Singapore hairlines

Hair cuts used to be cause for great anxiety. When I was a teenager, like most of my friends, I didn’t want my hair cut at all. When, at a parent’s insistence, we had to get a haircut, the deepest hope was that the barber would spend 20 minutes spraying, cutting, combing and fluffing, and leave our hair looking just as it was 21 minutes earlier. It never quite worked out that way.

During graduate school, I let my hair grow long and wild. This was great, except on one or five occasions when I was addressed as “mademoiselle”. That may explain the beard I grew not long thereafter.

At some point, I lost this concern with my hair. I am now much more adventurous (read: lazy) and will let anybody have a go at it. If the barber gets it wrong, well, as my mother always said, the nice thing about hair is that it grows back.

Here in Singapore, I have tried a few barbers/hair stylists, usually on the spur of the moment when the need for a haircut coincides with the appearance of a barbershop in my field of vision. I’ve tried the 10-minute haircut express types, the 20-minute wet market types, and the 40-minute shopping mall types.

They have a lot of things in common. Scissors, for example. And radios playing songs with incomprehensible lyrics, whether in Mandarin or English. And they all have my face in the mirror in front of me. I think that’s why they give me magazines to hide behind, assuming that the constant sight of my face must be tough even for me.

I’ve kind of settled on one of the shops in the wet market near home. I never remember what it’s called, but I know how to get there, and have finally committed to memory the owner’s name. That would be Pauline, a pleasant and professional woman who knows more than enough English to understand my few instructions. Pauline is, I believe, Singaporean. Some of her staff are homegrown, and one or two are from China.

I now ask for Pauline specifically, but that hasn’t always been the case. When I went there in November of 2007 for my pre-wedding haircut, I walked in and announced my usual no-strings-attached reason for invading the premises: Is anyone free to give me a haircut? Two pretty stylists in skin-tight jeans (not that I noticed) figured out what the ang moh wanted, got over their shock, and put me in a chair.

Through a combination of mimes and the frequent repetition of “short” I conveyed the full extent of the plans for my hair. This quickly prompted looks of consternation and a rapid-fire exchange of Mandarin between them. I watched the three of us in the mirror, while listening to the debate rage behind and above me -- a kind of out-of-body experience. My wife, who is also Chinese, then came in, and soon the three women were firing volleys of dangerously pointy Chinese characters over my uncomprehending and vulnerable Canadian head.

Only late in the conference did I understand that the fuss concerned the irreconcilability of my wish to have a short haircut with the stylists’ conviction that one should never expose the hairline above the temples. Clearly, neither Sting nor Bruce Willis had ever made it big in their part of China. I let them have their way. Our wedding photos show a happy bride and groom. She looks stunning. He looks…odd. But it’s often that way, isn’t it? The ugliest guys get the most beautiful women.

After a few more tries at Pauline’s salon, I’ve realized that she is really the only one who knows what to do with an ang moh’s mop. I now stick my head in the door and quickly glance around for Pauline, while tossing a non-committal smile and nod at the pretty stylists who are as anxious to avoid me as I am to avoid them.

If Pauline is busy, I come back another time. I never phone ahead. That would violate Featherstone’s First Law of Hairodynamics: a barber’s suitability is inversely proportional to the need for an appointment.

Mark Featherstone is a Canadian and a Professor at the School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University. He should really do something about his hair.