Bathhouses, factories, and chimneys are some of the most important products of the northeast in the last century. But after a dramatic shift in the social structure, both factories and chimneys were in decline, and for many Northeasterners, the bathhouse seemed to be the best empathizer. The bathhouse is both an amusement and a taste of solace.
Text | Zhong Yixuan
Edit | Zhou Wei
Operational | Tsukimi
From Beijing to Shenyang to scrub a bath
"Go to Shenyang and take a bath." When I first received this topic, as a Fujianese, a southerner who had never stepped into a bathhouse, I was both scared and excited.
Fear, naturally, is afraid of rubbing "bald skin". I have long heard that the northeast bathing includes a total of 18 links of "brewing and steaming, eating, drinking, scraping tea, pinching and wearing tent shoes", and when you go to the northeast, life is not gray any time, which is incomplete.
The excitement is because in the narration of my friends in the northeast around me, bathing is also the most grand entertainment activity in their daily life, and relatives visiting the door, business banquets, and classmate gatherings can be arranged in the bathing center. Of course, the bathing center here has long been not the appearance of the public bath, but has completed multiple rounds of evolution, luxurious comparable to a five-star hotel, which is all-encompassing, concentrated in the cinema, KTV, chess and card room, restaurant, game hall, children's paradise, some baths can actually make the teppanyaki the first in the city, and some may even have bookstores and lecture salons, not only to wash away the dirt on the flesh, but also to get spiritual baptism, which for me is simply unimaginable.
So, which city is the best place to go? I had to do a little bit of homework.
I am reminded of the saying that circulates: the whole country bath looks at the northeast, and the northeast bath looks at Shenyang. According to the Meituan App's "2020 Double Eleven Big Data", Shenyang ranked first in the number of national bath consumption orders on Double Eleven. Some people say that Shenyang is the Jerusalem of the bathing world, and it is Shenyang, which will further carry forward the bathing culture in Northeast China.
So I quickly bought a ticket from Beijing to Shenyang.
In the taxi in Shenyang, I asked the driver to recommend a famous bathhouse, and he smiled: "You came to Shenyang, you can be regarded as the right one." The car drove past a large, brightly lit bathing center, and the master pointed to it. I looked at the bathhouse, a luxurious wooden Japanese building, shrouded in warm yellow lights, like a five-star hotel. Next to the towering chimney, constantly spitting out smoke. From a distance, this bathhouse resembles the "soup house" run by Grandma Tang in "Spirited Away".
In this rather high-end Internet red bathing center to experience the Northeast bath, I naturally could not pull the crotch, immediately purchased a "bath + red wine rub + single buffet dinner" package worth 308 yuan.
In fact, in the northeast, bathing itself is not very expensive. Even if it is a high-end bathing center, the single bath ticket ranges from 45 yuan to 99 yuan. If you can afford not to enjoy other services, the ticket is your entire expense. Theoretically, you could spend the whole day in a bathing center, where it is said that someone would wash and eat, eat and sleep, wake up and wash again.
▲ Photo / Screenshot of "I'm Fine In Other Places"
There are still some more primitive public baths, as long as 10 yuan, you can have a chance to bathe with many same-sex baths. However, the service and quality of the public bath will of course be inferior to that of the mid-to-high-end bathing center. In a comment below a mass bath, someone complained: "Young people must not come, they can't stand it." ”
However, all my excitement was dissipated in the matter of undressing.
“2196！” The front desk handed me the orange bracelet, which was my pass. "A female guest on the second floor!" - I feel a little bit like that.
After going to the women's guest room on the second floor, the waiter guided me to the locker: "Take off your clothes and put them here." ”
Inside the storage room, a pair of cousins had just arrived, ready to undress. "Do I want to strip them all?" I asked. The girl's sister replied to me: "Yes. ”
I was a little incredulous. Although only female guests are allowed to enter and exit, the actual structure resembles a vertical locker in front of a supermarket, and people passing through the aisle can see it unobstructed.
