ITINERANT MASSEUSES

Those who have read my book Massage and the Writer and a subsequent post, Massage diary: Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, may recall some observations I made about massage in Vietnam which have long haunted me. In Hanoi in 2008, as I stepped out of my hotel in the city’s Old Quarter, a young woman on a motorcycle came up and said in English, “Massage? Marijuana?” My Chinese girlfriend was a few paces behind and I had to decline. And that only made me deathly curious. The woman said it in such a natural way, as if these two pleasures could only be enjoyed together. Then in Saigon in 2016 in a busy plaza in broad daylight, a stylishly dressed lady called out to me, “Massage?” Again that utterly graceful, open manner, with a big smile, as if massage was the only proper thing to do during my sojourn in the city. She didn’t come up to me directly but said it in passing. As the old proverb goes, I had to grab Opportunity by the forelocks as she has no hind locks. Once again I was with a Chinese girlfriend walking a few paces behind and had to decline.

What was I imagining could have happened? The Hanoi motorcycle girl takes me to her apartment. I’ll call her Tam, after a Vietnamese female I once had a fling with back in the U.S. Tam lives alone. It’s appropriately decked out in Baudelairean decadence, dusky opium-den atmosphere, walls lined with art and silk brocades. She pours two glasses of wine, fills a bong and lights up. The weed is not just a prop; it’s preparatory. But at this point we’re just sitting unrushed in stillness, as if she’s already forgotten about the massage.

“Do you have a philosophy of massage?” I would have asked her.

In apparent answer to that, she gets up to put on some music—Shpongle—and takes off her top. She is braless. She whips out a bag of penis envy and invites me to shroom.

“Weed’s fine this time.”

She oozes quiet intensity. I get her. She’s an SSP, a Strong-Sensation Person: all five senses always need to be engaged. Hence her vocation is psychedelic massage. With a revolving carousel of men—a few of whom turn out to have potential. It’s all beautifully choreographed and at the same time spontaneous. Next to come off are her jeans. More wine and clinking our glasses together and snatches of conversation before she gets up again to arrange towels and oil and slip off her panties. Highly individualistic, she’s completely at ease with herself, with men, and with her body: pubes and underarms are unfashionably unshaved. She helps me strip in turn and lays me face down on her bed. She sits on my lower back. Using her body weight for leverage, she begins to work my neck and shoulders with Ylang Ylang-scented coconut oil while grinding her groin into the small of my back, her hands and hips contracting together in rhythm. Dramatically amplified by THC, the erotic excitement is worth ten times whatever fee I’m paying her. I’ll be back soon to shroom with her.

Another version: she takes me to an unlit lane to smoke a joint before heading up for the massage. Before I even see the weed I’m hit over the head with something and knocked out. When I come to, I’ve been robbed of my wallet, money, cellphone, and passport. At least I wasn’t stabbed.

The reality is probably not so drastic but more mundane and banal. The weed and the massage are a choice, not a deluxe package, and if I want both we need to go to different locations, one to pick up the weed from a dealer, and the other for the massage, which is located in a starkly functional brothel with activity going on in several rooms. And the motorcycle girl is only a porter. Another, less attractive woman is assigned to me, who wants to fuck rather than massage, for fifteen minutes and for a steeper than expected fee. And she has no interest in smoking up with me.

As for the elegant Saigon lady, I honestly have no idea what sort of bizarre massage situation she would have led me to.

And now on this latest trip to Vietnam in 2025, again in Hanoi’s Old Quarter, a woman comes up to me on a motorbike with a fetching smile and says, “Can I take you somewhere?” It’s just an informal motorcycle taxi pitch (no Grab logo) with no hint of massage. But she’s nice looking, and had I not once again been with a woman trailing a few paces behind, a wife this time, I would have said, “Where would you like to take me?” And if she replied vaguely, “Where do you want to go?”, with a flourish of my hand I would have followed up with, “Can you show me a massage service better than these?” And maybe, just maybe, she would have offered to massage me herself.

Oh, if you’re wondering why I am always walking ahead of my female companions instead of side by side, there are several explanations. For one, I walk faster than most and while I try to rein myself in, it’s a constant struggle. For another, it’s a cultural practice for many Asian women, particularly the Japanese, to trail behind their men; my Chinese wife is used to this and fully at home with it. Finally, side-by-side walking is not necessarily any more logical than walking in a line. Why must we always keep pace with each other if we’re not presently engaged in conversation? Why must we attend to each other every moment, depriving ourselves of a semblance of privacy and ambulatory freedom to enjoy the scenery?

There’s a reason why during the present trip I was seldom approached for massage on the street (only once, more on which later): massage establishments have greatly proliferated in Vietnam and there’s less need for roving freelancers to solicit customers. In 2008 I saw very few massage shops in Hanoi. More were evident in Saigon in 2016, and I tried a few, but you had to chance upon them or be in the right place, such as the busy Bui Vien nightlife neighborhood. Massage prices weren’t cheap, at least in comparison to Thailand, the massage mecca for both price and quality, and it was more of a sideshow business rather than a thriving industry.

