Haircuts: His First Time

BEIJING — I waited until the barber finished cutting my friend Zach's hair to ask the question.

"Is this first time you've ever cut a foreign person's hair?"

"Yes."

It wasn't surprising. This tiny salon occupies a few square meters next to the eight-lane Fifth Ring Road. If, as some say, the road marks the end of "real Beijing," then the barber shop lies right on the boundary. Thousands of cars speed over the shop, rushing somewhere else.

The store doesn't seem to mind. When we stopped in the middle of a Saturday afternoon, two women watched a variety show on CCTV-3, a national television station. Two others snacked an early supper – fried rice and a bowl of sliced cucumbers. There were no other customers.

A man with dyed auburn hair greeted us through the door. He directed Zach toward a middle-aged woman, in charge of giving the pre-cut wash. She was careless, allowing water spill out of the snack and onto our clothes. She made Zach and, later, me dry our own heads with a green towel.

The barber worked quickly. He didn't try to solicit information about our favorite styles, he just grabbed a pair of scissors and a comb and started cutting. The strokes were short and quick, each one taking a small bit of hair as the two blades snapped together. He started on the left side, went around to back and on to the right. The top was next, sideburns saved for last.

He blew my hair dry and handed my glasses back for an inspection of the haircut. No complaints; this is my best haircut in months. I had one more question for the barber.

"Is cutting foreign people's hair different than cutting Chinese people's hair?"

He thought about it for a second. "No, not really," he said. "Foreign people's hair has more oil. Other than that, it's the same."

—

These "Haircuts" articles are designed to offer a peak into the Chinese barbershop, but since I use a different shop each time and only get my haircut every month or so, it's really just a furtive glance. Another American, Benjamin Ross, may soon know more than any other Western about the workings of a hair salon over here. He's working as a trainee in Fuzhou, a city in Western China, all this month. His blog entries on the experience, available at http://www.benross.net/wordpress, are fascinating.

"Haircuts" is an infrequent series about haircuts, the people who give them and the styles they dish out.