The older girl was called Xiao Jie, and the younger girl was called Li Qing, and I decided to mix with them. After I had just taken off my down jacket, I turned to Xiao Jie and asked, "Can I go in and undress again?" She had taken off all her clothes. I immediately turned my head, my face a little hot. Xiao Jie told me, "No, there is no place for you to put your clothes." ”
"Are you a Southerner?" she asked. This sentence will also be the most I will hear the next day.
Walking into the hall, the fat and thin women floated calmly in the pool, leaning on the rest chairs, walking in the aisles. I was undressed, weaving through a bunch of unclothed crowds, looking around, looking down. My eyes had begun to drift, and what was even more painful was that my hands were nowhere to be placed—whether to cover them or not to cover them.
Finally, a tough walk to the shower area. The shower area is a semi-open compartment, and in addition to facing the opposite compartment, it avoids a lot of eyes. Luckily, I found a dead end and couldn't see me from the outside. It took Li Qing a while to find me, came to me and said, "Don't put on shower gel, but you can put soap on it." "I was embarrassed to tell her that Southerners bathed fast, and that the shower gel on my body had already flushed into the sewers. But in the eyes of northeasterners, I can only be regarded as a shower.
According to Li Qing, the shower gel is too lubricating, and the soap can increase the friction, and all of this is for the sake of "good ash" when the bath is waiting.
▲ The floor distribution of the bathhouse. Photo / Zhong Yixuan
Rare lower gray southerners
Some people say that it is not enough to talk about the northeast bath without experiencing a rub into the soul, so much so that I have been asking Xiao Jie when she can scrub the bath. She was brushing her teeth and told me incoherently that before scrubbing, I must first soak for a while, and I must "soak thoroughly" - this is a state where the skin is on the verge of bubble wrinkles, "the skin should be red, hot, it is best to rub some ash myself." Finally, Xiao Jie glanced at me and gave the order: "Go to the bath."
Generally speaking, the pools of the northeast bathhouse have different temperatures: one is a cool pool, more than 20 degrees; one is an ordinary pool, about 40 degrees; and the other is a hot pool, more than 48 degrees. The real northeast old cannons are soaked in pools above 48 degrees, and it is obvious that I can only withstand the temperature of ordinary pools. I leaned carefully against the edge of the pool, and the current of water pouring into the pool wall behind me was enough to suspend my body on the surface of the water.
After a round of showers and baths, my performance was quite natural by this time, and Xiao Jie repeatedly praised me, saying that I was a "very adaptable Southerner" that she had ever seen. But soon, this calmness, which was difficult to maintain with dignity, immediately disappeared.
In the scrubbing room, there was a hot and humid air, and there were about 20 scrubbing baths, which were full of female guests. The eldest sisters, wearing red underwear and underwear and red rain boots, held bath towels and circled around the bathing platform. "2196 Little Beauty, come here." After hearing the call, I lay down slowly. The bathhouse is only one person wide, the water-filled mat is soft and soft, and the surface is covered with a plastic film.
I was facing the ceiling and my hands were starting to have nowhere to put them again. The eldest sister brought a plastic bottle filled with red wine and squeezed me from head to toe. Putting down the bottle, she didn't say a word, put on a scrub towel and began to work on me. The granular hard brush, rubbing back and forth on my skin, is not an exaggeration to describe it as peeling. I stomped on my legs in pain: "Big sister, I'm a southerner!" ”
This kind of pain is not unbearable for me alone. In 2020, Harbin Daily published a news: "The northeast bathing master is too enthusiastic, and the southern guy is rubbed to the police." After Mr. Li from the south experienced the Northeast Bathhouse for the first time, he found that he was "rubbed" and his calf was slightly broken. Mr. Li then called the police, and the Benxi police station in Liaoning province handled the case, and the bath master finally compensated Mr. Li with 100 yuan for treatment.
But in general, this difference between the north and the south will only make the bath masters more excited. Hearing my shouting, the eldest sister was stunned, "Here comes a southerner again." She quickly put a white towel between the scrub towel and the palm of her hand, "so that it doesn't hurt." She continued to bury her head in work, and I continued to grin.
"Baby, baby." The female guest sister in the next bed shouted at me, and I did not react for a while - after all, the first time I came to Shenyang, it seemed that there was no acquaintance who could call out my baby. "You ask her to turn you over." The eldest sister of Shenyang who was in the next bed saw that I could not eat the pain and suggested that I rub it from the back first. I looked at the big sister who was rubbing the bath, and she quickly instructed me to flip my body.
