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Massage; A study in Self Analysis for China

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Back in the day in China, people were “assigned” jobs, and they had little choice but to accept them with open arms.

Bi Feiyu is an immigrant Nanjinger. Having studied Chinese literature at Yangzhou Normal University, he was assigned to a training school for teachers of the blind and deaf in Jiangsu’s hinterlands.

This was to sow the seeds of what would become “Massage”, the 2011 Mao Dun Literary Prize winner that has more recently been translated into English and gone on to further widespread acclaim, in China and abroad.

Yet, Bi would have to suffer working at the Nanjing Daily first for six years as a journalist, to see but only 6,000 of his words published, on account that there was a nasty editor who did not like his writing style, Bi has claimed.

So while opinion was divided, Bi went on to co-write the script for Zhang Yimou’s “Shanghai Triad”, and has twice won the Lu Xun Prize for Literature. More recently, “Massage” has been made into a film while a theatrical version was staged at the National Grand Theatre and the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre.

Bi has centred “Massage” around the inner lives of a group of blind masseuses working at a tuina centre in Nanjing. The main protagonist begins by returning from Shenzhen where he has made a fortune, easing the city stresses from the shoulders of Hong Kong’s movers and shakers.

There is little question that “Massage” is a fine work, let down a little by a style of prose that employs too many over-the-top metaphors. However, where Bi really scores is through his characters’ use of verbal slang.

Yet, all of this is to belie the public’s fascination with “Massage”. It was in a China of not so long ago where those with disabilities were shunned and hidden away, considered inferior and a source of loss of face. As a result, very little has been written about the lives of any such minorities.

With “Massage”, the cat is very much out of the bag, and the debate has turned to the picture that Bi has painted; its warts and all approach to depicting the lives of this previously unrecorded side of China’s underbelly.

Words such as dispair and pity do not factor into a review of “Massage”; instead, the reader shall feel compassion and empathy for the blind’s plight, accompanied by a warming toward each of the central characters, expertly presented by Bi as they struggle with their sense of identity, as well as at times by one or two excellent chuckles.

The author claims that he was inspired by wanting to reveal something new about the interpersonal relationships between the blind. Yet, through laying bear the fundamentally human secrets of a blind masseuse, Bi unwittingly also forced the public into an inevitable acceptance of the blind as merely another community in the tangle of human life, one with just as much variety and fraility as another. Consider for a moment those blind from birth versus those who lost their sight later in life and how that impacts an opinion of the world.

We can therefore see that the characters in Massage are not defined by disability. It is rather the protaganists’ ultimate pragmatism that ads nuance to the book’s character, and really keeps the pages turning.

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