The taxi rolled down Shanghai Lu as our conversation meandered on. The three of us had been in China long enough to consider ourselves fairly sophisticated in the ways of how things happen here and passing a legit massage parlor, the topic now veered towards the illegit kind and one of our new colleagues – an amiable, laid back man in his fifties.

“Well, he was telling me how he had a full massage and a cupping for only fifty kuai.”
“What’s a cupping?”
“I don’t know, it must be some slang word…you know…”
“You mean like ‘half boom-boom’? That sort of thing?”
“Yeah, I’m thinking that it’s some sort of happy ending kind of thing…you know…”
“Wow, man…he just got here.”
“I think he knows more Chinese than he lets on…”

We all nodded knowingly and said no more. Soon, we were there.

There was my favorite club in Nanjing, a little music bar called the Polar 77. I hadn’t been there in a long time and was looking forward to it. In the back of the noisy little place, we met up with a larger than expected crowd of our colleagues, among them the main topic of our taxi conversation. Before too long, we had broken off into different subgroups and, in so doing, I ended up sitting across from this fellow playing the local variation of liar’s dice. As we played, rattling the bones and trying to outwit each other, the earlier conversation surged to the forefront of my mind. In liar’s dice, as in many situations, I try to read people – figure out where they’re at, so to speak. But now I simply couldn’t. All I could think of when I peered over my cup was, “Jesus. I really have to hand it to him. He just shows up, manages to sniff out a massage parlor, gets a cupping – whatever the hell that is – and then tells everyone about it afterwards. That takes a special kind of something…not necessarily bad or good…but something.” It just didn’t seem to fit. I’d had some conversations with the man before and no…no…it just didn’t seem to fit at all. I started losing. All very pleasant…just distracted. And losing. I finally excused myself from our game – still mildly befuddled and strangely impressed.

A few days later, I was with one of my friends who had been with me that night.

“Hey. Do you remember that whole cupping thing?”
“Yeah, sure. The massage parlor. The taxi.”
“I was talking to somebody who was talking to him about it…”
“Really? Still talking about it?”
“Yeah. Apparently, cupping is when they put those little heat cups on your back…”

I am, in fact, familiar with this procedure, a very common, respected part of traditional Chinese medicine. I once even had it proposed to me at the very same massage parlor we had been driving by, not so much because it was therapeutic, but because I had a particularly lazy masseuse who didn’t feel like doing any more work that day.

Sometimes, I can sophisticate myself right into the back of the turnip truck.

Ah, well. C’est la vie.