How to Write a Poem

Try Chinese massage

My first serious practitioner Dr. Shang

stood in front of Zabars with a chair and offered

Zabars customers free back rubs knowing

we who shop at Zabars are a tense and anxious lot.

(Is the same true of Shoprite? Maybe yes.)

I sat in the chair and Shang released

the stress of everything.

He invited me to have a Chinese medical massage

at his studio in the West 90’s I became a devotee,

often eating lunch afterwards (he made specialty

dumplings) and eventually meeting his family

and he helped me and I wrote him many Shang poems

and he said massages and poems will make

us both healthy citizens and I said what do you

mean by citizens. Isn’t that a good English word said Shang.

(Here’s my New York Times piece about him:

WHEN I first saw Shang, he was standing still and apart in the Saturday morning chaos outside Zabar's. A small golden man, he wore a loose-fitting black coat and bright white sneakers that marked him as a recent arrival in this country. He gently beckoned to passers-by, suggesting that they stop at his stool for a free, 10-minute, on-the-spot massage, and I did. 

I saw others hesitate, apparently interested but uncertain because Shang was a stranger to them. They felt there was something odd about having a stranger put his hands on their necks.

But I love massage, love the idea that hands can turn tension into flow, and I have had massages all over the world, in countries like Bali and Thailand where they are a part of everyday life.

Other people's hands draw me to them. They often look like what they can do. Shang's hands looked short and strong. When I sat on his stool, I felt that strength and sureness on my neck. 

While he worked, I read his sign, a small white cardboard, neatly wrapped in transparent plastic. It was an odd advertisement in our slick neon world: "Tension? Now, NO. Mr. Shang Can Help You. Sciatica, Insomnia, Flatulence, Back Pain, Indigestion, and Many Other Bothersome Problems. Try Shang. Free Trial. Massage proven in China. Breathing. Exercise. Tai Chi in the Park. Call Shang."

I made another appointment and saw him regularly over a period of a year in his home, a small room in a cheap residential hotel on the Upper West Side.

The walls were hung with acupuncture charts and pictures of birds from China. And on his hot plate, Shang always kept a large aluminum kettle. After his powerful massages we would drink tea and he would tell me about himself, often stopping to look up the right word in a dictionary.

A 16th-generation practitioner of Chinese Tuina massage, a deep curative massage that relies on the same pressure points as acupuncture, Shang had learned his profession from his family and from a four-year course in a medical college in Shandong Province. His wife, too, practiced medical massage, but she and their children remained behind in China. He said he hoped to bring them to the United States.

I invited Shang to dinner. My husband, a film editor, had worked on a documentary on the 1989 confrontation at Tiananmen Square. We showed Shang the two-hour tape. He watched in silence, hardly moving. He asked if he could watch again. He said he could hardly believe his eyes, to see the troops shooting into crowds of students.

Some friends from his medical college were coming to New York to lecture, and Shang wanted to borrow the tape so they could see it. We agreed, and eventually the Chinese doctors watched it at a friend's house on Staten Island.

A few weeks later, Shang called us to say he had received a cassette from his wife. The Chinese police were harassing her and the children, she reported. One of the doctors who had seen my husband's tape had told a friend about it, and the friend had informed the police. The police told Shang's family that he was showing untrue films, spreading lies about China in America. 

We felt responsible, in a way, though our intentions had been innocent enough. Shang had given me the powerful benefit of all he knew about the Chinese understanding of bodies and energy. I had wanted to give him something back, something to make his own life better, but I had made it worse.

On the cassette, which Shang played for us, his wife is crying and pleading with Shang to help her leave. But bringing his family to this country is very difficult; the documents needed are hard to come by. 

It is Shang's dream that his wife will one day stand beside him on the sidewalk outside Zabar's. "She specializes in babies and children," he said. "She massages them to be tension free. I see many babies in New York who could benefit from what she knows.")