That’s all changed. In tourist areas like Hanoi’s Old Quarter and Da Nang’s beachfront community, the number of massage shops now rivals all other streetside businesses put together. It has to be seen to be believed. But quantity does not equal quality. The missed opportunities of my two former trips and the inconsistent massages I experienced on this trip inform my title. By “massage vibrations” I don’t mean groovy sixties-style vibrations but something more ambiguous: catching the right vibration to get in the groove at all. The previous trips lasted only a few days a piece. On this third trip I had a whole month to get in the groove. To make a long story short, nothing worked out quite as expected. But what did work out was all the more interesting because it was unexpected.

Rather than split our stay in different locations, we planned to spend the entire month in Da Nang, the central Vietnam seaside city previously known for its huge U.S. army base in the Vietnam War, and today for its burgeoning digital nomad population and contingents of Russian, Korean, and Indian tourists. The advantage of staying in one place is that there would be time for things to come out of the woodwork and I might develop “relationships” with a few select masseuses. The subsequent massages one receives from the same person tend to improve as mutual familiarity grows.

Flying into Hanoi, we had a day and a half before our flight to Da Nang. The one massage we tried was not a good omen. It was the same hotel I stayed at in 2008 but had since opened a spa service in the basement. A girl sat out front with a menu placard, as all streetside hotels were now doing to compete with the abundance of dedicated massage shops. Most of these shops had just a single room with a row of massage tables divided by curtains. My wife and I lay on adjacent tables, the curtain drawn between us. Our masseuses were two girls who looked to be about twenty. Their impassive, bored expressions conveyed at the outset it was not going to be a great massage. Indeed, despite paying a higher fee for stronger stroking, my masseuse lacked any semblance of pressure. My buttocks and inner thighs, always aching for touch, were both out of bounds. While doing my belly her fingers stopped at the rim of the shorts I was required to wear, whereas even the most finicky of masseuses will pull down or roll up your shorts a token inch or two to do you a bit more thoroughly.

All this was by default and thus expected. But then they did something that was most unprofessional. Probably thinking we wouldn’t mind since we were a couple, they opened the curtain separating us halfway so they could chat with each other. The curtain is there for a reason. It serves the same purpose as a private room, which is to create an inviolable space. Even couples don’t necessarily want to be massaged in full view of each other. Not to mention we’re paying them to concentrate on their customer, not on each other.

On the other hand, considering the low price of 450,000 VND (USD $17) for sixty minutes, only about half of which the masseuses would each receive as their cut, I suppose I couldn’t complain. In Da Nang, the average price was half that, 200,000-250,000 or USD $8-$10 for an hour’s oil massage—the lowest rates I had ever seen anywhere and a tenth of U.S. prices for the same, not even including the tip. Massage in Vietnam has gotten a lot cheaper due to the newly competitive environment.

These girls were clearly from the countryside. Other employment options were limited to restaurant, clothing store or assembly-line work, at comparable wages. Massage work was less strenuous perhaps, if they only had a handful of customers a day; I noticed that most shops were often empty. Like most other massage girls we encountered in Vietnam, they had no massage training and everything was learned on the job, if anything was learned at all. They tended to evince about as much interest in the job as a restaurant dishwasher. The next smelly customer walking into their shop could only have elicited ambivalent feelings of more tedium barely compensated by more money. And the fact they were likely virgins meant they’d only be repulsed by half-naked male strangers twice or thrice their age. One encounters the same bored massage girls in Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand. The difference is that in Thailand they’ve been doing massage for decades and the industry is far more developed, so that a cohort of skilled, talented and enthusiastic massage workers have staked out enough territory to raise the bar—the overall level of massage quality.

Before diving into Da Nang, recall the comment that my masseuse’s fingers stopped short of entering my shorts. Whenever writing about massage I have to clarify a major misconception about the profession. For some people, massage is a sinful, frightening activity synonymous with prostitution. For others, massage is a worthy form of physical therapy and relaxation, with stress on therapy in strict contradistinction to the erotic. In many countries, the legal massage industry exists only by virtue of preventing anything remotely sexual from leaking into the massage encounter. Puritanical Americans are particularly confused about this, or righteously sanctimonious (see my essay on American massage). Suffice it to say here that Westerners bringing their fussy, prudish mindset about massage with them when traveling abroad may be in for a shock. In China, Thailand, Vietnam, and other Asian countries, the boundaries between purely therapeutic, mildly erotic, and overtly sexual massage are fluid or outright nonexistent. Many Asian massage workers do have strict limits and will keep things chaste simply to avoid misunderstandings; or they don’t have much of an erotic sensibility to begin with. But many others are highly attuned to customers who want things eroticized to some degree and will make an educated guess as to how far to push things. And when they guess wrong, as they sometimes do, it’s an occasion for humor, not traumatized outrage.

