ABSTRACT
Zhang Yang’s bittersweet tragi-comedy Shower (洗澡 Xizhao) (1999) is a ‘family drama’ of father-son relationships set in an old-fashioned communal bath-house in Beijing. Old Liu’s bath-house serves as a refuge from the modern world where the regular customers obtain relief from their aches and pains, seek advice and guidance for their marital and domestic woes, exchange insults and pleasantries, and generally pass the time in relaxing and mostly healthful pursuits. However, the therapeutic and life-nurturing culture of the bath-house is also shown as fragile, vulnerable to the forces of social change and physical decay, limited by virtue of its exclusive homosociality, and doomed to extinction in face of the onslaughts of techno-modernity and wholesale urban redevelopment. This chapter seeks first, to identify the principal elements which make up the culture of self-care celebrated in Shower, and the forces which threaten to destroy it; secondly, to situate these very localised and concrete forms of practice in relation to the broader Chinese culture of yangsheng, ‘the art of nurturing life’, and thirdly, to consider whether there are any possible means, alternative settings or less fragile social ecologies in which more inclusive cultures of self-care might develop and flourish in the digital worlds of today and tomorrow.
