Haircut, Round III

I'm an alley rat. I get some weird pleasure taking random turns through the alleys near my apartment with loosely defined missions of finding some random service or product. Little business districts pop out of nowhere - an entire alley of seafood with water running out of a hundred tanks and into the streets, a used-furniture alley, the chopping block alley with live ducks and chickens awaiting your execution orders. Dotting the alley's are people running phone rooms, tailors, game rooms with 80's arcade games, neon lit brothels, cigarette & baijiu stores, and salons. I was on the prowl for a massage joint. It costs about $3 for an hour long and thoroughly strange massage and I figured I'd treat myself for no particular reason.

Bright lights caught my eye reminding me that I needed a haircut. I detoured into an alleyway salon and took a seat. I whipped out my pocket dictionary and pointed to the side of my head and said, "short", then pointed to the top and said "not short." Hopefully that would do and they'd get my point - which explicitly was to not shave my head like had happened in Tianjin. I made little visual cues as to how short I wanted it.

I was bombarded with a long, fast stream of Chinese. "Wah boo hway shwaw Hanyu [not pinyin, I know]/ I don't speak Chinese," I told them in a horribly mangled accent. More Chinese. Not even a little bit slowed down. I repeated myself. I gave up. Maybe the inflections in my English would get the point through: "Dude, I don't speak Chinese."

They got it.

A young lady grabbed a clearly marked "shampoo" bottle off the shelf in front of my chair with proceeded to spray four inches of white foam on the top of my head. She began a 15 minute process of massaging it in.

It began again. A million questions in Chinese. I picked out one I thought I was hearing correctly and told them I was American. I told them I was an English teacher. Confusion. People start walking into the salon from the street to see the laowai getting his head massaged with white foam who doesn't speak crap for Chinese.

A man kept getting closer in closer. Without my glasses I could only see a blur of him in the mirror. I turned right and he was staring at me from about six inches away with the wild eyed joy of a six year old poking a dead alligator with a stick. We both broke into maniacal laughter.

For the remaining 12 minutes of my massage was a endless sequence of someone asking me a question in Chinese, me shrugging, and then uncontrollable laughter - especially from the girl rubbing her hands through my hair with the white foam. There's some strange acid trip of a feeling of having someone else touching your scalp and there being no ability to communicate. It gets weirder when sharp objects enter the picture and the actual haircut begins.

Now is a good time to point out a big cultural difference between Americans and Chinese. The Chinese viewed my presence with curiosity and benign humor. Never did I feel like I was being made fun of. Everyone felt bad for not being able to speak in each others language. In America, most barbers would be profoundly annoyed if a Chinaman came in speaking hardly any Chinese and wanted a haircut. You're in America, speak English[!], right?

I think that's been one of the biggest buffers keeping me sane in China as a non-Chinese speaker. The Chinese seem to have endless patience for foreigners, want to be helpful, and what comes off as rude - the endless staring - really is just an inordinate amount of curiosity. It's nice living somewhere where a sense of humor can come across even without words.

Tags: Treyopia short stories stories haircut hair cut language humor China Chinese Shenzhen alleys streets salon