In the following, I don’t draw a line between therapeutic and erotic massage. Though the distinction has a legal function, it’s a reflection of social contradictions and a notional absurdity, to my mind, a Judeo-Christian ideological construct. It is anathema to the art of massage. After long experience with the art, I can attest that the best massage workers share a single indispensable aptitude, that of thoroughness. Thoroughness implies the expert and loving application of hands and fingers not just to tangled knots but to every portion of the body, genitals included. Their job is to intuit desires and limits, so that the customer receives no more no less than what he or she expected (but some expect the unexpected!). Customers not inclined to erotic massage will be blissfully unaware that their masseuse or masseur can deliver that too and with the same expertise.

DA NANG

An old American friend, Jerry, has a university job in Da Nang and is well acquainted with the country; and he’s been living in Southeast Asia for most of his life. He helped find us a service apartment in the My An neighborhood, a short walk to the beach. My wife is not as much of a massage aficionado as I am and after lunch our routine is to find a café—plenty of awesome ones abound in Da Nang—to deposit her to work on her digital paintings, and I join her a few hours later. My plan is a massage a day, totaling thirty massages, but not thirty masseuses, as I hope to return to the better ones more than once.

I use my instincts to select a shop from among the many at my disposal. This means avoiding any with young women, which means just about all of them. They aggressively call out to me, “Massa! Massa!” (they can’t quite get the “g” down, until I realize they’re just saying the word in Vietnamese, mát xa). I’ve always preferred older women to green-banana girls—more character, more wisdom, riper body, riper sexuality. The older they are, the more grateful for customers, the more experienced at massage, and the more relaxed with men they tend to be. It certainly doesn’t hurt if your masseuse turns out to be attractive, but there is no correlation, no connection, between a beautiful face and a great massage! You can snip out that live wire in your brain right now. If you’re looking for sex in massage shops because you equate massage with prostitution, Vietnam has designated “VIP” massage houses which are exclusively brothels and “massage” a mere euphemism, but you have to know where to find them as they are vastly outnumbered by the regular massage shops. To cover all bases, I had actually planned to visit one but in the end didn’t need to, which I’ll get to later.

I try the side streets, where the shops are shabbier and the masseuses older. Ah, there’s a shop, open to the street, with a woman dressed oddly in a pleated miniskirt rather than the usual nondescript sportswear or slacks. Intuitively I go for the unusual. She’s only a bit older than most, somewhere in her thirties, and I take a chance on her. She asks me to wait five minutes while she sets up a table behind a curtain. She hands me the mandatory faux-silk shorts, which I hate not only because massage should be naked and any clothing is to be detested on principle, but they adhere too snugly around the thighs, as if to remind both masseuse and customer where fingers are forbidden from entering (in Thailand you’re draped with just a towel; in China, disposable paper shorts that are easily ripped open). She starts to do my back but then steps away after a couple minutes. I hear some whispering, and the massage resumes. But it feels different. I look up and it’s a new girl who was summoned to the shop. She’s young, pretty, and the massage is utterly indifferent and inept. It’s even worse than the one in the Hanoi hotel. I grow impatient—I could be getting a better massage almost anywhere else—and quit well before the hour is up. I pay her half. As I leave, she’s playing with her cellphone and ignores me.

At least she wasn’t playing with her phone with one hand while slopping oil around with the other. That I have encountered, believe it or not, once in Laos and once in Malaysia. I mean they were not taking a call or texting an urgent message but were playing with their phone for the duration of the session, or as long as I put up with it. Now, it’s not uncommon for a masseuse to reach for her phone in the middle of a massage to attend to an inquiring customer. This happens in China, where it’s rude not to respond immediately to someone’s call. I understand it’s a business and tolerate these interruptions as long as they’re momentary. But any cellphone activity is still unacceptable where really good customer service is concerned. They should not have their phone with them at all.

About a week into our stay, I’m heading with my wife to check out a vintage clothing store in the An Hai neighborhood and pass by a small massage shop. Just at that moment I catch the eye of a masseuse at the entrance before she turns back into the shop. She may have noticed my wife (we were walking side by side this time), or she wasn’t minding anyone. Forties, big round eyes, voluptuous ass in tight jeans. Perfect. As we’re busy, I’ll have to come back a day or two later. Again, her appearance has no predictive value of her massage skills, but I feel powerfully drawn to the woman after only a second’s glance.

It’s been raining hard the past few days, after a typhoon near-miss. Jerry had warned me that October-November was rainy season, but it was the only time we could fit the Vietnam trip in. The next day I head back to the shop alone. It’s shuttered, perhaps due to fewer expected customers.

In the same neighborhood I pass by a massage shop with a woman who smiles at me behind the window. Forties, attractive. I slow down, turn around, and enter. Tall, gorgeous, and classy, with a pixie haircut, she’s the manager unfortunately and doesn’t massage. It’s a large, moderately upscale shop (which doesn’t necessarily mean a more upscale massage). A young Caucasian couple are having their feet bathed in shallow basins prior to their massage. I ask for an older masseuse. I’m assigned a plain, chubby girl in her thirties who bathes my feet before leading me to a private room on the second floor. She doesn’t object when I request to be draped with a towel instead of wearing the shorts. What follows is not a great massage technique-wise but it’s enticingly clumsy—her hands keep brushing against my erection as if by accident. The manager’s name is Dieu. She gives me a card with the masseuse’s name on it, Thanh, and I’ll get a discount the next time I’m in. I get Dieu on WhatsApp so I can arrange ahead of time to have Thanh again, though I’m not sure I’ll be back.

