A visit to the Chinese reflexologist is perhaps more contradiction than you’d think; unlike other massage experiences, you’re fully clothed for the duration, and the reflexologist frequently adjusts your clothing, pulling down shirts to cover exposed lower backs and resorting to placing a hand towel on whichever other location on your body they touch that isn’t coverable with your clothing. In spite of such distance, it’s a shockingly intimate experience. At least it has been for me, each of the ten or so times I’ve gone.

It starts with a 45-minute foot massage, followed by a 15-minute back rub. Pressing on the ball of my left foot, he says, “Too much red meat, too little greens.” Okay. Fair assessment. Maybe it’s a subtle way of telling me I’m fat. I try not to let insecurities cloud my absorption of his wisdom.

“And you sleep too late.”

Did he mean I had eyebags?

“And you ought to stop drinking too much water before you sleep.”

Was that another fat jibe? Was he saying I’m retaining water? I did have my period, I think to myself, huffily.

And then it got personal.

Pressing on my calf, he says, “You think too much.”

Whoah! Was he saying I was intellectual, that I had a tough job…or that I need to expend more brain power than the average person?

…Was I thinking too much about this?

Pressing on my right foot after a while, he proceeds to comment on my personal character: “You’re too emotional. And you’re very tolerant. And you drive with one arm.”

Well, colour me impressed. I don’t know why I always get the chatty ones either; my friends had fallen asleep and their masseurs had started talking to one another, instead. Maybe I got the one that no one else wants to talk to. I won’t go on about the rest of what he said—which was fairly similar—but by the time I left, my head was swimming with old/new revelations about my health and character traits.

“Oh, you’re so naive,” said my mother later that night, after my excited report. “He’s only going on an ego-trip because you probably looked facinated and grateful.”

“Yeah lor,” said another friend who was present. “And it’s so you to believe any hocus pocus coming out of someone remotely chinkychong.”

“And,” continued another, “you can’t always be so gullible.”

See, problem is, by that logic, I’m flip-flopping and easily-trusting, regardless of whom I believe—the reflexologist or my friends. At this point, I realise it’s like most things in life: I’m damned if I do, and damned if I don’t.