My name is Hằng. I’m forty years old. I’ve been working as a traditional therapeutic masseur for twenty years. Now, I have my own business and I work when there aren’t enough people working at shop. Before this job, I was a construction worker in my hometown, Thanh Hóa province, but I felt unmotivated so I decided to attend school for traditional medicine. I like this job because I used to help a masseur doing charity work back then. I thought that this job was interesting and I enjoyed serving the community so I pursued this profession.
I enrolled in the Tuệ Tĩnh school of traditional medicine. For three years, I studied traditional medicine which focused on acupuncture, diagnoses, prescribe medicine. For another three years, I continued studying traditional medicine along with western medicine. Then I spent an additional three years learning to specialize in acupuncture. You see, my training took a total of nine years.
The hardest part, but also the secret to success, is perseverance. One must be passionate and studious to learn traditional medicine. I must know the location of each nerve to perform acupuncture, massage, or acupressure. Traditional medicine is extremely difficult! Besides the knowledge, good health is important. Warm and strong hands are necessary. All masseurs have to cut their fingernails short to work easily. Sometimes I use my thumbs, other times I use the whole hands to massage. Usually, after each session, my hands get sore. But you know, I’ve done this for years so I’m used to it. I pay attention to techniques because if I don’t do them correctly, the patients won’t get better.
My massage shop is opened from eight in the morning until eleven at night. There are seven or eight women working for me now. On average, we have a few dozen customers come in each day. Usually, I manage and collect the money we make. My employees get thirty percents as commissions. My main job is to train all my employees. I don’t just train anyone, only those that commit to work for my shop. Some might just learn and then go work for someone else, you know? Massage has many techniques that are hard to learn. Some look easy, but people can’t really imitate them at home. A lot of my employees, they have gone through three years of traditional medicine school but I still have to spend a lot of time and effort training them. There were people that quit or I just let them go after two or three days because they couldn’t get used to the workload. They complained that their hands were sore and strained. I have been doing this for twenty years. My hands and wrists are really big now. So manly, right? [Laughs]
I rent this entire house to live and work for twenty million VND a month [US$1000], which is quite expensive. This house has two entrances so I’m moving my business to the back entrance, and leasing out the front entrance on Nguyễn Trãi street to earn some extra cash. My business alone… just simply can’t afford it. Luckily, many of my customers are regular so moving the business to the back isn’t a big problem. Some still don’t know about the recent move so I keep the front open for now. People like my massaging techniques so they keep coming back. Not to mention the tips they give me, I truly treasure the numbers of families and friends that they refer to my shop. How long it take to get regular customers? Generally, it depends on the masseur’s skills. My techniques are unique because I don’t study from other masters. I research and learn from books then practice. I practice on myself first, then on my family.
My customers vary. Sometimes I have drunk people come in to get massages to increase their blood circulation. After about an hour or so they become completely sober. Ah… it’s also not unusual that some customers come straight from work for massages without showering first. Some people have stronger body odor than others, but that’s just how this job is. The majority of my customers are men. Women often want to save money. Only wealthy women or people who are hurt really badly come in for massages.
A lot of professors and students from Hanoi University are also my customers, especially Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese students. There are also a lot of Westerners from the university who come here. Some days, they bring a group of ten or eleven people. It gets quite busy. Asian customers like to crack their body parts because that would release tension in the muscles and joints. Westerners don’t like that. Now I know they want me to massage softer and not crack anything. Back then, I only massaged according to the strength of my hands regardless of what the customers want. Nowadays, before the treatments, I ask the customers what they’d prefer. I don’t know English so I often use body language and gestures to ask them or I would read their facial expressions. If my techniques hurt them, then their faces would show. I depend on these expressions to work.
Sometimes customers expect us to give them happy endings so I had to explain that we don’t do such thing at my shop . The working space here is very open. People are walking back and forth all the time. Anyone can understand that just by looking at the layout of my shop. There are other places, like the massage shop behind mine, they do other things. The workers there wear short shorts and work in very enclosed rooms. Some people don’t know, they think that all places are the same, that all massage shops give happy endings. But you know what? Even at those places, the girls are not supposed to have intercourse with their customers. When the customers want to ejaculate, those girls can give them a hand-job or a blow-job to satisfy their customers’ need. Places like mine, we focus on treating illnesses and taking care of our patients health.
If you want to know which massage place does what, you have to ask the owners or managers whether or not they actually perform acupuncture or acupressure. Some will tell you, but some will lie and do a really crappy job because they don’t really know how. Usually those places ask for the money in advance, so the customers would’ve paid already even when they don’t want the service anymore. Such massage shops charge a fee from five-hundred-thousand to one million VND. My business is for ordinary people, so the price is quite reasonable.
My occupation doesn’t allow me any vacation time. I stay home twenty four seven except when I go to the market or pick up my children. My business is closed for Tết [Lunar New Year] only, from the twenty-seventh to the sixth of the lunar calendar. With that many days off, I’m dead because of the rent. It’s over ten million VND [US$500]: not a small number! Normally, we don’t have a set schedule for lunch or dinner breaks. Whenever the customers come in, we work even if they interrupt our meals. Some days, it gets really hectic because customers come nonstop. We work until everyone is gone. Granted that eating irregularly can affect our health, but there is nothing we can do. Work is work! Fortunately, I have very good health. I don’t get sick very often. After getting married and giving birth to my daughters, I’m still very healthy. When I work too hard, I get tired, but never fall sick. When I was pregnant, I work until the day before I went into labor. After my first daughter was born, I left work for one month. Then with my second daughter, I was off for a week. Well, three days to be exact. I remembered on the third day, a patient came in with a dislocated shoulder from practicing martial arts and asked me to treat him. I was still really weak so I had some of my employees treated him as well.
Today, people tend to rely on Western medicine to treat illnesses, but many still come to my shop to get diagnose and prescription for herbal medicines. I really like traditional medicines because they have a lot of benefits. When people are in pain, they don’t need to drink any kind of medicine. They can get massage, acupuncture, or acupressure as alternative treatment. Machines just can’t do a good job massaging as hands. They don’t have the electric currents that run from the masseur’s fingers to the patients during treatment. My skills and techniques are good enough to help my customers. Many of my colleagues, they work in the hospitals because their skills are not high enough to open businesses. Salary at the hospital is low, only a few millions VND a month.
I don’t want to expand or open another shop because both of my daughters are still very little. When I was young, I didn’t dare thinking about dating anyone; men scared me so I focused on my career instead. I didn’t get married until I was thirty-six years old. Now, I want to spend time taking care of my family. Do I want my children to follow my foot steps? They are too young to know what they like yet, maybe when they are older I’ll know. It doesn’t matter what the occupation is, you must like it to do it. This job is no exception. If I want them to take over my business, but they don’t want to then it’s useless. You know what? My two daughters… the oldest is only four years old but she likes to watch my employees while they are working and then tries to imitate what she saw on her dad. The youngest one is two years old. She also likes to watch and practice each time I teach my employees. [Smiles]
I hear that in Western countries, this profession is getting popular. If I open a business there, I’d make a lot of money, don’t you think? I’m not sure how it will be in the future, but I’m satisfied with my current business. I’ll take it one day at a time. Maybe I’ll find opportunities for my two daughters to study abroad, but that’s twenty years from now. By then, I’ll be old also… Nothing is certain!
Contributors: Ngoc-Diệp Tăng, Haven Rocha, Hoàng Huyền Trang, Vũ Phương Thảo
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