I head down Nguyen Van Thoai Street to The Cups Coffee Roastery and B&B Bakery, a huge digital-nomad magnet, to join my wife. She asks me how it was.

“Yiban.” So-so.

I have yet to receive a memorable massage in Da Nang. I’ve described two massages so far but have already had seven or eight other mediocre encounters not mentioned above. I need a reason to describe a massage experience—the memorable, the awful, or the quirky. An example of the latter is a woman who calls me into her large, empty shop one day. She’s fat and in her forties, with that tincture of Indian blood you can see in some Southeast Asians from past Indian migration waves. She leads me to a private room. No shorts required, she says. Instead of leaving the room while I undress, she stands there staring at me. I get on the table naked. She goes to work on my back, with long, firm, accomplished stroking. But this lasts only a minute or two before she attacks my buttocks, scrotum and balls. I happen not to like things so direct, with no build-up, no dramatic tension. There’s nothing more exciting than a massage that starts off chaste and keeps you guessing until they break the rules. You can’t get more direct than with this woman. When I turn over, she gets on the table and we fuck. Well, I had to do it at least once, just to see that it can happen here—it’s not uncommon in massage shops in Thailand. Plus she’s friendly and graceful about the whole thing and clearly enjoyed it herself. She wants a tip. I triple the fee, already dirt cheap, and that satisfies her.

I try the small massage shop again, with the elusive middle-aged beauty. It’s open this time and she’s there. I’m not sure whether she recognizes me from when I passed by on the street that day. She looks grittier close up, her working-class eyebrows somewhat thickly brushed, but still nice. Her full breasts are tattooed beneath her black-lace top, and her belly is exposed and spills a bit over the rim of her jeans. Those hefty hips of hers make me crazy. But she hands me over to another woman—slim, attractive, mid-thirties. The shop is about as low-end as you can get and cramped, with two narrow makeshift tables. My table wobbles when I get on it and the padding is thin. They make me wear the shorts. But the coworker surprises me by pulling the shorts down to my ankles when it’s time to do my legs and hips. While refraining from direct stroking, she works my groin quite thoroughly at first, before becoming repetitive and mechanical, like the thirty-second loop of New Age music they have on repeat. I tell the voluptuous one I want her next time and I add her on WhatsApp before I leave. She won’t tell me her name. I’ll call her Anh.

In the elevator of my hotel an American guy named Charlie talks me up. He’s retired and splits his time between Da Nang and Tbilisi, Georgia (the country). He’s a massage aficionado and recommends a woman named Crystal who does house calls. She charges 600,000 ($25) for erotic massage, he says. It’s about a third of what I’d pay in China for the same.

I contact her and she arrives by motorcycle an hour later. She’s petite and pleasant looking in a nondescript way, in her thirties. And she speaks a smattering of English; most Vietnamese masseuses have zero English, though cellphone speech translators now make communication easy enough. I lay face down on the bed with a towel over me. Crystal has a toolkit of massage techniques, and one thing she does is extremely enticing. She folds each of my arms in turn across my back to massage the shoulder blades, with my palm turned up. She’s only wearing a short skirt and as she squats over me, her thigh presses into my palm, flattening my fingers onto the inner edge of her panties. I’m sorely tempted to stroke her there but refrain escalating things too quickly. Then she puts her toolkit away and punctures the drama by proposing a handjob for an extra fee. No! Too soon! I ask her to continue the massage for a while. After turning face up, I agree to her request to round out the fee to 1,000,000, more than Charlie claims to have paid. She brings me off with workmanlike efficiency—all well before the hour is up. Perhaps sensing I’m disappointed in the rushed treatment, she sits back on my bed as if to show she’s in no hurry to leave. But now I’m impatient and indicate it’s over.

I message Anh, the voluptuous one, on WhatsApp to arrange an appointment. She doesn’t respond. I fear she’s not keen on my returning for some reason. I head over to her shop anyway. She’s there alone and says, “Ah,” recognizing me. I already messaged her, I tell her, and got no response. She looks at me uncomprehendingly, naturally so, as she doesn’t understand English. She makes me wear the shorts as usual. Unlike her coworker, she does not pull them down and proceeds to give me one of the most prudish, perfunctory massages I’ve ever received, as if to make a point that she’s not that type. As I get dressed, she only now notices my message on WhatsApp and apologizes for not responding earlier. But she gives not the slightest hint that she’d do a better job if I returned, and I don’t intend to. Oh, well, you win some, you lose some.

A few days later, I’m returning to my building one evening after dark; my wife is already back at the apartment. A woman is standing at the busy corner across from the popular Hop Garden restaurant and hands me her business card. It’s the one time in Vietnam I’m approached on the street by a massage freelancer when I’m alone. Her face is half hidden under a baseball cap. Before I give her a closer look, I glance at the card: “Crystal Massage.” I keep walking and don’t look back. She seems not to have recognized me.

