“Lion Hair” | Annie Zheng | Nonfiction

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

look nice; rather, the consequences of that haircut only seemed to fuel the resentment I felt in those days, partnered with grief, hormones, and turmoil toward a mother who knew of no other way to communicate but through frighteningly honest thoughts and short, clipped sentences.

I was my mother’s child and her only daughter. It was no secret that I inherited the dominant masculine traits of my father and my father’s mother. In her eyes, I was lacking. Perhaps I always would be.

So, I thought, at last stepping away from the mirror—I had become a lion.

When I was young, my mother was placed in charge of my hair. Sometimes we would fly to New York for weddings. There, she would declare a hair appointment necessary with one of the Chinese hair salons in Flushing Chinatown because they were “better than the Americans,” so to speak, though it’s not like I could ever tell a lick of difference. In the summers we spent in China, I would suffer through three-hourlong sessions strapped to a hard leather seat, hair slicked with chemicals underneath a plastic cap, and made to sit straight while a bulbous machine hovered above my head, radiating heat. All the while, she would sit beside me, or across from me, sometimes nowhere even near me, and get her own hair done. A perm, at times a straighten, sometimes just a trim, before returning her attention to her daughter. She spent far more time on me than she ever did on herself.

“Why do we have to do this?” I once asked her, head plunged under the faucet in my bathroom sink at home as I leaned over the counter, spine aching. My mother vigorously scrubbed gel into my hair. I wasn’t sure what kind, just that it was one she’d been cajoled into buying from the hair salon. It smelled like gasoline.

“To make your hair straight.”

“My hair is already straight,” I said, shutting my eyes. A wash of cold water hit me.

“Not straight enough. This makes it healthy.”

But what does that even mean? I wanted to ask, but then there came another wash of gasoline scrub.

According to traditional Chinese standards, my mother wasn’t exactly pretty. She was a tiny woman—enough so that if someone knocked her over, her bones would probably break, just like a small bird—and she had thin hair. When she was younger, her hair covered her entire head; now, she had bald spots. She used to hide them—comb-overs, ponytails. It wouldn’t make the bald spots go away, but at least they wouldn’t look quite so severe.

Perhaps in some ways, one might imagine that she lived vicariously through me, her child. A snot-nosed, fat-faced, half-sloven daughter of a mother who used to live in the dankest dredges of Fuzhou when she was a child and never got to wear pretty dresses in school, or eat meat buns fresh off the stand, or purchase books instead of renting them for a few RMB at a time, all because she was poor, and nobody thought she was attractive. These were her words, never mine.

In many ways, I imagine she simply wanted the best for me, and this was her only way of showing it. Over and over again, haircuts, treatments, straightening.