The Reservoir in the Bathhouse

In the shower today, for no apparent reason, I crossed my hands against my chest and made a tiny “reservoir” between my arms and body. Water ran down my face, chin and shoulders and collected there until there was no room left. Then I opened my arms and the whole pool fell to the floor at once with a loud splash.

That splash pulled me out of my daydream. I realized that I had not played with water like this for many years. The last time was probably before I became an adult.

Before the turn of the millennium, Xining was far less green and well watered than it is today. The wind often carried dust, rain was scarce, and many homes still had no private bathroom. Taking a shower, something that now seems effortless, required more thought then.

That made the city’s public bathhouses important. The bus stop nearest my home was called Xining Bathhouse. For years, the name struck me as entirely ordinary, as though the stop had always been meant to be called that. Looking back, cities have memories of their own. A bathhouse stood there, people came and went to wash away the dust, and in time even the bus-stop sign remembered it. The bathhouse eventually disappeared, but the name remained. People still wait for buses and get off there every day, though they may no longer know that a real bathhouse once stood nearby.

As far as I remember, I went to Xining Bathhouse only once. What stayed with me was its large soaking pool. When you are small, everything looks enormous. To me, that pool was almost a swimming pool, deep and broad, with steam rising from the water. The adults would never have let me treat it as one, of course. Whether it was clean was something only grown-ups worried about. I thought only of how large it was, as though I might swim a very long way.

Soaking in a pool was a small luxury. For an ordinary bath, we usually went to a cheaper public bathhouse. There was no great pool, only rows of shower heads. A child who did not particularly enjoy washing had to invent other ways of making it interesting.

At most, we visited the bathhouse three or four times a year. When the weather was hot, after exercise, or when a dust storm had left us coated in grit, we heated water at home instead. Small children could sit and soak in a large basin. Older children and adults had to make do with a towel. Because a visit was unusual, bathing did not feel like an everyday task. It felt like an occasion that required proper preparation.

My mother packed clean clothes and slippers into separate plastic bags. Towels, an exfoliating mitt, shampoo and soap went into a plastic basket reserved for the bathhouse. The basket came into the washing area with us. Finally, everything was placed together inside one large bag. Only then were we ready to leave.

The bathhouse we visited most often was inside the Transport Technical School on Wusi Street. It occupied a two-story brick building in a corner of the school’s athletic field. The boiler room was downstairs, and that was where you paid. If you had not brought a padlock for the locker, you paid extra to rent one. The baths were upstairs. The men’s side was divided into a changing area and a shower room. You locked your clothes away, changed into slippers, picked up the bath basket and went inside. Only then did the bath truly begin.

Steam met you the moment you entered. In winter, the vapor was even thicker, turning everything white. It really did feel a little like entering another realm. Public bathhouses in northern China were large open rooms without so much as a partition. When you are small, the room itself seems vast. In memory, that bathhouse is almost an auditorium, with taps and shower heads lining every wall and water rushing everywhere. Now and then someone spoke, their voice striking the walls of the empty room and returning from far away, like something heard in a dream.

I did not like bathing very much. Perhaps children’s eyes are somehow larger, because water always seemed to find its way into mine. If shampoo foam came with it, the sting was worse. And a bath was never over quickly. Since we came so rarely, it seemed necessary to wash thoroughly. There were rounds of rinsing, scrubbing, rinsing again, soaping, and more scrubbing.

I was small and impatient, and always finished before my father. But I could not leave on my own while he was still washing, so I had to wait beneath the shower. Wait long enough and I would inevitably find something to do.

My favorite game was the one I found myself playing again today: crossing my hands tightly against my chest to build a little reservoir. I waited until it filled, then suddenly opened my arms and let the water fall to the floor with a splash.

I adjusted the angle of my arms again and again, trying to make the dam high without allowing it to leak. Then I carefully compared the sound each load of water made when it struck the floor. In general, more water meant a louder sound, though the rule did not always hold. Testing the relationship between the amount of water and the noise it made became one of my favorite ways to pass the time.

Another favorite game was pretending to be different characters with a towel. When you are small, objects are large. An ordinary towel wrapped around my waist became a little skirt. Standing beneath the shower with hot water pouring over my head and face, I imagined myself as Tarzan in a tropical downpour. If I had recently watched a few episodes of Journey to the West during the summer holidays, the towel instantly became a tiger-skin skirt and I became the mighty Monkey King. Thrown behind me, with two corners resting on my shoulders and the rest hanging down my back, it became a cape. Then I was Superman, ready to punish evil and defend the innocent.

My other amusement was adjusting the hot and cold water. Those showers were different from today’s. Hot and cold water arrived through separate pipes, each with its own valve, and mixed only at the shower head. Turn the left valve and the water grew hotter; turn the right one and it cooled. Too far one way and it scalded, too far the other and it froze. Too much pressure made my head hurt.

So I stood there experimenting again and again, as seriously as though I were conducting important scientific research. When I finally found the exact position where the water was neither hot nor cold and the pressure was just right, I felt like Newton discovering gravity.

For all the fun I found in the shower, I always dreaded stepping out into the changing room. Xining was cooler then. Even in summer, the temperature rarely reached thirty degrees. Stepping out of hot water with my skin still wet, I shivered the moment I entered the changing room. Winter was worse. There was a coal stove for heating, but its warmth never seemed to do much. Before I could even dry myself, I would already be trembling and sneezing.

Getting dressed afterwards was hard work, especially in winter. Long johns were the worst. My skin was not yet completely dry, but the fabric had to be pulled over my legs, creating a resistance that seemed to defy the laws of physics. After the hot water, I was limp and tired and wanted nothing to do with it, but there was no alternative. I put the layers on one by one. Once I had finally put on all my heavy clothes, stuffed the dirty ones into the bag, and checked the locker for anything left behind, we could go home.

Later, bathing became as ordinary as eating or sleeping. Hot water was always available. Bathhouses no longer resembled auditoriums, and no one waited outside a boiler room to collect money for a padlock. Yet sometimes, beneath the shower, I still cross my hands without thinking and hold a tiny reservoir against my chest, just as I did then.

The water fills, falls, and makes the same short splash.

The sound lasts only a moment, but it seems to come from very far away. It brings back the boy who feared shampoo in his eyes and hated putting on long johns, yet built reservoirs beneath the shower, played at being the Monkey King and studied the ratio of hot water to cold. He invented nothing, but somehow seemed to know a great many secrets.

He was both a hero and a scientist.