I’m surprised to find a message from Anh on WhatsApp, “Hi how are you.” I let her know I was more impressed by her coworker’s massage than hers. She tries to write a coherent response in English: “please visit my shop. we do good massage for you. nothing but you think it is like or not like her 2h. wait for you my shop.” I tell her I’m willing to try her coworker again. “ok what time do you come.” I tell her tomorrow—I’m on the other side of the city today. “She said long time no see. Miss you.”

Da Nang’s seashore strip is separated from the rest of the city by the Han River, and we’re on the west side of the river at the popular Tan Café, which occupies an old French colonial building. I pop out for a massage, a shop recommended by a friend of Jerry’s, hidden away in a labyrinth of lanes within walking distance from the café. The shop is done up in tasteful yet understated decor with New Age accents. A Black American woman is present in the lobby and is fetched by a masseuse dressed in pastel-hued cotton shirt and drawstring pants. The male at the counter has space for me. I occasionally go for male massage and feel like something different today. He’s polite and friendly and obviously gay, with his immaculate face; speaks English as well. Normally with a male massage worker I’m not required to wear the provided shorts, but he points them out to me anyway in case I’m body shy. I get on the table in the private room naked. He has good, strong technique, and if he did nothing else, it was worth it. He is also thorough, in the groin as well, to which he devotes the final quarter hour, suspensefully working up a strong hard-on, letting the towel slip off to expose it, and releasing it with just a few deft strokes. He gives me his business card at the end and asks if I would post a positive review on Google. I notice on the card the words, “LGBT friendly.”

The next day I return to Anh’s massage shop as promised for another go with her coworker. When I arrive, Anh is there alone. She explains via cellphone translator that her coworker had a last-minute conflict. She knows I wasn’t satisfied with her massage and promises to do a better job today. While I have to wear the shorts again and she keeps them in place, she does go further this time, working her hands inside and teasing my cock without directly stimulating it. But now she does something unexpected. She comes up to the front of the table to massage my torso. As she reaches down over my head with each stroke, her chest grazes my face. It’s exquisite torture and I give her boobs a little tweak. She pretends to protest but then presses her chest into me more firmly yet. I pull up her shirt and bra and her breasts drop on my face.

She grabs her cellphone and types into her translator, “I can come to your hotel. I’m not a prostitute but I’ll have to charge you more since I’ve never let a customer touch me before.”

“I can’t today,” I tell her. “My wife is there.”

“We can rent a room somewhere else.”

“No, I can’t. We’re leaving Da Nang tomorrow and I have to get back soon to pack.”

I want to have her right on the massage table. Nervously she glances at the entrance of the shop and balks. She only lets me pull open her pants. I slide my hand down her groin. Pubic hair comes in all types and hers is profuse, thick, and coarse. Raw and animalistic. I want her badly. But we really are leaving the next day. The rain never let up but only got worse, torrential downpours throughout the day and night, like diarrhea from the sky. It’s not only the rainy season but the worst rainfall in decades, it turns out. Two nearby cities we really wanted to visit—Hue and Hoi An—are flooded. I was seriously upset about this.

A hundred kilometers to the north, Hue was the capital of Vietnam from 1802-1945. In a month of fighting between the end of January and early March, 1968, the city was leveled and over a hundred thousand rendered homeless in one of the biggest battles of the Vietnam War. Around ten thousand civilians were either massacred by the communists or slaughtered by U.S. and South Vietnamese shelling. The city has since been rebuilt. I wanted to see whatever traces were left of the battle or at least see how the city was remade. But the flooding got worse during the course of our stay and soon tourists were not just discouraged but forbidden from visiting Hue. The outskirts of Da Nang also experienced flooding and casualties, but the city itself was spared, raised high enough from sea with a sloping beach. The rain had let up for a couple days earlier in the week, and flooding somewhat receded, allowing a brief visit to the ancient city of Hoi An, thirty kilometers to the south. When we got there, however, the most scenic areas by the river were still flooded out, apart from a few streets in the Old Town, jammed with tourists with nowhere else to go.

Now another typhoon is making a beeline for Da Nang, a super typhoon. We have to decide whether to stay put and hope it weakens and veers south, as the previous typhoon did, or leave. We are tired of the incessant rain and we’ve been to most of the key cafés and restaurants, some more than once. We decide to spend the last ten days of our trip in Hanoi.

On the way to the airport the next day, I get a message from Anh: “I’m sorry. Brother. Today the radio said. The wind… I. can’t open. The shop so I have no income. The rain said. 2 days… so I have no expenses for. 3 mother and children. at. home. Can you. help. me. a. little. Brother. I’m very shy. but. I’m speaking. honestly.” Now I feel relieved I didn’t bring her to my hotel, as who knows how much money she would have convinced me to fork over. But at least it would have been worked for and earned. I don’t respond.

