Lion Hair Annie Zheng
The renthouse had a stripped-down mattress splayed on the ground in the basement, draped with a thin, baby blue comforter. It was the first thing I noticed when I went down there. At the bottom of the staircase, there was a plastic stool, some newspaper laid out on the floor for easy clean-up, and a mirror above a sink. There was no bathroom in sight, but there was a Chinese man who worked in the kitchen of my family’s Chinese buffet restaurant. Stiffly, my mother beckoned me over. “Say hello,” she said. “Hello,” I mumbled, a shy child. “Say thank you.” She pushed me forward. “Thank you,” I said to the man because I was my mother’s parrot. He set to work. It only took a few minutes to sit me down, clasp one of those hairdressing capes tightly around my neck and cut my hair. I was eleven years old when his scissors decided my fate for me. Snip, snip. I watched as pieces fell. Snip, snip went his blades. My hair had been down to my lower back then; I didn’t think much of it when it came time for me to cut it again. My mom wanted me to trim the rough edges, smooth out what had been growing into a wild mane, and our annual practice was set in stone, even if this was our first venture with this stranger. When the man was done, he gestured for me to look at myself in the mirror.
My hair had been shorn to my shoulders. Earlier, he had asked whether I wanted layers, and because I had only ever heard the word “layers” used by pretty, white girls coming back from the salon, hair shiny and neat and voluminous, I immediately blurted yes. That had been my mistake. That day, my mother paid him in cash for cutting my hair. When we arrived home, I headed straight into the shower so that the loose bits of hair on my neck and body would wash off. After I stepped out and let my hair dry, praying madly that a miracle would happen, I looked at myself in the mirror again and paused. It was certainly—voluminous, I thought, cringing. It was, however, not neat and not shiny. In fact, my hair puffed out and stuck up; I was like one of those psychotic-looking blue-haired pets from Dr. Seuss, the kind of bland, picture-book story that was forced down our throats in third grade. “You look like a lion,” my mother remarked. She stood in the doorway. I chewed the inside of my cheek. It was hardly a compliment. “I don’t like it,” I said. I could already imagine all the rude stares I would get in the hallway at school. She flinched unexpectedly. “I know,” she said, before walking away. Later, I think she felt guilty. Later, I think, if given the chance, she would go back in time and slap her daughter so that I wouldn’t say yes to getting layers. It didn’t
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