Return to Shanghai

“Finally!” exclaimed Sasha Bamwele, as she kicked off her purple slingbacks and sank back into the deep, soft pillows of the couch in her Shanghai hotel room. She’d been on the go since before dawn and it was almost another day now – a new day. A brand-new day was dawning for her in so very, many ways.

She swung her legs up onto the large, lacquered coffee table and shifted her gaze into the night outside her window. She could see the lights of the city flickering, sparkling and shining into the hazy distance. Across the river in Pudong, stories were being told in all the colours of the rainbow, up and down the sides of buildings so tall they seemed to reach right into the sky. On one building, a famous football player ran forward, took aim, connected with a ball and sent it hurtling into the electro-sphere. On another building, giant hands played notes on a giant keyboard, a song no-one could hear. On yet another one appeared letters and a heart symbol that meant I Love Shanghai.

Sasha was indeed loving Shanghai tonight. She had been in the city for the past week, and was due to leave in another couple of days. She had completed her business earlier than expected, and now was intending to shift into tourist mode and spend the rest of the time exploring the city. This was her third visit and the one that had ended up making all the difference. Visits numbers one and two had not gone so well. Her first set of connections had failed her, costing her money that, at the time, she really could not afford. That loss had set her back a full year and more, but she didn’t give up. She had tried again, because she was determined that her business would succeed, and her determination had paid off. Three years later, SasSha’s Salons now had its own product lines, and manufacturing agreements with a number of partners, some of them in Shanghai.

Opening day was just a few months away for her new salons in Newark and Chicago, and she was close to being ready for the opening of her first full-service spa, in Providenciales, in the Turks and Caicos Islands, not too far off the coast of Florida. She was beyond excited about that one in particular, because she was eager to “get back onto the floor,” as she liked to say. She missed the day-to-day interactions with clients, the banter, the flow and the gossip. This venue, in a small but active place, just on the edges of the beaten path of the resort tourism sector, would be perfect for getting her hand back into the basics of her business and teasing out the kinks in preparation for growing out into other, larger locations.

Sasha, full and proper name Natasha Erica Bamwele, had opened for business about ten years before, in her small car, driving uptown, downtown, across bridges and through tunnels in the New York tri-state area to provide her manicure and pedicure services to clients in their own homes. It was a very select target market and the only one she could possibly have served at the time, given that she was in no position to rent real estate to do her work and build her clientele. Driving around was tough and tiring work, but after a couple of years or so, she was providing her services, on site, to the members of one of New York’s most exclusive women’s social clubs and no longer needed to be driving around quite so much.

The women of the New York social clubs were well-heeled in every sense of the word. They were owners of businesses, high level professionals, successful artists, wives, girlfriends and daughters of rich and powerful men. They had wide networks, they had influence in high places and they wore shoes that were the dream of women everywhere. Serving the personal image and aesthetic needs of women living at these levels was an opportunity, the value and potential of which, Sasha was very conscious.

Once, several years ago, one of these clients gave her a ticket for the opening night of a play on Broadway. Sasha arrived more than an hour early and parked her pink and green striped van, the only vehicle she had at the time – with Tasha’s Mobile Salon painted onto the side – in a parking lot on 8th Ave and W. 46th St. She chose a spot within sight of the parking attendant, turned up the volume on her favourite New York radio station, Hot 97FM, and settled in to wait. Within about ten minutes, a woman walked up and knocked on the window. Sasha turned her window down, only a little – this was NYC, after all.

“Are you open?” the woman asked, anxiously.

“Open?!” Sasha asked her back, not understanding.

“Yes, Yes. Are you open? Open up. Open up. I must get a repair. I’m on in less than two hours.”

“On where?” Sasha was confused, “Get what repaired?”

“My nails,” the woman said, and put out her hands so Sasha could see the chipped nail polish and broken nails. “I got a flat tyre driving in from New Jersey, Triple-A was taking too long so I changed it myself and destroyed my manicure. I had it done only yesterday, too. Can you fix them for me? Like really, really fast?” Sasha thought fast.

“Yes. Yes,” she said, glancing in the direction of the parking attendant to ensure that it was safe. He shrugged his shoulders at her unspoken question and Sasha opened her door, went to the back of the van, pulled out chair and toolbox, set them up in view of the attendant and the street and fixed the woman’s nails. After the woman left, Sasha walked over to the parking attendant.

“I didn’t come here to do that,” she told him.

“I don’t care,” he shrugged.

“I’m going to see a show on Broadway, and I was early, so I was just killing time.”

