The Math Professor Who Gave Me a Back Massage

Today, I went to a tiny tui na massage place that offers very cheap, no frills massages.  For those of you who don’t know, tui na (pronounced "twee naw") refers to a wide range of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) therapeutic massage and body work. There are a ton of small, simple tui na places all over New York City, usually staffed by Asian American immigrants who work extremely long hours for very little money.  To give you an idea of the pricing, a 90 minute massage at the place I go to costs only $70.  You can imagine how little the actual massage therapist is getting after the business’s cut and overhead.  
 
Anyway, I went there and got a massage from a woman who appeared in her late 40’s and extremely polished and professional.  She was dressed very nicely and looked more like a business woman than a masseuse. The massage was great and, afterwards, I asked her a little about herself.  
 
It turns out this woman was a high-level university professor of mathematics in China.  She came to the United States, like so many who hope for a better life with greater personal liberty and political freedoms.  However, she found herself lost in a system that is stacked against non-English speakers.  Because her English isn’t great, she couldn’t even get interviews for math professor positions and she ended up in this tiny tui na room, giving 90 minute massages for $70 an hour.  She didn’t tell me this in a “I feel so sorry for myself” way at all. She was happy to be here.  She was just telling her story because I kept asking her and she told it in a simple “this is the way it is” or “that’s life!” manner.  However, it was obvious she’d prefer teaching math to college students to giving massages.
 
I don’t know if any of you watch the TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale” on Hulu, based on the Margaret Atwood novel.  If you haven’t read the novel or watched the show, I highly recommend both.  In the story, far-right fundamentalist Christian extremists take over the United States and force women into subservient roles that meet their idea of “traditional values,” such as handmaids (women who were sexually “loose” before and are now used in ritual rape ceremonies to produce babies for the high ranking officers in the new country), “Martha’s” (domestic servants), and so on.  In one episode, we learn one of the Martha’s was, before the takeover, the most preeminent neonatologist in the country.  Now, she’s cooking meals and scrubbing floors – basically a slave.
 
While this woman in the massage place was telling me her story, I couldn’t help but think of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”  Here was an extremely well educated, professional woman, a university mathematics professor and, in her new country, she is relegated to giving strangers discount massages.  Atwood’s dystopian fantasy seems like it is becoming a bit too real.
 
On that note, I have seen – as I’m sure you have too - a proliferation of amateur videos posted of racist Americans engaging in classless, base racist tirades against their fellow citizens over the past few months.  Most recently, I had the displeasure of watching a racist white woman hurl disgusting vitriol at an Asian woman in a nail salon
(https://asamnews.com/2018/06/11/customer-stands-up-for-nail-salon-worker-hit-by-racist-tirade/).   
 
This also made me think of the woman in the massage place.  The trashy racist throwing vitriol shouldn’t be engaging in such abusive, low-class behavior regardless of whether the person she’s hurting is a nail salon worker or a professor of mathematics, however, it’s worth thinking about the fact that the nail salon worker, like the masseuse, probably has a story about who she is, why she immigrated here, what she gave up to do it, how she has worked and struggled, what she is capable of.  Challenges that I’m guessing the racist white woman never gave a thought to.
 
After I spoke to the woman at the massage place, I gave her some resources relating to a Chinese program I know of at CUNY in the hopes that there might be teaching positions where she could actually teach in her native tongue.  I also connected her with New York City’s free English classes, which are a great resource that, in my experience, no immigrants know about (we need to get the word out!) - https://www.nypl.org/events/classes/english and https://wespeaknyc.cityofnewyork.us/ run by the New York City Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs.
 
I write this in the hopes that those of you, like me, who feel confident and comfortable, able to communicate with ease, will remember that not everyone is as lucky and that the people who may not speak English as well as you, who are rubbing your feet and painting your nails and serving you food and sweeping your floors, are all multi-faceted human beings with stories to tell.   So, get the word out about the free classes, be respectful, don’t assume, and help when and where you can.  Why not? Why not be a good person?
 
Doing good will make you happy.  Going back to those racist tirade videos, nobody with any sense looking at those frothing racists thinks those racists are happy. They’re miserable people, perpetuating their misery on others, trying to rationalize their cruelty with stupidity. Don’t be those people.