M and T are two Beijing prostitutes whose services I occasionally employ. Both are over 30, T probably 40 or so, and both are independent operators.
I met M while leaving a bar at about 1 am and she hailed me asking if I wanted a “massage.” Impulsively, I said, maybe, yes, but let’s talk first.
I liked her because she didn’t look like a hooker.
She was conservatively dressed, almost preppie, with simple makeup. One thing led to another, a deal was struck but then and since it hasn’t really been about sex.
Far from it. Frankly, M and I are thoroughly mediocre in bed except when it comes to sleeping and talking. I wind up paying her mostly to literally sleep with me and that’s all right.
Hard to understand, perhaps, but especially as one ages there’s sometimes more comfort than an orgasm in reaching out during the night to hold a warm hand that presses back or to cup a breast that otherwise might not be there and then falling off again into dark bliss; an intangible comfort. Only the lonely, as Roy Orbison sang.
M says she is from an upper class BJ family, her father is a retired doctor with a major hospital and university and mother who, from M’s description seems cool but suffering from early short term memory loss.
A model of filial piety, M goes to their home every Sunday; once with a stove hood fan that I bought in lieu of services rendered, though part of me, the logical part, wondered where is daddy, the celebrated doctor in all this?
Am I being used? Sure, but I can afford it and if a stove fan makes her look like a dutiful daughter and keeps her mother from burning down the house, cool.
Carnal foreign aid, as it were.
M lives with a roommate who also works the bars, and until recently was also working part time as an accountant and beyond that I’m not sure why she continues to do what she does.
She likes sex, she says, but usually solo and about twice a week that way. It’s mostly about the money and maybe some Freudian thing regarding a lying Chinese boyfriend who broke her heart after a long time, but whom M occasionally can’t help telling me about.
I don’t pry beyond that, and really to hear her talk about the day she won the “second best 17-year-old Chinese girl chess player in Beijing” prize.
I’m proud to be with her at that moment, imagining.
She’s a news junkie and watching Chinese language CCTV news as I write this. Her English isn’t great. M speaks exclusively in present tense but the feeling is there. “BrazIL” she informs me gravely, emphasizing the “I” and “L.” “Much trouble.” The screen shows trouble in Brazil. “Africa,” she reports again. “More trouble. Korea, always trouble. Too much trouble in world.”
Now she wants to play Celion Dion on my computer. I’ve gotta stop writing for that, though I loathe Celion Dion, whose image, much less voice, is too much trouble in my world.
But it’s okay. I respect M. It’s worth Celion Dion and what I pay to reach out to hold M and hear her sigh and snuggle at 3am when the rest of my world seems to be crashing down.
Labels: beijing hookers, chinese prostitutes, life in china, lonely in china