“Lady, I really don’t care. Your business is your business. T’ain’t mine.”

“Thank you,” she said, putting her hand out and offering him a twenty-dollar bill. “She paid me, so here. Buy yourself a beer.”

“Cool,” he said, accepting the offer. “Come back anytime you want.”

He was still in his little box at the entrance to the parking lot when she came back after the performance almost three hours later.

“Another woman came and asked if you were open,” he told her. “Maybe you should open.” She cocked her head sideways, said “Hmm!” and chuckled at the thought.

Once she had cleared the Holland Tunnel and was flying down the New Jersey-facing side of the Pulaski Skyway on her way home, however, she began to think, “Yeah. Why not? Once a week to begin with and see how it goes. I am Tasha’s Mobile Salon, aren’t I?”

She starting coming back to the parking lot once a week, and she soon started picking up walk-in clients. dropping. Pretty quickly, business was humming along and she had to start adding days. She opened only in the afternoons and evenings, however, so that she could still work her mobile business in the mornings.

Two years later, the first brick and mortar SasSha’s Salon opened up just a block away from the parking lot of its birth. The name change was a suggestion – a very strong and oft-repeated suggestion, in fact – from several of her best clients. Before very long, the name Sasha came also to apply to her; she even began to introduce herself as Sasha Bamwele, aesthetician – different to and yet the same as Natasha Bamwele, manicurist.

The very first SasSha’s Salon was a tiny place, able to accommodate only two clients at a time – barely – but it was bright and clean, all glass, chrome and mirrors, with plush pink and green striped velvet cushions. She had bought the cushion covering at a store on 42nd street that sold fabric ends, and often sold some of the most luxurious fabric pieces at rock-bottom prices. The salon was tiny, but very glamourous, as was its expanding clientele – actors, dancers, models, and women who aspired to be those. Ever so often, SasSha’s Salon would get called in to go backstage into the dressing room of some big-name Broadway star – sometimes it was for a manicure or pedicure, and often it was to give a relaxing or energizing hand or foot massage in preparation for, or as a consequence of a performance.

Sasha mulled over all of this, and replayed it and much more, in her mind, on this night high above the streets of Shanghai. She thought back to the day she moved out of her tiny apartment in the Ironbound district of Newark and into a glass and steel high-rise on the Hudson river in Hoboken. Tonight, she gazed down onto the Huangpu river bustling with traffic below her and then looked around her 28th floor suite in the Hyatt on the Bund. Excitement morphed into nostalgia and loneliness, and she cried. Not for the first time, but for this reason, she cried to sleep.

Sasha was very aware that there was a considerable difference between a spa and a salon – although the word salon would remain in the name she had chosen. The spa would definitely allow her to get her back into the day-to-day of her profession at least some of the time. She intended to be very hands on with the spa in the beginning. She had been too far removed from her clients in the last couple of years as she had been so tightly focused on expanding the business. She didn’t like that. She wanted to change that. She was going to build and rebuild relationships with clients and staff, get to know them, do stuff with them. In fact, she wanted a life back. She wanted to be amongst people during her workday, and she wanted to have time in the evenings to have friends over for dinner. She might maybe even be able to find time to date someone. Yes. That. It seemed like years since she’d been on a date. She missed that. Maybe once she was not travelling so much anymore, maybe once she had work days that ended before midnight, maybe…

The current plan was that she would be based in Providenciales for the next year or so. In fact, she had already begun looking to lease a house on the beach just outside of town. She had always been intrigued by the sea, and considered herself an island girl at heart. Also, she liked Provo very much ever since the first time she had visited. She was looking forward to getting there in a week’s time to work on the grand opening of SasSha’s in Provo at the Royal Hotel Providenciales.

Right now, she was going to fall asleep being watched over by the Oriental Pearl Tower directly across the river, and tomorrow when she awoke, she would go wander the city, meander up and down the Bund and maybe sit quietly for a spell in a Buddhist temple somewhere. She felt she needed some quiet time after these last weeks and months of meetings and discussions, late night conversations and early morning consultations. And she liked the atmosphere in the temples, anyway – the haze from incense burning, the cool darkness, the murmurings, the sense of ceremony and the smell of the incense, especially. Tomorrow would be a good day.

The lights had been turned off in some buildings in the Financial District, but the Pudong was still quite well lit up when Sasha woke up. It took her a moment to get her bearings and realise that it was only just after midnight and that she had fallen asleep on the couch. Out of habit, she reached for her phone, then paused for a moment and changed her mind. Instead, she got up and walked to the wall of glass in front of her. Shanghai seemed to float away into the haze below her.

