The Un-Mullet
So.*I call it the un-mullet because, aside from a few truly terrifying minutes right after leaving the salon, I on the whole do not believe that the somewhat interesting shape and style of my hair right now could rightly be termed "mullet." Shortish on the top, longer on the bottom? True. Business in the front, party in the back? Not true. Resemblance to Rod Stewart? Debatable.
Perhaps I ought to start from the beginning.
In April, a few days after my 21st birthday, I cut off eleven inches of my hair to donate to Locks of Love, and wound up with a 1920's style bob of (for me) unprecedented shortness. I had decided to live out the awkwardness of growing this style out over the summer, so that my hair would be a respectable length when I returned to school in the fall. However, like waiting for a pot of water to boil, or watching the grass grow, waiting for your hair to grow out is painfully boring. After a conversation about this with Sara over the weekend, in which she encouraged me to get a "funky Asian haircut" while I was here, I decided the time was ripe for a bit of change.
So, after class on Tuesday, I hiked my bag up over my shoulder and headed down to the only barber shop I knew of, a recently-opened, rather trendy-looking salon sandwiched in between the supermarket and a small stand selling dan bing (a kind of fried egg-and-scallion pancake) and soft-serve ice cream. I ascended the stairs to the salon cautiously, almost timidly... the shampoo-scented air itself seemed full of the sense of something momentous about to transpire. I knew I could turn back -- a large part of me wanted to -- but I pressed on. "Ni hao, ni hao," chorused a number of trendy-looking Asian hipsters, swishing their hair out of their eyes and hiking up their dark aprons. I asked for a magazine to look at for pictures of hairstyles. After a bit of confusion (during which I was handed an issue of Chinese Cosmopolitan -- as if I would have come to the salon for the sole purpose of sitting down and reading a magazine) I acquired a small pamphlet featuring a number of Asian women with various hairstyles. I found a fairly normal-looking one with approximately my own hair length and pointed at it hopefully.
The stylist ushered me over to a chair, pulled the rubber bands from my hair, and talked for a pretty long time while fluffing and rearranging my hair, making motions which were evidently meant to help me imagine the style he was describing. I say evidently, because aside from the fact that I think he told me my hair was flat and needed more body, I had not a clue what he was telling me. Feeling more trepidation than ever, and with a growing sense that this had all been a horrible mistake, I watched as he began pointing to the picture below the one I had selected, a truly horrible haircut which many women in Beijing are currently sporting and which I would not wish to be visited upon my worst enemy. I assured him rather emphatically that I did not want that hairstyle, a kind of frizzed-out mullet with crimpy, bleached hair on top and long, fugly straggles on the bottom, and that I did not like curly (I made squiggly motions with my fingers) hairstyles.**
He seemed to take the point, and I was ushered over to a set of lockers, where I deposited my purse, and given a black cape-like gown to cover my clothes. A knot of terror was welling up in my stomach. I knew I had reached the point of no return as a new Asian hipster, with dark sly eyes and a fringe of brownish bleached hair, guided me into the back room for a quick shampoo. I lay there in silence as the water began running, wondering wildly if this was one of the coolest or (more probably) one of the stupidest things I had ever decided to do with myself. "Nei ge guo jia?" hardly more than a mutter, roused me from my thoughts. "Shenme?" I asked the shampoo-er nervously. I hadn't quite caught that. He repeated his question -- a simple query as to where I was from -- and I replied that I was American. Silence ensued. "I'm at BCLU studying Chinese," I hazarded tentatively in Mandarin. This was greeted by more silence, and scrubbing with some sweet-smelling shampoo. "Cool," my hipster finally replied in Chinese. "How long have you been in Beijing?" And so we chatted, on and off, before I was led back into the main salon area and the first stylist reappeared, brandishing a scissor and razor blade.
