Her belly daubed with rhubarb paste, weighted with a bag of sand and attached to a flashing contraption by electrodes, Aida Jiang is one of China's fashion victims.
"I can't wear tight jeans anymore. I feel like a gas balloon," she says. "I want people to think I'm only 20 when they see me from behind. Perhaps not my face, but my shape."Though still a very trim 30, she fears that childbirth has spoiled her chances of looking like her idol, Cindy Crawford, and the other gossamer models featured in her favorite magazine, the Chinese-language edition of the glossy French fashion journal Elle.
Cursed for centuries by famine, now China is fighting fat. And leading the charge is Jiao Donghai, medical doctor, rhubarb researcher and guru of tummy trimming.
Jiao runs Shanghai's premier fat farm in a ward of the Xiangshan Chinese Medical Hospital, an underfunded state clinic with a lucrative side-line in slimming potions and sweat-free exercise.
"In the past we could not even get enough to eat," he says. "Now people are getting fatter and fatter. We are nearly as fat as the Americans."
A survey he helped conduct discovered more than 70 million overweight Chinese. China's "little emperors" - the spoiled product of the one-child policy - are particularly prone to flab.
Schooled in both Western and Chinese medicine, Jiao first made his name treating obesity, gastric bleeding and other maladies with rhubarb-based concoctions. An academic press published a collection of his research papers. But now he increasingly caters to China's new narcissism.
Shanghai, the first city to banish Mao's blue boiler-suit, takes its appearance very seriously. Home to a galaxy of models and movie stars, it inherits a tradition of high-fashion glitz and cosmopolitan vanity.
"I'm not fat, but I want to look better," Jiang says, lying motionless as the pulsing electrodes of a "Multipurpose Passive Exerciser" silently massage her stomach. "It is very comfortable, like taking a sleeping pill."
Before connecting the machine, a nurse rubbed her stomach with rhubarb unguent, a beauty balm first used by the Empress Dowager - not a good a advertisement, since she was immensely fat.
Jiao claims to have improved the formula, using only carefully selected rhubarb roots - very different from the variety used to make crumble - from China's far west.
Jiang shuns exercise as unhealthy. "Run? Where can you run around here? Even at six in the morning the air is dirty. What good will running in all that filth do?" Swimming, she says, is even more hazardous: Public pools are grubby and those in hotels used by foreigners are riddled with the AIDS-related virus - or so a friend warned her.
But she worships foreign fashion.
The treatment room, crammed with narrow wooden pallets on a concrete floor, is more like a military field hospital than a beauty salon. It stinks of ammonia, cabbage and stale cigarette smoke. But all the beds are taken. None of the "patients" - all women - looks fat.
"I think I'm a bit flabby," says Zhang Lili, 40 and svelte. "My husband wants me slimmer and told me to come here and do this."
Dist. by Scripps Howard News Service