Oh how I loathe thee. Before I even came, I knew it was going to be about as straightforward as deciphering meaning from a Hu Jintao speech. Forget dealing with the bureaucracy, the language issues, eating things you once thought were poisonous, getting a proper haircut here is by far the hardest thing you’ll have do if you plan on staying a while.

This is the process of getting your haircut in China.

You walk into the usually large shop, where there will most likely be a set of couches in the middle with 15 of the 16 staff sitting watching a movie or sleeping. On entry, the one person actually doing work is the peon that has to open the door and greet you, and upon doing this a few of the staff will look up, notice you aren’t Chinese (if you aren’t Chinese that is), mumble something, then all of the sudden you’ll have 16 pairs of eyes staring at you as if your space ship just crash landed outside and you’re looking to do some bum busting experiments.

After some chuckling in what I can only assume is the “who wants to wash the dirty foreigner’s head” game you’ll be guided over to the hair washing station, laid down and borne witness to the most excruciatingly painful head massage you’ll ever receive. It seems they want to remove most of your hair by squeezing it from your skull before you even get the cut. It’s so horrible, that after my first experience with this, I’ve always made sure to inform the washer that they don’t need to waste their time or my brain cells on the techniques they stole from Guantanamo.

Once your seated in the barber’s chair, some guy (not many girls do the cutting, they just aren’t feminine enough) will come over and ask what you want done. If you can speak somewhat decent mandarin prepare to have exactly the opposite of what you want done. If you can’t speak mandarin, this is the part where you slap yourself across the face for trying something so dumb and you bolt out of the store, heading home to a cereal bowl and rusty pair of snips.

The guy will proceed to cut your hair, continually cutting and cutting, until you physically stop him by man handling him to the ground. I don’t know what the deal is, but they keep making little touch ups to parts they’ve already cut as if they missed something. They do this to every part of your head. The real trouble is that this will be done to the point where you could have your own brand of cleaning products.

If you’ve survived up to this point, you’ll be lead back to the hair wash station for another go to get rid of the little particles of hair, which I have to admit is a nice touch that I’ve never had back in Canada. Once that’s done you head back to the chair, they’ll dry you off and proceed to give you a style that’s straight out of a Japanese comic book, but will turn into a drunken birds nest the moment you step outside into wind. The silver lining is that haircuts including the wash run anywhere from 20-70rmb, which works out to less than $10 in the most kitschy places.

I’ve been lucky. I’ve had about 8 or so haircuts since I’ve been here, and most have been ok. The first 4 I had were acceptable; they were all at the same place, from the same guy. One day however, I returned to this place and got a different guy, and he fucked my hair up so bad I actually went to a different place an hour later to get it fixed. I have never had to that before in my life. To give you an idea, he basically shaved the sides of my head really short, but left the top really long. Remember Kid n’ Play? Yeah neither do I, but I’m sure he looked more dapper. I suppose I could have told him I wanted the top shortened, but I was afraid that he would make it as short as the sides. I went to another place to try and get it fixed, and of course, they made the top as short as the sides, resulting in me looking like what I imagine an ubergeigh commando would look like. Sorry gay army commandos, nothing against you personally but your hairstyles are wank.

Thankfully my hair grows back, and quickly. So I began trying out a series of different places trying hard to find a half assed shop to get my hair cut (asking for a full ass is asking too much). On my most recent excursion last night, I enlisted the help of my Korean friend, to try one of the Korean shops out. For some reason, even with my friend translating for me, there was something very complicated about “TAKE 2 CM OFF EVERYTHING”. First they seemed to think I wanted to have my hair shaved with a number 2 shaver. My cat like reflexes pulled the electric shaver out of the stick-like barber’s hands before he had a chance to do anything dirty. Then he seemed to think I wanted my hair cut down to just two centimeters. Finally, I got some paper, and made a drawing like this to explain what I wanted done.

The guy took a good five minutes to look this over, examine it as if they were studying the blueprints to an engineering marvel of modern man, and then…disappeared. He came back a short while later with a book with all kinds of whacky styles in it, and pointed to what was surely the only white guy in the whole damn book, with hair that looked….wait for it… 2 centimeters long! My patience was lost at this point, and I told my friend “JUST TELL THEM TO CUT 2 FUCKING CENTIMETERS OFF, HOW FUCKING HARD IS THAT ?!?!” but it actually came out as “please please 2 centimeters, I’ll buy you some bibimbap later!”. Worked like a charm. The guy got to down to business and did a surprisingly better job than I’ve had done at the other places I’ve been to. I told him to remember me and to do the same thing next time. So I’m praying he doesn’t get kidnapped by some North Koreans or something. You gotta watch your back round these parts, those crazy bastards are everywhere.

The bottom line is that bald people have the advantage over here. Of course, with the process you’ve got to go through to get a haircut, it won’t be long before you’re one of them.

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