Hipster #2 perched himself on the counter as Hipster #1 began trimming my hair. "What do you think of Beijing?" #2 asked me in Chinese, then, to #1 "She's a student at BCLU. Got to China about two weeks ago." I told them both what I thought, and asked their advice on places to go in Beijing if ever I got a chance. Another hipster appeared at my side and handed me a cup of water, then lingered on the other side of my chair to join the conversation. Hipster #3 was called away shortly thereafter but was soon replaced by #4, this one a girl, who also arrived bearing water, although I had not yet finished my first cup. Little bits of blonde hair fell to the black cape and to the ground around the chair as I chatted with the twenty-somethings Beijingers, easily as fascinated by them as they were by my, this strange girl with her bright hair (one of them picked up a piece and stared at it, twisting it this way and that in the light, while another reached out to touch a small curl at the side of my head with something like wonderment). I had so much fun talking about everything from Long Island to Bejing bathrooms to Chinese pop music and the comparative beauty of American and Chinese women that I almost forgot to fear the developments taking place atop my head.
I hardly noticed as Hipster #1 enlisted the help of #5 and #6 (who had each appeared to join the little throng of stylists in our corner of the salon) to begin putting my hair in little curlers, and indeed, as I had my glasses off to make hair-cutting easier, I could hardly see what was happening anyway... but when another arrived bearing a little tube of chemical and I became aware that my entire head was done up in curlers with little pins and Q-tips sticking inexplicably out of it, I knew I had to say something. "I don't want curly hair," I told #1 again as plainly as I could, motioning again with my hands, "I want hair like the girl in the picture," I pointed again in the direction of the magazine, which had been left on the other side of the counter. I might or might not have a mullet at this point, but I was sure as hell not going to have an irreversible frizzy mullet to boot.
#1 started going on again about how my hair needed more body, that the girl in the picture had body in her hair and mine had none, and reassured me again and again that I would not have curly hair. "Fang xin, fang xin," ("relax, relax") he said, as amused by my obvious consternation as I was unamused by this sudden turn of events. "You won't have curly hair, you'll just have hair like in the picture." I was somewhat unconvinced, but it was at least clear that he wasn't trying to frizz my mullet out, just to use some Chinese chemical that makes straight, dark, glossy Asian hair have more body. What it was going to do to my soft, pale, mostly-straight-but-sometimes-a-little-frizzy Northern European hair, I had no idea, but with my 2pm dang ban ke (one-on-one class) looming ever nearer, I just wanted to finish up.
My hair was chemical-ed, rinsed, left to set, taken out of curlers again, and rinsed once more (this time in cold water) by Hipster #2, who had the best intuitive sense of how to talk to a foreigner. He had frequently served as a kind of interpreter for the other stylists, who often talked too quickly, or with too thick an accent, for me to understand over the buzz of hair dryers and the pressure of so many eagerly watching eyes. My mind was set at more ease as I joked with #1 and #2 about future trips to China (I was instructed to come and bring all my children -- "7, 8, 9, 10 of them!" cried #2, in a somewhat poignant example of what American marriage must seem like to the "One Child Policy"-bound Chinese) and a dreamed-of trip to America that #4 wanted to take. "You should definitely come to New York, it's the best state," I told him, screwing up my face as itchy little snippets of hair dusted my nose. "I'll come look you up," he assured me, grinning, "you can translate for me!" "My Chinese is way too bad for that," I told him, but he only laughed and urged me to "Xue xi, xue xi!" ("Study, study!") The joking had a bittersweet edge to it, though -- even a man like the one cutting my hair, with a good-paying job and a home in the country's capital, has about as much chance of leaving China for a vacation to America as I do of seeing the blue sky through Beijing's haze of pollution. The Chinese government makes it immensely hard for anyone to leave the country, especially to go to America, even if you are going there to work or teach.