HANOI

Cheaper hotels have more character, with all their flaws, and we search online for one in Hanoi’s Old Quarter. We select one place with a photo of a large room and two queen beds for a good rate. The manager adds me to WhatsApp and we let her know our arrival time and again soon before arriving. The Grab taxi drops us off at the address but we see no sign of the hotel. After scouring both sides of the street, we find an unmarked entrance to a narrow, decrepit corridor with the hotel’s street number but no hotel sign. No way this could be the hotel. When we message the manager again, there’s no response. My wife waits outside while I venture down the Kafkaesque hallway which goes on and on with twists and turns, like a time machine back to the 1930s, low-watt bulbs strung by wire from the ceiling, old bicycles and junk lining the walls, old people visible through the doors of their lairs. At the end of the corridor a woman emerges carrying a bucket. She’s in her forties and attractive, with long shapely legs. She smiles at me as she passes. A maid? I’d like a massage by her, in fact. But there’s still no sign of a hotel.

What kind of hotel service is this? Back out on the street, I message the manager again to tell her if we’re not met by someone soon, we’re going to find another hotel. “Please wait a minute,” is the response. Soon we see a woman running toward us, the manager. She beckons us to follow her several stores up the street from whence she came to another corridor. This entrance is marked with a hotel sign and has a massage menu out in front. It’s not the same hotel as the one we booked. She apologizes for the delay and invites us to sit down in the hotel’s lobby. The other corridor was indeed the right one and the room from which the maid had emerged our room; it just needs a few more minutes of cleaning. It’s all the same hotel, but as our room is in a separate location it’s listed under a different hotel name, for reasons the manager’s English is too limited to explain.

When we’re finally brought to the room, it’s as strange as the corridor leading to it. The doorway opens into a little outdoor patio with a canopy just large enough to shelter a table and chairs from the rain. Opposite is a kitchen with kitchenware and a bathroom. Our room is also from the past, with high ceilings and orange-painted walls. The room has a window onto the corridor but lacks a curtain. A bright light right outside the window is kept on all night and we need eyeshades to sleep, and earplugs as well to muffle the loud voices in the corridor late at night. Roosters are crowing outside the patio not just in the morning but all day long. It’s a quaint hotel room but we request a change. After two nights the manager has another room for us in the main hotel with three queen beds, just vacated by six young Italian women, who took about an hour to vacate the room, one at a time, as we watched from the lobby.

Meanwhile I ask the manager if their massage service has any older women. We have all ages, she says. I have to pay her for the massage first and choose a one-hour body massage for 400,000 ($15). To forestall any misunderstandings, she warns me that “body massage” does not include the abdomen—a priggish restriction I also encountered at some Da Nang massage shops; presumably the lower abdomen encroaches too dangerously on the male organs. The manager’s prim librarian disposition contrasts sharply with the sexy black bodycon dress enwrapping her delicate figure.

The massage room occupies a second-floor room facing the street. At the window end are recliners for foot treatment and the rest of the room has four massage tables separated by pull curtains. Shorts are as usual obligatory. I’m delighted to see that the masseuse assigned to me is the very maid I passed by in the corridor who was cleaning our room. She has a high forehead, big almond eyes, and a ready smile but not a lot of strength. But she tries her best, even straddles me when I’m face down and leans her elbows into me for more leverage. Surprisingly, she pulls my shorts down over my ass and doesn’t object when I move them down further to the knees. She works her fingers close to the groin on the inner thighs just short of my balls. She pulls the shorts back up when I turn over. I have a raging erection. She grazes it a few times over the shorts and works her fingers under the shorts along the sides. She types into her cellphone translator that she’s doing my abdomen anyway even though it’s not allowed. I’m pleased with her and give a tip. Her name is Oanh and I add her on WhatsApp.

My wife wants a massage. I arrange another session the next day. I have Oanh do her so I can try the other resident masseuse, Phuong. She’s also in her forties and not as pretty as Oanh but is of extravagant figure with jutting breasts and buttocks. We’re on adjacent massage tables with the curtain drawn. Who knows what Oanh confided to her, but Phuong fastens the curtains around my table together so I’m blocked from view at the front in case anyone entering the shop should happen to walk by, the manager for instance, who had made several passes back and forth the day before. Phuong removes my shorts completely. She is considerably freer around my groin area than Oanh was. When I turn over, she drapes my cock but not before catching a good glimpse of it. She repeatedly presses and prods it under the towel, without direct stimulation; it pokes out here and there and she has to keep replacing the wayward towel. It’s a playful, daring massage yet scattered, the tension dissipating before it’s allowed to build up, unlike Oanh’s more focused and controlled treatment. I like either style and will be trying both of them again. My wife wasn’t satisfied with Oanh, however, who lacked the strength she expects in a massage.