“Maybe even a SasSha’s in Shanghai” she mused out loud. “Hmm. I like the sound of that. SasSha’s in Shanghai.”

Lionel Errivo looked out into the rain as his chauffeur navigated the streets of Shanghai on the way to Pudong International airport. He was tired and irritable and the murky weather was not inspiring any uplift in his spirits. He watched the water run down and across the window as the vehicle sped forward. He wished the man would drive faster. Not that he was late for his flight or was in a hurry for any particular reason; he just wanted to be moving, he wanted to be on his way. Well, he didn’t want so much to be on his way as he just wanted to get out of Shanghai. “On his way” meant that he was headed to the city of Los Angeles in the state of California in the United States of America, and he was really not the least bit excited about doing that, as a matter of fact.

He muttered something to himself and the driver glanced at him in the rear-view mirror, but said nothing. Lionel tugged at the beanie he was wearing on his head, took it off and ruffled up his hair. He fiddled with his seat belt, straightened it, checked it, rechecked it. He pulled the collar of his shirt, pulled at the shirt where it went into the waist of his pants, then pinched the seams of both legs and pulled again, tugging his pants towards his shoes. Finally, he sat back, folded his arms across his chest and resumed looking out the window. Then, he reached for his phone.

The car pulled up outside the terminal and he grabbed his bag and reached for the handle before his driver could come around to open the door for him. He remembered, too late, that in China, drivers maintain full control of their car doors at all times. The door was locked. He grunted in annoyance, turned away from and then toward the door again and waited the five seconds or so for the man to release him. He hopped out before the door was fully open. His driver opened the trunk and handed the luggage over to an attendant.

“Thank you,” Errivo said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, sir,” the driver responded in his best imitation of an American accent, and bowing slightly. Errivo nodded at the man and turned to follow his luggage into the terminal.

A woman walked past him just as he started to walk into the terminal, brushing him so closely that he had to swerve and swing his body away to avoid having her bump right into him. She turned briefly to glance at him and even seemed to smile a little bit, but he couldn’t be sure. It had happened so very quickly and she was wearing dark glasses, even in this dark, rainy weather so he wasn’t able to see her eyes. He did very clearly see the rich, red hair bouncing out from under her hat, however. He stood and watched her enter the terminal, and the door close itself behind her, before moving forward himself to go check in for his flight to Los Angeles.

Checking in for a flight in China is a very complicated process compared to the United States, and by the time he had completed it, he was even more irritable than he had been all morning. He was so irritable in fact, that he was just done; he had come fully to the end of his tether. He couldn’t even be bothered to feel put out when the announcement came that his flight was delayed. By then, he was sitting in the International Airlines lounge and his response was to get to his feet and head over to the bar.

“What the hell!” he said to himself. “It’s happy hour in L.A. right now. In fact, it’s happy hour last night.”

“Gin and tonic,” he said to the bartender, “one to one; with three lime wedges, please.”

As he was walking back to his seat with his drink, he saw again, the woman who had almost run him over outside. Couldn’t miss her; she was still wearing the coat, in a deep, rich red colour and a felt fedora of the same shade, both several shades darker than her hair. Her black patent leather boots reached right up to the middle of her thigh. She had taken off her sunglasses in the building and he could see her eyes now. They had the appearance of charcoal, dark and deep and shiny. He became aware that he was staring when he realised that she was looking straight at him and was not smiling.

“May I help you?” her eyes seemed to be saying. With attitude.

He looked away and kept walking without acknowledging her unspoken question. When he was seated, he could still see her. Now, she was selecting foods from the buffet. Then, she was selecting magazines from the rack at the entrance to the lounge. Finally, he opened his bag, pulled out his laptop and decided to do some work.

Work did not help his disposition any. Quite the opposite. Opening his spreadsheets and emails was just a reminder of what lay ahead for him. When he landed in Los Angeles, he was going to have to report to his father and the board of directors that the Chinese investment had fallen far short; it was not working out and would have to be scrapped. He had pushed hard for the partnership with the Chinese manufacturers, and he had worked very persistently on reaching agreements and building relationships, but he had, nevertheless, failed. And there was nothing he could do to change that now, he thought. It was done. Over and done with. He’d have to come up with something else. He walked over to the bar and got himself another gin and tonic.

On his way back to his seat, he stopped at the food station and fixed himself a plate of cold cuts, nuts and crackers. When the flight was called more than an hour later, he had not eaten so much as an almond off the plate.