A Saigon girl

A Saigon girl's New York anatomy lesson

"I have to massage seven clients like you every day," said Vietnamese escort Lin, as she applied a hot towel to the back of my neck, the silver bracelet on her wrist making the sound of wind chimes from the Mekong Delta. "Germans always store pressure under their shoulder blades, like an unexploded Berlin Wall hidden in their ribs."

Her workbench was filled with worn-out appointment books, with pencil-crossed periods denser than Wall Street trading days. "Last week, there was a hedge fund manager," she said, pressing her thumb against my third lumbar vertebra, "whose nodules on his back were arranged like a Dow Jones index candlestick chart."

As eucalyptus essential oil seeped into her pores, she talked about the massage school in her hometown of Hanoi: "We used banana leaves as human models when we studied anatomy, but now we can feel whether the client drank whiskey or tequila last night." She pressed her knee against my sacrum and suddenly asked: "Do you know what the most uniform organ of Manhattan elites is? It is the stiff masseter muscle - even their moans have the rhythm of the Nasdaq opening."

"Don't you mind male customers?" I asked in a muffled voice with my face buried in the breathing hole.

"I'm more afraid of Silicon Valley geeks than Wall Street wolves," she applied peppermint cream to my temples, "those people always demand algorithmic precision to measure muscle relaxation." The silver bracelet rang again, "but engineers like you are the easiest to deal with - your body is as honest as a Siemens machine tool."

When leaving, I caught a glimpse of the new Russian name in her appointment book. Lin was mixing Vietnamese coffee into the essential oil bottle: "The next guest needs to be refreshed. His wife just discovered the surveillance camera in the Fifth Avenue apartment."

Swabian accent in the third lumbar vertebra

When Lin's nails scratched the back of the German customer Klaus, she suddenly switched to counting in German: "Eins...Zwei..." She found that the texture of the trapezius muscle of this Stuttgart automotive engineer was surprisingly similar to the gear arrangement of the Porsche gearbox. "You calibrate your body like a precision instrument?" She dripped peppermint essential oil on his occipital hairline, "but pain can't be standardized like bolt torque."

Klaus asked her to apply acupressure according to the ISO 1940 balance standard: "Please vibrate at a frequency of 110 times per minute, with an amplitude of 3 mm." Lin placed a hot stone on his sacrum: "In the Mekong Delta, we treat blacksmiths and measure the temperature with the palm of our hands - your lumbar intervertebral space is now 52 degrees Celsius, equivalent to asphalt road in Saigon during the rainy season."

When Klaus complained that the amount of essential oil was not precise enough, Lin suddenly took out a vernier caliper: "Do you want to measure the displacement of your shoulder blade? A Munich architect asked for the same thing last month." She deliberately poured out 0.5 ml of ylang-ylang essential oil and hovered: "Look, this is the visual tolerance zone that you Germans love the most."

The most dramatic moment happened in the reflexology area of ​​the soles of the feet. When Lin pressed his liver reflexology area with a teak stick, Klaus suddenly talked about his childhood in the Swabian dialect. "Sure enough," she said, swinging a silver bracelet soaked in cedar oil, "Germans' homesickness is hidden under the third metatarsal bone of their right foot."