Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Foot Massage. . .
But Were Afraid To Ask
Today, I’d like about something near and dear to my heart (and feet!), foot massage in Dongguan.
Even before I came to China, I’d read how great a Chinese-style foot massage could be. When I arrived, it turned out that my first apartment in Dongcheng Zhong Xin was just above a foot massage place. The tales I’d read turned out to be pale reflections of how great a properly done foot massage can be.
Foot Massage Chairs
For those who haven’t ever had the pleasure, let me lay out the standard procedure for a 1 hour massage. A foot massage doesn’t start on the feet. Instead, your feet get soaked while the pretty massage girl works on your back, shoulders, neck, scalp (usually optional), and arms. Then your feet get an amazing work over, followed by your legs (and nearly all the time followed by a suggestion to stay another hour).
C’mon Baby, Make It Hurt So Good
If you get a reasonably strong massage girl, some parts of the massage can border on a beating. If you’ve got masochistic tendencies (confession time – I love being beaten by pretty massage girls 
), this only makes it better. I generally consider a few bruises to be souvenirs of an excellent foot massage.
If you are a bit less into pain, nearly all the girls will try to ask if it hurts. Just yell “tong” (painful) and she’ll back down. I make it a point to always say “bu tong” (which I have discovered means “please pretend I’m not screaming in pain because it hurts soooo good“). The reason is two-fold. First, as mentioned, I’m a bit of a masochist. Second, many massage girls will shift from a strong massage to an incredibly weak massage if you give in even once. My Mandarin is insufficient to explain that just because she found one painful spot doesn’t mean she should let up elsewhere, so I’ve gotten very good at not giving any sign of pain.
A pretty foot massage girl about to go after my feet
If you want to add a bit of surrealism to your massage, set the TV channel in the massage room to one of those WWII/Anti-Japanese war TV shows. Sooner or later, there will be an interrogation scene. I took my wife and her parents out for foot massage a few times. Once. my mother-in-law picked one of those shows. The timing was perfect – the occasional yelps from my wife when her girl hit a nerve on one of her feet combined with the sounds of some innocent person being interrogated coincided well with the pain I was getting as my feet were being worked over.
This connects to another thing I love about China. In the US, paying a pretty girl to beat me is generally viewed as a bad thing. In China, going out with family and/or friends and paying pretty girls to administer a beautiful mix of pleasure and pain is considered perfectly normal. 
There’s another spectacular feature offered in some foot massage places. If you stay for a second hour, some of the girls will walk on your back. If you’ve never had this done, you might worry about the amount of pressure being too much for your back to handle. Unless you are particularly delicate, don’t worry. Not all pretty massage girls fall into the petite category. I’ve had more than one of the bigger girls dance on my back. Some have even gone from just using their feet to going up on their toes without causing me any problems.
Prices and Times
A typical massage is an hour, but you need to check the definition of hour. At many places, it’s 70 to 80 minutes. In others, it can be as short as 50 minutes. In general, unless there’s a significant delay in the start time, the clock starts when you enter the room and usually ends about 5 minutes early. The reason for this is that at most places, the pretty massage girl collects the money, takes it to the clerk, and (hopefully) brings you back your change.
My personal suggestion. If it’s a girl you haven’t tried before, go for 1 hour. You can always extend for a second (or third!) later. This way, if the massage isn’t good (this does happen from time to time), you can bail after the first hour. Another reason is that sometimes if you say 2 hours up front, all you get is the standard massage stretched over twice the time. If you add that second hour, quite a few girls are skilled at back walking or else you can point out any areas that need extra work. My job has me sitting in front of a computer all day, so I like to get extra work done on my neck and shoulders as well as my lower back.
For quite some time, the price was 40-50 per hour at many places and 70-80 RMB an hour at the upper-end places. Over the last few years, the prices across the board at the places I go to have all moved into the 70-80 per hour range (and one recently jumped to 88 kuai per hour). A few places will have “special” rates of 35-50 listed. These almost always fall into one of 2 categories. The first is an “intro” massage, which is only about 40 minutes where the pretty massage girl will spend much of the massage time trying to get you to extend for another hour (which will cost a lot more). The second is a bait and switch deal. The rate is valid, but only certain girls work at that rate and there’s NEVER one available. (Sort of like those hotels in the US with rooms “from” $25 per night – there’s only one $25 room and it’s already taken.) The only reliable discounted rate foot massages are from a few places that offer lower rates before 6 pm. So far, I haven’t found one of these in the DongCheng area, but know of a couple in Liaobu.
