Pedicurist goes from 'stinky feet' to success

By Lin Qi (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-04-05 09:19

BEIJING: Lu Qin, 39, has a pair of white, slim and smooth hands. Her nails are finely polished and trimmed, features that would make many women her age feel jealous of.

Lu's hands are also those of a pedicurist who has touched the feet of many political figures, tycoons and celebrities.

Through exemplary hard work and perseverance, Lu is now the owner of a major chain of pedicure salons nationwide.

"Customers sometimes talk of their admiration for Chinese works of art like jade and wood carvings," said Lu, who is from Yangzhou in Jiangsu province and also a deputy to the National People's Congress, the country's top legislature.

"I tell them that we pedicurists are also artists. We work the feet of people."

Born to a military family in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, Lu grew up hearing a lot of anecdotes about Yangzhou.

What fascinated her most were the local traditions of the "three blades" - the tools of the chef, barber and pedicurist, as well as the skills their professions represented.

After graduating from high school in 1988, Lu went to Yangzhou with her younger sister to look for a job. She enrolled in a bathhouse run by a State-owned catering company and became one of the first female apprentices of the craft in the city.

"There were only male pedicurists then. Women had to wait in the passage outside the men's bathroom if they wanted foot afflictions to be treated. They usually waited for quite a long time, because pedicurists were busy engaged with male customers," Lu said.

A number of women then even felt embarrassed to receive pedicures in a public area and would endure their foot ailments, Lu said.

At first, none of the veteran pedicurists wanted to take on apprentices, for fear of being surpassed and replaced by their students.

But one of these pedicurists finally decided to train Lu and another girl.

"He was an honest and contented man. But he was also shunned by other pedicurists for imparting his skills to us," Lu said.

Lu said she had doubts about learning the trade on her first day of lessons because of the hard work involved. Her wrists and arms suffered under the grueling training and her master would sometimes forcibly grab her wrist to ensure that she was using the right technique.

Her hands swelled and she could not hold chopsticks properly to eat her meals a few days after these lessons.

After Lu completed her apprenticeship, she was assigned to scrub dead skin off customers' feet in bathhouses.

"The bathhouse was a place for senior residents to socialize. They could chat, sing local operas and play games," Lu said.

She often sat on worn out wooden footstools and dealt with the thick cuticles of senior customers as they fell asleep on the couch.

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