As the festive season draws to its peak, all kinds of way-out things are happening. Chinese New Year, or the Spring Festival — the country’s biggest celebration — begins on February 18. Already, dinner tables costing the earth are being booked. This is not just a time for family reunions, but also for bribing those who matter big time. And what better way to do so than to take the bosses out to a sushi restaurant where you eat off a naked young woman?
This Japanese practice has caught on in a big way in America. In London, diamond jewellery is sometimes displayed at exclusive parties on naked young women. In China, three years back, one restaurant in Kunming, a tourist city, began serving sushi on two university students at 1,000 yuan a plate. After local outrage, the authorities banned it. Last week, graphic flyers were sent out by a restaurant in a mining province in the north-east, advertising a naked sushi banquet at 4,600 yuan for six diners, with free alcohol, as a new year novelty. The authorities fined it 50,000 yuan for “false advertising” after the proprietor claimed his waiters had sent out the flyers on their own.
There is another novel package now on sale in China: “bed-maids”. Housemaids — anathema in the Communist days — are quite common nowadays with working and even non-working couples. As in India, you see them walking behind their mistress, loaded with vegetable bags, taking the dog out to pee, picking up the child from school and carrying her school bag, sweeping the compound.
Touch me not
The Communist Party’s women’s organization — the only women’s organization allowed to function — even recommends this as a fit profession for female migrants who come to cities for jobs. You now have training courses for such housemaids, aimed at enabling Chinese girls to compete with Filipino housemaids abroad. The employment situation has forced even university graduates to enrol as housemaids till they find a suitable job.
A month ago, an agency in Shaanxi province, advertised housemaids with additional qualifications: they could cook, clean and share their employer’s bed. Naturally, their salary too was higher than their counterparts’ — 2,000 yuan, compared to the latter’s 500-1,000 yuan. Again, there was no outrage from official quarters. One columnist even scoffed at the suggestion made by shocked citizens that the police must monitor employer-maid relations. How different is a bed-maid, asked the columnist, from the practice of ernai, or second wife, indulged in by most wealthy men? And don’t we ignore the rampant prostitution so prevalent in big cities, he asked? Maids needed to be aware of this “occupational hazard” and trained to handle it, he wrote, adding that women’s organizations must step in whenever asked to.
Was it just fifty years ago that a violent revolution swept away the practice of concubines and bound feet, communes took over the drudgery of household work, and women were encouraged to leave home and work? Not surprisingly, the other side of this sexual exchange is the old Asian conservative attitude to sex. Inspired by Americans offering hugs in new York, some young people decided to do the same in Beijing, as an antidote to the growing urban alienation in the capital. They got few takers. Most passers-by frowned from a safe distance; the few who did take up the offer, did so with members of the same sex. “We are not a touchy-feely people,’’ commented one columnist, though he admitted that it had always been considered acceptable for youngsters of the same sex to hold each other’s hands.
Today, the sight of young couples cuddling all over China does not merit a second glance. But physical contact with a stranger? Not unless it is paid for.