Many places offer higher cost services starting at about 110 RMB per hour and going up from there. Sometimes this can add some time to the “hour” or else include options like fire cupping (on feet only, this can be part of the initial hour at a few places) or the very colorful (and modestly painful) back scraping. If you are a massage fanatic like me, start with the basic 70-80 package on your first visit. If you like the place, test out the upgrade options on a later visit.
Squid Attack? No, I got fire cupped during a foot massage 🙂
Back scraping – more masochistic fun at a foot massage place
Each pretty massage girl usually wears a badge with her employee number. Sometimes they don’t and you have to ask. Once you find a really good one, get that number and you can ask for her. If she speaks enough English or you speak enough Chinese, get her phone number, QQ number, or WeChat contact so you can make an appointment. Otherwise, you get to play what I call “girl roulette”. Happily for me, the majority of the girls do a really good job.
A Ticklish Question
Some people with more sensitive feet may avoid foot massage because of a fear of being tickled. 
In practice, this rarely happens. Tickling generally requires lightly brushing across the sole of the foot. A proper foot massage involves firm and near continuous contact with the sole of the foot. Out of the hundreds of foot massages I’ve had, I’ve only had my feet slightly tickled by accident 2 or 3 times.
Comparing foot massage places
I’ve got 4 main places I visit in Dongcheng and occasionally visit a few others in both Dongcheng and Liaobu. The real trick is not to focus on the facilities, but to find some massage girls who know what they are doing. I’ve had great massages and very bad massages at every one of these places. How good or bad a foot massage is really come comes down to the strength and skill of the individual massage girl.
Foot Massage Chairs at Athena
My personal pick as the nicest facilities of a foot massage place in DongCheng is Athena Foot Massage at the Pullman Hotel. Unfortunately, it also has the most expensive base price per hour. The rooms are very clean and the TV offers several English and other non-Chinese language channels in addition to the usual mix of Mandarin and Cantonese channels. The advantage of putting the TV onto something like CNN or BBC is that your massage girl is far less likely to be distracted by it. The chairs are also a bit newer and more comfortable than some of the other places. Many of the rooms have balconies, so you can open the curtains and sliding doors when the weather is nice. The air conditioning is also controlled from inside the room (no need to summon a waiter with a remote for the AC).
Note: An altered version of this ran in the November Issue of HERE magazine (HereDG.com). Not only was it trimmed down for space and inadequately illustrated, the editor decided to give a different title. For some inexplicable reason, he came up with the impressively bad title of “Masseuse for a Monsier“. This required me to try to explain the title every time I showed it to a Chinese friend, no matter how good that person’s English was. He also tried hard to screw up the subheadings. He wanted to replace “A Ticklish Question” with the meaningless “Tickle Town“, but I managed to talk him out of that abysmal decision. When questioned later, the editor said that he considers it standard policy to automatically disregard any titles provided by authors, since “writers having nothing to do with the headlines,” He also claimed that as a general rule, writers do not get their original titles on their work in any other publication. He really seemed to believe that making up bad titles to replace perfectly good titles was not only a default in all publications, but that it was a critical part of his job. I might believe this explanation is the case of newspapers, but consider such a claim of automatic deletion of author-provided titles being standard for all magazines to severely stretch the boundaries of belief (as well as common sense). Reading some commentary from some of the writers who I greatly admire does reveal cases of title changes (some good, some bad, not one as pathetic as the one my article got saddled with) by magazine editors, but also shows many examples of the original author’s title being retained. I suggest reading “The Early Asimov” to see which stories editors changed the titles of vs. how many they left untouched – all long before he was famous. The version of my work published on this page has the CORRECT original title and is a slightly expanded version of the article as I first wrote it.