Next, sprinkle red wine, rub mud, while rubbing, the eldest sister took an iron basin filled with water, rinsed the "ash" under the rubbing, and then slapped me twice, indicating that it was time to turn over and rub the other side. I turned around and cycled back and forth until it was done on all sides. The eldest sister rubbed very carefully, behind the ears, arm sockets, and finger slits. I don't know how to describe myself, but sometimes I pickle fish and chicken wings at home, and I remember that the general approach is this: kneading, turning, patting.
"Red wine rubs out ash, white vinegar rubs sterilization, milk rubs skin." The eldest sister introduced me to different materials, different rubbing methods, and different effects. I asked her what the principle was, and she couldn't say it, so I had to listen curtly.
The girl on my right side, with a layer of plastic film on her body, listened to Xiao Jie, this is called "milk bath", which will spread a layer of plastic film on the top and bottom of the human body, and sprinkle various condiments between the body and the plastic film, such as lemon juice, banana juice, cucumber juice, almond milk juice. "Milk bath is a general term, this milk includes different materials, usually arranged after the bath." At the same time as the milk bath, the big sister will also bring a full-body massage, "this is called promoting absorption."
In the scrubbing room, the sound of water and conversation intertwined with each other, and there was a lot of noise. With the duty of this business trip, I asked my eldest sister, "How did you turn the seemingly simple task of scrubbing into a craft?" Seeing that she seemed to understand, I changed the way I asked: "Big sister, how can you rub it hard?" She gave me a meaningful look, "We've all been trained not to hurt you, but also to make you go down to ashes."
After all, bathing technology has developed into a systematic and standardized vocational skill in the northeast. In 2021, the Heilongjiang Bath industry association is preparing to launch a "bathing school" in Harbin, which is the first standardized vocational skills training school in the province and even the country specifically for bathing workers.
Under the professional service of the eldest sister, I did go to ashes. "Don't say, it's rare for southerners to get out of ashes like you." The eldest sister called out "rare". I was a big girl, described by her as such, and did not know which emotion to respond to her, whether it was honorable or shameful. In the end, only one sentence came out: "I take a bath every day." ”
Later, Xiao Jie said to me, and her elder sister who was scrubbing asked her: "Is this friend of yours a southerner?" Xiao Jie was a little shocked, and the eldest sister smiled mysteriously and pointed to my back, "See her bath towel wrapped so tightly."
▲ Photo / Chess Soul
The spiritual paradise of the northeasterners
While sitting in the rest hall with the Little Jie sisters, we chatted idly about the status of the northeast bath. Xiao Jie said that the northeast bath, for the northeast people, and eating and sleeping, is "a kind of daily life", any northeast people who come to the bathing center, can spend a full 24 hours here, "if it is not allowed by the epidemic, I will spend the night here today."
In the Northeast Bathing Center, you can indeed see all kinds of daily life - the Shenyang big sister who calls me baby, while rubbing the bath, talks to her daughter about her grandson's Go class; a young mother, leading her daughter from elementary school, shuttles through the corridor of the shower room and "takes you to a high-end bathhouse to play"; on the recliner in the rest hall, the big brother of about forty years old presses his feet while holding a business meeting on the phone; and there are two people who are engaged in the Internet, discussing the meta-universe.
Northeasterners bathe all year round. According to the "2019 Meituan-Dianping Bath Industry Report", in northern cities such as Dalian, Tianjin, Shenyang, Harbin, changchun and so on, the annual bathing consumption is relatively average, and the minimum consumption in the peak season is only 10% more than that in the off-season. In some southern cities, the consumption in the peak season can reach up to 10 times that of the off-season.
Xiao Jie gave me an example, at the beginning of 2020, as soon as the epidemic in Shenyang was unsealed, the bathhouse was immediately overcrowded, and Xiao Jie's mother and grandmother ran to the bathing center with the whole family, "There are too many people to be incredible, I really can't stand it, and it feels too dirty not to take a bath for a month."