For variety’s sake, I try a new type of massage venue: the Sen 20 Hang Tre Massage & Sauna. The stubborn decor is of an earlier generation, suggesting the bathhouse is public, with the government having some kind of a hand in its operation. I make an appointment for a private room ($27 for 110 minutes) rather than the lower-price public room, which I later regret, as the whole point is to see how locals and regulars go about it. An attendant points me to an elevator and tells me to get off at the fourth floor. The elevator opens and I step into a corridor where a bunch of women wrapped in towels pass by. I’m on the wrong floor. Not sure why it opened on the third floor with no one getting on or off. On the fourth floor I’m greeted by a bored young attendant who leads me to my room. Again, the mandatory shorts. The bathing room is shared among several private rooms and has a jacuzzi, a wooden tub with herb-infused water, and a steam sauna. He indicates that I’m not to bathe naked, even though I’m presently alone; we wouldn’t want to cause any other males stumbling in offense. Back in the room twenty minutes later, the designated bathing time, I get on the massage table. A middle-aged masseuse enters. The treatment is purely therapeutic, as expected, but she has superb technique, getting on top of me and deploying her limbs to fold my limbs around like an exotic dance. She even digs her fingers under my shorts a bit to show she’s not a total prude, without going further. She has a name tag and down in the lobby I arrange an appointment to have her do my wife.

The next day, while my wife is off getting the bathhouse treatment, I’ve arranged for Oanh massage me for the second time. I had made an appointment with her but when I arrive, she and Phuong are busy giving pedicures to a pair of Indian women. The manager says Oanh will be ready in thirty minutes. I say I can’t wait since I’ve arranged to meet my wife at a restaurant after the massage. Oanh breaks off from her client to attend to me while the manager takes over for her. She works my buttocks and inner thighs more perfunctorily than the first time, keeping my shorts on, as if annoyed at having her client interrupted. But when I turn over, and the Indian women are gone and she’s the only one in the room, she relaxes a bit. She sticks her hands all the way inside my shorts and gets very close to my shaft and balls. Later she moves to the front of the table to massage my chest and tickles my nipples. I reach back and tweak her breasts. She pulls back with a laugh. I tell her she’s beautiful. She pulls out her cellphone translator to say she had no idea what I said. I speak the words into the translator and she smiles.

I arrange with the manager to try Phuong again. As I pass through the lobby at the appointed time the next morning, Phuong is sitting there with several others and gestures for me to go up and wait. At the very moment I step in the massage room, however, two white foreigners, a man and a woman with no relation to each other, arrive for massages themselves. Oanh is there and receives the woman. The guy is young and handsome and I’m wondering who he’s going to get. Then two new masseuses walk in that I haven’t seen before, both in their forties with seasoned expressions suggesting years of massage experience. One of them comes up to say she says she’s doing me. I go back down the lobby and ask the manager why I’m not getting Phuong, as requested. She says she’s needed for maid service today and has no time. I’m always up for new masseuses and don’t protest.

The two masseuses chat breezily with Oanh, who seems to know them well. The one doing me is a slim little woman with a see-through mesh top and a black demi bra underneath barely covering her small breasts; I’m sure I could catch her nipples from the right angle but I don’t stare. Her mate is taller, with tight jeans and tight blue-and-white striped shirt accentuating a large bust. She goes to work on the foreign guy on the table next to mine. The foreign woman is on his other side with Oanh. My masseuse lets me wear my own briefs in lieu of the provided shorts. She gets on top of me to do my back but lacks strength and enough body weight for leverage. When the foreign guy leaves after his half-hour session, his masseuse steps up to the head of my table and attacks me with long satisfying strokes down my back, while the first masseuse strokes upward along my legs. They ask if I want a four-hands massage. I readily assent and we tack on another half hour to make it a full session with the two of them.

Their names, coincidentally, are also Oanh and Phuong. I’ll call them Oanh 2 and Phuong 2. They are neither beautiful, nor ugly, nor plain, but the fourth and largest category of face: slightly weird and thus distinctive and special. Oanh 1 is still working on the foreign woman and carrying on a three-way conversation with Oanh 2 and Phuong 2. When they turn me over, Oanh 2, the shorter one, pulls her end of the table flush against the wall to sit facing me and lean against the wall for leverage. My legs hooked over hers, she applies oil to her bare feet and slips them into my briefs for deep-tissue work in my perineum and around the groin. As she then grips my erect shaft between her feet, Phuong 2 strokes all the way down my abdomen and beneath my briefs to gather up my testicles. Oanh 1 has come up to watch and giggle, having finished with the foreign woman. I tip them generously. Oanh 2 adds me to WhatsApp.

Using auto-translation, Oanh 2 starts chatting with me on WhatsApp as soon as I leave the shop:

