An Asian Do

While wandering the streets of Pohang by myself the other evening I ran across a Korean hair salon, recognizable by its barbershop pole featuring women, instead of the traditional red and blue stripes, whirling around the spinning pole. Despite the fact that I was desperately in need of a haircut, I walked by the salon, too lily-livered to jump into foreign cosmetology. Instead I gathered my courage by visiting a street market and purchasing five clementines, having learned that purchasing four, for unknown reasons, was not satisfactory to the friendly clementine merchant. With the false sense of courage that is derived from a successful commercial transaction in a foreign language, I plunged into the hair salon with reckless abandon, ready to take on negotiating a haircut.

Fortunately, the hair stylist was alone this late in the evening, so there would be no witnesses to my ineptitude. I stuck my head in the door and quickly communicated my need for a haircut by holding my bangs between my two fingers. The cosmetologist bravely assented to my wordless request and motioned me to come in and take off my coat. She sat me down in the chair in front of a surfboard-shaped mirror and said "Cut?" I nodded yes and tried to indicate by grasping my bangs between my two fingers that I wanted about a half an inch taken off. She appeared unfazed by my gesture and my inability to communicate and held out a pair of scissors and an electric clipper, indicating that I should choose between the two. Not wanting to restrain her artistry, I shrugged my shoulders non-committally, and she unhesitatingly chose the shears.

I was starting to come down from my market success high and had at this point noticed that I hadn't exactly chosen a high end salon. Somebody else's black hair was on the floor around the base of my chair. Likewise, there were little hair clippings unrelated to me on the weighted plastic-covered mantle that held down the apron she had draped on me. I started to look around more closely, desperately hoping that I would see one of the those cylinders of green barbicide packed with sanitized combs that are standard at any American hair salon. Nada. I started to think about Marty's niece Willa's cosmetology book that was loaded with color photographs of diseases and vermin and started wondering if I had been a little rash.

Before you get the wrong idea, let me assure you that South Korea is a highly-developed, very modern, clean country. Every fifth person on the street wears a mask over their mouth, indicating that they have a cold or other communicable disease that they are trying not to communicate. Our hotel lobby and other public places have hand sanitizers readily available. When Marty and I used the subway in Busan, there were four sanitary workers armed with spray bottles who ambushed unsuspecting travelers with forced hand sanitizing. And let's not even get into the butt-washing toilets.  Basically, Koreans seem perfectly clean and free of excessive head scratching. I reassured myself with these thoughts and rationalized that having someone else's hair within close proximity to my body is not a particularly life threatening situation.

My Korean clipper chose to spritz me with water, although a shampooing sink was nearby, and confidently started cutting away, no questions asked. Initially, her style seemed identical to my American experiences, and I relaxed. Once she finished the first go-round in her reassuringly familiar style, she started clipping more rapidly and randomly all around my head in a frenzy of Olympic-level haircutting. Now you may remember that I had tried to indicate that I wanted a half an inch taken off? One and a half- and two-inch pieces of hair started to fly off. She was going for it.

This isn't my first encounter with foreign haircutting. The best haircut I think I ever got was in Germany where I was completely unable to communicate with the stylist, my German being only slightly better than my Korean because I happen to know the word "kindergarten." I loved my haircuts from Gerome, my French hairstylist who was almost everything you expected a male French hairstylist to be. The one thing Gerome was not, however, was talkative, so I once made the mistake of trying a different hairstylist in the hopes of getting in a little French practice at the salon. The Guadeloupan hair stylist whom I foolishly substituted for Gerome certainly talked a lot more; in fact whatever she was talking about clearly agitated her so she babbled on rather violently, paying little attention to where her shears were landing. Needless to say, I contritely returned to my quiet, little Gerome.

In Gambia, we had no professional hairstylists, so I relied on the skill and goodwill of a friend. While traveling outside of Gambia, however, I was once desperate enough to try cutting my own hair with the itty-bitty scissors on my Swiss Army knife. For fashion reasons, it's probably best to avoid the Swiss Army cut, but when one is bathed in sweat and buried under a hat in the blazing West African sun while coated with many layers of sunscreen, it's really too late to care about one's hair.

I should also note that I got a buzz cut once when starting a long distance bike trip that was going to require three months under a bike helmet. No one from home, except Marty, ever saw this cut because I wisely got it after saying goodbye to all friends and family that I may have wanted to see again. Curiously, my hairdresser at the time got great pleasure from shaving my hair to a half inch length.  In hindsight, perhaps I should have found that alarming. More recently, I had a tatoo-covered male hairstylist who shampooed by rubbing my head rather too vigorously in the same place, over and over again. I thought for sure I would have noticeable hair loss in that one spot.

This is all just to say that for someone with rather unremarkable hair aspirations, I have had my share of hair adventures. I figured I could handle whatever Korea was willing to dish out.

After the whirlwind of shearing, spritzing and snipping, my Korean hairstylist started blow drying what little was left of my hair. While blow-drying she used her second of three English words and looked at me and said "Shampoo?" Knowing that I was covered with tiny little hairs that would get every where, I quickly said, "Yes, please." She blithely continued blow-drying, leaving me wondering if it was just a tease.  When it was all done, she declared it "Beautiful!" and I paid $7 and went on my way.

You are probably wondering about the results. Well, the best way I can describe it is to say that I look like a teenage Asian boy with attitude. No Korean woman I have seen has a haircut like this. In fact, while traveling on the bus yesterday, I finally saw a Korean with a haircut like mine. Sure enough, this teen, whose gender I found myself debating, sat in the back row of the bus, just behind me. I imagined him wondering whether that middle-aged Caucasian in front of him was a man or a woman. Gender-ambiguity aside, it's a technically good cut and well worth the $7. I've done far worse in America, and androgyny is under-rated.