Some people joke that China has three major centers: the political center of Beijing, the economic center of Shanghai, and the bathing center of Northeast China. Meituan-Dianping industry report shows that only 10% of the country's bathing centers cover an area of more than 5,000 square meters, while more than half of the top bathing centers in the northeast have reached this standard, and the largest area is even more than 100,000 square meters, and the styles are different, such as Japanese Japanese style, Hallyu style, Southeast Asian wind, and even INS wind.
After saying goodbye to the Little Jie sisters, I began a leisure trip, eating a seafood buffet first and then going to the movies. In the theater, the dim environment, coupled with the relaxed body after the bath, the surrounding purring was everywhere, and I did not hold back and fell into a deep sleep. When I woke up, on the recliner next to me, an elder brother was watching a movie.
▲ The theater in the bathhouse is full of snoring. Photo / Zhong Yixuan
I tentatively asked my eldest brother, "Did you come with your family?" He suddenly smiled and said to me: "Who comes to the bathing center and does not want to relax, if it is OKAY with his girlfriend, how can he relax with his wife?" "He called himself Brother Wang and told me that as soon as he was born, he would take a bath in the bathhouse.
Scrubbing is the spiritual belief of northeasterners. Liao Xinzhong, a self-media person, said in an article: "Some places in China focus on making friends with wine, and some places like to meet friends with tea, so in the northeast, they pay attention to treating friends with baths." If there's anything to do, take a shower first. We can have a day to stay in the bath center to cultivate feelings and pluck out our lungs. ”
Brother Wang agreed with this very much, and he told me that a few years ago, there was a particularly difficult southern customer, who saw it many times and did not let go, and as a result, he pulled the other party to the bathhouse, and the negotiation was completed that night. "It was upstairs in this rest hall." He smiled mysteriously at me, "It may be that after the frank meeting, the customer trusted me." ”
In the small talk, Brother Wang lamented to me about the loss of population in the northeast. His daughter graduated from college for three years, directly refused Brother Wang's retention, and was determined to stay in Shanghai to develop. "How could you say I wouldn't want her to stay here?" But the young people were gone, and I couldn't stop her. ”
As a traditional old industrial base, the three northeastern provinces once had great institutional advantages, but after entering the 1990s, with the slowdown of economic growth and the decline of resource-based cities, the local population began to gradually lose. According to the seventh national census data released by the National Bureau of Statistics, from the perspective of net reduction, the phenomenon of population outflow in northeast China is the most significant, and among the top ten lists, a total of nine cities in Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning provinces have been shortlisted, accounting for 90%.
"Northeasterners are either on their way to Sanya or on their way to Beidaihe." Brother Wang said.
In the past two days in Shenyang, I have heard the most sighs about the "eldest son of the Republic". A taxi driver and I mentioned Shenyang's past status as the "eldest son", and in a regretful tone, I was startled by slapping the steering wheel with my right hand. "Alas, now that I think of Shenyang, in addition to the bath, it is a chicken rack."
Bathhouses, factories, and chimneys are some of the most important products of the northeast in the last century. But after a dramatic shift in the social structure, both factories and chimneys were in decline, and for many Northeasterners, the bathhouse seemed to be the best empathizer. The bathhouse is both an amusement and a taste of solace. The original function of the bathhouse has become insignificant, and today's bathhouse has become the spiritual paradise of the people of northeast China.
I told Brother Wang the word "empathy" and asked him if it was appropriate, "it seems to be this taste," he said. So in the bathhouse, a huge contrast arises – when you are lamenting the loss of population in the northeast, you will immediately be shocked by the crowding of the bathhouse.
As a southerner, I suddenly broke into the northeast cultural circle, I felt new, but it seemed that it was not strange. Before 5 p.m., night covered the entire northeast plain, and the bathhouse was brightly lit. I packed up and left quietly.
▲ Photo / Kamen Rider Revive
Resources:
1. "Northeasterners, the King Standing at the Top of the Chain of Chinese Bathing Contempt", Koi Youth
2. "Southerners can't imagine that the northeast bathing has completed super-evolution", Liao Xinzhong
3. "The Magic and Reality of Northeast Bathing", Blue Whale Finance
The article is the original of the daily people, and the infringement must be investigated.