Oanh 2: How do you feel when we massage you
Me: Never had a massage like that with the feet. Marvelous.
Oanh 2: So you live in China?
Me: You need to develop more strength. Your partner needs to learn to go slow-fast, strong-light. Be flexible, not just the same way the whole time. I have a lot of massage experience. I live in China.
Oanh 2: I know what you want but we are not allowed to do that. If previous technicians have done it for you it means they are doing it in secret. There are cameras there. If we were discovered, we could be shamed by all the spa groups in the old town and the spas would not accept us.
Me: Cameras watching everything?
Oanh 2: don’t you see the camera there. 1 camera on the shelf and 1 camera hanging on the wall pointing straight at your massage bed
Me: I didn’t notice. In China and Thailand there are no cameras in massage rooms.
Oanh 2: that’s why i have to put a blanket over you every time you want to take it off. There are spas that don’t have cameras installed, but there are also spas that have cameras installed in the common rooms.
Me: Wow.
Oanh 2: They avoid the situation where the staff misbehaves in the massage room.
Me: So that’s why the hotel doesn’t allow massage in guests’ rooms?
Oanh 2: It is still possible to have a massage in the room if you call an outside technician in. But if the local police suddenly check and find you and the technician behaving inappropriately, you and the girl could be arrested.
Me: Do you work at the hotel every day or are you on call?
Oanh 2: We are freelance technicians. The spa doesn’t have enough staff so they call outside staff like us to come work.
Me: Is it common for police to check guests’ rooms in hotels?
Oanh 2: Sometimes they feel suspicious or someone reports it then they will come to check.
Me: Where else do you work?
Oanh 2: I work in many spas when they are short of staff. But usually I work in 4 and 5 star hotel spas. I only work at small spas in the mornings when big hotel spas are not accepting guests yet.
Me: Those hotels have cameras too?
Oanh 2: No. Not all spas have cameras in large massage rooms. If you want a more comfortable massage, come to our spa at [address]. I will massage you if you want or if you want Phuong to massage you, I will call her to massage you.
Me: What are the massage fees there?
Oanh 2: 450k/h. this is my friend’s little spa
Me: Maybe the day after tomorrow, in the morning, both of you again?
Oanh 2: text me first before you want to come there
Me: I am not sure yet. I will confirm later.
Oanh 2: it’s up to you who you want to massage you
Me: Both of you!
Oanh 2: yes of course it is possible

We had one day left in Hanoi. I arranged to see Oanh 2 and Phuong 2 in the morning and Oanh 1 in the afternoon, who asked me to squeeze her in once more (“I will make you satisfied,” she said on WhatsApp). Their massage shop is a ten-minute walk away. Phuong 2 meets me out on the street as I’m trying to figure out if the address is correct. Her features in the sun’s glare now are starkly rustic, with angular cheekbones and heavily brushed eyebrows, dressed in a tacky leopard-print shirt and black polyester slacks. Their friend, a well-dressed and still attractive middle-aged woman, gives me a quick lookover and a smile. Oanh 2 arrives a minute later and we take the elevator to an upper floor. The small massage space is in back. I persuade them to place two massage tables together to form a wide-enough platform for them to climb around and onto me for leverage. No one else is up there and we have the place to ourselves, but they draw a curtain across and make me keep my underwear on, for the symbolic purpose anyway of showing who’s in control. They then remove it once the massage is underway; the towel too comes off later. Yet they seem a bit rushed today and have trouble synchronizing their stroking. Things never get more exciting than the first time and I can’t maintain an erection.

What I was really hoping for was for them to get naked—not necessarily sex, just the intense, celebratory freedom of mutual nakedness. That was beyond their current limits and perhaps imagination. Missing was the luxury of time—for trust and affection to grow.

Back at the hotel after lunch, Oanh 1 is giving a man a pedicure when I arrive at the spa. As I lay in the massage booth waiting, the middle-aged Australian is complaining in a loud voice that she’s not grinding his toenails hard enough. She doesn’t understand what he’s saying and summons the manager to come and explain. Finally he leaves. Oanh 1 spends the entire hour with her hands inside my underwear doing everything short of a handjob. Obviously, she’s never performed one. Still, her gentle manner is worth a hundred handjobs, which I tend to find boring anyway.

After we depart Hanoi back to Kunming in China’s Yunnan Province, Oanh 1 tells me more about herself on WhatsApp. She’s from Lao Cai in northwest Vietnam, on the very border with Yunnan Province. In February-March of 1979, in reprisal for Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia to kick out Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, China invaded Vietnam. I remember the headlines while living in New York City. Chinese troops succeeded in advancing a few tens of kilometers into Vietnam before being stalemated and finally withdrawing. Both sides lost an estimated twenty to thirty thousand troops and both sides claimed victory. Thousands of Vietnamese civilians were killed in the house-to-house fighting. Lao Cai was one of the three invasion routes from China. Oanh 1 was born in that year and obviously has no memory of it, nor did her parents tell her anything. Even people who’ve been in the middle of a war are wont to wipe it from memory. But her personal life has been momentous enough. She sold clothes in Lao Cai but business never recovered after Covid, so she came to Hanoi. Also around that time she found out her husband had a secret daughter with a mistress. She divorced him and has now been single for three years and has worked in the hotel spa for two years. She asks me to find a man for her.

“There are handsome guys who come to your spa,” I say.

“I haven’t found a good man yet.”

[Note: names have been changed to protect anonymity.]

* * *

Related posts by Isham Cook:
Massage and the Writer: Essays on Asian massage
Massage diary: Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam
American massage
Massaging the Yin-Yang in Pattaya
Massaging the masseuse in Beijing and Bangkok
Music for massage, meditation, sex, and psychedelics