The thing is, my friends asked me if I wanted to get cupping therapy before the spa session began. We were getting a full-body massage, and I wanted to take advantage of everything included in our package. When they said it was the thing where they put glass suction cups on your back, I thought, no big deal, I think I’ve seen that in a Chinese movie. Yay for new experiences. This is where I went wrong.
Anytime people ask you if you are okay with doing something that you are ignorant to, but understand to be harmless, beware. What is really happening is that they know that you think you know what you don’t know. This is the story of what started off as a friendly trip to your local posh Chinese spa and ended in me looking like I contracted some Clifford the Big Red Dog made-up back disease…
Cupping therapy came after the full body massage. Shirt off and face down on my cushioned table, I was a bit curious, so I peeked up to check out how this was going to work. My masseuse had one wide-rimmed glass suction cup in one hand. Expected. She had a cigarette lighter in the other hand. Unexpected. Little did I know that she would light the lighter in each glass cup before smacking them up and down my back to create the most UNCOMFORTABLE suction ever. There were like 10 of them, and as soon as my masseuse put one on, I knew I hated it. HATED IT. What to do? Option one, suck it up (pun intended). Option two, be a foreigner wimp and ask to take it off. “Excuse me!” I said in Chinese after she started walking towards the door.
I chose to be a wimp, but it backfired: by “take this off,” she thought I meant to take one off instead of all of them. She swiped off one of the cups, flapped a white towel over my glass-cupped back, and walked away so quickly I couldn’t recover fast enough from my disbelief to call her back. The glass cups were so close together & sucked so hard that I had to take shallow breaths for the full 5+ minutes of “treatment” because I couldn’t move my chest up & down enough to take deeper breaths. It was trauma on top of the fact that this woman had just given me the most stressful & intense full body massage I’d ever had (this was only my 2nd one). She kneaded my thigh and butt muscles with her feet, lying back-to-back on top of me, she pulled my arms backwards towards the sky, etcetera, etcetera. If I may speak in the 3rd person, cupping therapy was the glass that broke Kelicia’s back.
I did mental cartwheels when she came to retrieve her weapons of mass construction (i.e. the perfectly round purple bruises on my back). Many people get cupping therapy to help with circulation or minor ailments because it brings blood to the surface of your skin. If it circulated anything in me, it was fear, because after I went home just to wake up the next day and realize that I was still purple spotted, I was panicking, praying, and showing my Chinese instructors, asking if they thought my sore speckled back would ever return to normal. I was sore for at least 3-4 days. The bruises didn’t go away until almost a week later. I promised everyone willing to listen that it was the first and last time I’d be trying cupping therapy.
When I say that for the first couple of days I was full of worry and regret that I would always have a trace of purple spotting, I’m not joking. I was praying to God in earnest. But all of this could have been avoided if I would have hearkened back to the book of Proverbs that says “Wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding,” (Proverbs 4:7, NIV). I’m open to trying a lot of new things. I thoroughly enjoy first-hand cultural experiences, but I absolutely did not have a good understanding of what I was getting myself into on that day. So if you’re traveling, try to experience as much as you can! But I’d just advise that you seek God’s wisdom first, or you too might end up panicked, purple, and in pain.
Dear Lord,
Please help me through this vacation.
Love,
Kelicia
About This Series:
Every post is based on my true life experiences while living in Harbin and Tianjin, China during my Fulbright grant year in 2014-2015. I’m highlighting the happy, the hilarious, and the ‘help me!’ moments of my experience from an uniquely Christian perspective. I’m combining the stories with the scriptures, and I hope that you stick along for the journey!
About the Author:
Kelicia Hollis is Detroit-born, Arkansas-raised writer,
speaker and educator. She completed her B.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia
University, her M.A. in Higher Education from the University of Michigan.
Hollis, a 2014-2015 Fulbright Scholar, is currently President and CEO of
Polyglot International Ventures Inc. in Little Rock, a foreign language
services firm. Learn more at www.polyglotnation.com,
and connect with her at www.keliciahollis.com.
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Interested
in a graduate study abroad?
For more
information about the Fulbright Grant Opportunities and how to apply, visit http://eca.state.gov/fulbright/fulbright-programs
For more
opportunities for funded graduate study & research abroad, check out this
article from Diversity Abroad: http://www.diversityabroad.com/guides/study-and-research-fellowships/study-and-research-fellowships