These solemn reflections were set aside, however, as Hipster #1 finished his brief blow-dry job and fluffed my hair with an air of finality. "Put on your glasses," he told me proudly, and I did. Staring back at me in the mirror was a girl in a black cape, face white and eyes nervously wide behind their thick-rimmed glasses, gazing in horror at the pale, wispy mullet atop her once-normal head. #1 pulled at the fringe of uber-short bangs which ended a few centimeters above my glasses, and demonstrated (with a flow of Mandarin I was too horrified to try to catch) how the hair on my head could also be tucked behind my ears, or worn in front of them (hard to say which was more terrible, but I think the "tucked behind the ears" look was worse). The other hipsters gathered behind my chair, staring fondly at my hideous new hair, looking for all the world as if they actually liked the terrible puffy mass atop my head, and weren't utterly revolted by it. I tried to smile, though even I could tell it was more like a grimace. "Xie xie," I thanked them weakly, looking from one interested face to another. "You like it?" beamed #1. I couldn't even muster the strength to answer, but nodded mutely as I pulled out my wallet (from the purse that had been returned to me by #5) and groped for money to pay for my terrible mistake.
I hardly had time to contemplate the horror of what I had just done with the last two hours of my life, for my dang ban ke was fast approaching, and I had no choice but to hurry back to the main campus, catching terrified glimpses of my new hairstyle in passing store windows and raking my hands through my frizzy hair, desperately trying to lessen my resemblance to Rod Stewart on a particularly bad hair day. My ears were ringing with shame and panic. What had I done? "Your hair looks fine," came a bemused-sounding voice from the other side of the sidewalk, and I whirled around, caught completely off-guard by the sudden presence of English on the streets of Beijing. "Th-thank you," I stammered, catching sight of my accoster, a tanned, grinning, bespectacled thirty-something in a linen shirt, his bald head gleaming in the bright day. "I just got it cut," I called after him, panic still evident in my voice, and hurried through the BCLU gate to meet with my teacher.
I ran in to a few friends in the area outside our meeting place, and, to my complete horror, no one said a word about the horrific thing that had happened to my hair. The feeling of dread solidified in the pit of my stomach. All the fun I had had just shooting the breeze with a bunch of young Beijingers could not erase the horrible truth that they had given me a mullet, and a perm, to boot (although admittedly, just as Hipster #1 had assured me, it was not curly, just sort of poufy). I slid into the bathroom and tried putting my hair in a ponytail. It was too short. I tried to put it in two small half pigtails, a favorite style of mine for bad hair days. My fluffly little mullet fringe of bangs puffed up in the front and would not lie flat in the pigtails. I yanked the rubber bands out too, took a deep breath, and resigned myself. I went to my dang ban ke, answered questions and rehearsed grammar in a sort of hollow, mechanical daze, before plodding my way back to my dorm to do some homework and try to forget the distaster that my outer appearance had become.
After a few sentences of homework, and generous usage of colored highlighters in my attack of tomorrow's lesson, I was beginning to feel a bit better. I had a lot of cool new Chinese friends, an, um, interesting Chinese haircut, and was after all not in Beijing to model or look American, but rather to study a challenging language and immerse myself in a foreign culture. At HBA, as at Harvard, the most important measure of your worth to the people around you is primarily your intelligence and dilligence, not your attractiveness or your lack of an outdated hairstyle named after a fish. After all, I told myself reasonably, it's only hair. It grows back. I rolled off my bed and wandered into my bathroom, where I ran a brush through my hair and contemplated my appearance in the mirror. Now that my hair had fully dried, and I had managed to move the awful bangs off my forehead and merged them with the hair on either side of my part, I was struck by the realization that my hair wasn't actually that mullet-y after all. Wispy and a little bit poufy, yes. Unlike anything that has ever happened to my hair before, naturally. What I had in mind when I entered the salon, absolutely not. But a mullet? Not really.
*As Amy and Varun know well, every truly great story begins with a "So." Studies reveal that the emphaticness of the "so" is directly proportional to the awesomeness of the story.
**This isn't quite true. Curly hair is lovely, but I was trying at all costs to save my hair from the hellish visitation that is the frizzy Asian mullet, and (given my lackluster Chinese skills) a bit of subterfuge was definitely called for.
***In an effort to discover what the back of my head looked like, and how mullet-y my hair looked from various angles, I took a few shots of my new haircut, which can be found here, if you're interested. But I promise they're not that much fun to look at.
posted by Kelly @ 2:47 下午
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