he had a neck and he had a stomach, both of which he pushed like a slave driver. His ambition led him to abuse them each and every day, and by the time he sensed their suffering, they were no longer his slaves, but had turned him into an aristocratic young lady, the delicate Lin Daiyu of fiction. His neck and his stomach acted up whenever they felt like it, relentlessly.
One always needs reminders regarding health. ‘Sir, you don’t look so good. Are you not feeling well?’ Yet that convenience is not available to the blind. Only the wearer knows if his shoes are too big or too small. Sha’s neck and stomach had already begun acting up when his business was flourishing, but he put up with it, not letting on to anyone. The blind are inordinately proud people, contemptuous of complaint, which they regard as whining, no different than begging for food. Sha had more pride than most, which prevented him from telling others about his ailments. Besides, what was accomplished by talking about them? Business was good and he was busy, there was money to be made – more than ten thousand yuan a month. Ten thousand yuan. That was more than he could have dreamed in the past, when he’d forged a long-term plan, which was to be a boss before he turned forty. Then that plan had seemed too long term; he’d likely have to start much earlier. Which was why he’d decided to put up with the pain; just a little longer. Once he opened his own business, he’d become a member of the bourgeoisie, and someone else would produce health, comfort and wealth for him. The neck and the stomach are not vital organs; as a sort of doctor himself, he knew that. After all, it was nothing but a little discomfort.