Google Translate Break-up: 分手的女孩

Google Translate Break-up:  分手的女孩。

It's been an interesting week or two.  it's hard to know where to start.  I think i'll begin with Mei.  You all know that i've been dating a girl named Mei here, and that she's pretty with fitness, and that she's a dance instructor.  i have had a few reservations, but i thought i just didn't understand what was going on, and went with it.  (things like, how can a girl who is a high school drop out speak mandarin with the Beijing accent?  How can a high school drop out put her brother through university, and take care of her parents…you can’t, these things are impossible).  Last week, i invited some friends of mine to go with me to see her work, and to allow her boss to see that the new "marketing manager" was actually bringing in business.  i have been wracking my brain trying to figure out why in the world this business would hire her as a Marketing Manager, and I still have no idea.  It is a massage place that’s a little different in china from those I have seen before.  It is in a high rent section of the district of Nanshan (translates to South Mountain) in  Shenzhen.  They apparently have 2 other companies here in Shenzhen, but I see zero proof, so, I’m not sure that I believe that.  Mei has been going to these sales meetings from 8 am until 9 or 10 pm at night, every day, 7 days a week for a week now, and she has another week of “training” to go.  What confuses me most is that Mei knows nothing about marketing.  She knows very little of sales, and doesn’t know the difference between the two.  It got a little stranger when we got to the spa.

We arrived at the spa at 3 pm on Wednesday last week.  They offered us mushroom tea of some sort and asked us to relax in the waiting room while they prepared for us.  We then were told that there were only 2 people able to get massaged and they were waiting for another opening.  So, I sent Thomas and Jason in while I sat and talked to Mei.  While we were talking, I kept getting sideways glances from the manager and from the front staff.  I was finally brought into a room and got the strangest massage I’ve ever gotten in china, and that I’ve ever heard of.  It wasn’t at all painful, they rubbed oil into me, and it was all kind of light tough, but too light, making it completely pointless.  It was relaxing, but that was mostly due to the music, and aromatherapy.  We then went in for the foot massage, and that was painful as always.  I don’t think that there’s a difference between any of these places, it just hurts, get over it, it will eventually feel good a day or two later.  At the end of the foot massage, they gave us a fairly good mushroom soup, and we were on our way.

The next day, I met up with Thomas, and he asked me what was really going on there.  There’s a couple of things that really stuck out:

• ·        Mei had been training in this place for 13-16 hours per day 7 days a week, on her 8^th day, and did not know her way around the facility. 
• ·        Mei didn’t know what services they had to offer
• ·        They’re supposed to be on one floor, but where they were meeting was nowhere to be seen
• ·        There are only 5 massage rooms
• ·        There is one foot massage room with 5 chairs
• ·        There was one other customer there besides us
• ·        There were not enough employees to have 3 people get massages at a time

The conclusion then, is that there is an upstairs portion, that is something else completely.  We talked to Jason and he said it doesn’t have the set up that is normal in a place that sells “special” massage, although that could be what’s going on upstairs.  More than likely, something else completely is going on, and the front end is a front of some sort.  I also have zero idea as to what Mei does for a living, she’s obviously aware, but she isn’t telling me, she’s instead telling me about the massage place, of which she can’t find her way around in.  So, my trust started going down, and I started being more open to other questions that I had.

I met Thomas the following day, and he asked me what’s been going on.  He’s been doing his own thing, and while we talk on the phone a bit, we don’t get to hang out as much right now, just due to other things going on.  He told me that I’d lost far too much weight in too short of a time, and asked me what was going on.  In fact, this is a common thing.  I’ve lost between 40 and 60 pounds in 1 month, which is a bit excessive, I’m sure most will agree.

He asked me what I was eating, I told him, random Chinese food (Mei came over every morning to cook breakfast, have lunch ready, then she would come over after work, we’d have dinner together, talk, then she’d go home.), a ton of crazy Guangdong tea of some sort, and that was pretty much it.  He said, “crazy Guangdong tea”, what colour is it?  I told him that it’s not red or green or black, but a mixture of red and green.  He said, that that’s the problem I’m having with weight loss and loss of energy.  There’s a diet drug in the tea.  What I’m actually getting is 600-800 calories per day, and if I drink enough of the tea, I can do okay, but if I don’t, then I have severe energy loss.  He told me to get off of that, ASAP, that it’s dangerous, and is in fact Chinese medicine that the Chinese won’t drink more than once per month.  It does speed up your metabolism, but prolonged use can cause major problems.  That night, when I was talking to my parents, she said something, (in English!!), unforgivable to the person I was talking to on the phone, and I knew that she wanted both me to hear and the person I was talking to to hear.

It was at this point that I’d determined that the complete lack of respect that she showed to me, combined with unanswered questions, meant that I needed to get rid of the problem entirely.  So, on Friday, I came home to figure out how to dump Mei.  I had been planning on doing so as soon as she was done training, but it was only hurting me, so I figured it was time to finish things off.

Have you ever dumped someone via Google Translate?  It’s unpleasant.

For 3 hours we fought, and I tried to get things over and done with.  Every now and then, she’d wander away and do something else, she washed all of the dishes, cleaned the floors, folded my laundry.  It was very strange, but I think she was trying to show me what I would be missing out on.  Finally though, I had to use words that you can’t take back, and really end things. 

The ultimate compliment you can give to a Chinese girl is to tell her, that you are a better person when she is around.  The ultimate insult then, is when you say, “I hate myself when I’m around you.”  So, after that, it was finally over.  I do appreciate that my house is cleaner now as well though.