Now I’m through with my course, and moving back and forth from country to country, life to life, I find that I’m never quite sure what to write for my monthly post. While I was taking my Counselling Psychology Masters, I could easily tell the story of something that happened or something I’d learned over the last month as an ethnographic moment in an unfolding journey. Now, after graduation, life has a less certain form, and my experiences can’t quite be fitted into a narrative. Yet I still like the idea of attempting to pull things together once a month. For this month, at least, I’m going to take a different direction, reworking material from a diary that I keep. I’ve recently been reading Ruth Ozeki’s novels: first A Tale for the Time Being, and then My Year of Meats. These texts are very rich, and I’m now dipping my toe into The Book of Form and Emptiness. Ozeki’s writing often links two very different places, through characters who inhabit each space and yet are not quite at home in in. This speaks to me of my own life in Vancouver and Singapore, with the occasional visit to London. And it’s got me thinking about rituals of everyday life in both Vancouver and Singapore, and the people I meet who also inhabit these in-between spaces. Let me begin with cutting hair.

I always let my hair grow a little too long. I forget about it until it starts to bother me. In Singapore, this is when I can no longer push my hair back: when no matter how I brush them, strands begin to fall over my eyes. In Vancouver, in the winter, it’s when I come in out of the cold and take off my toque and my greying hair refuses to be brushed or combed back into order. It’s only then that I call my hairdresser and make an appointment.

C. Her salon is in a small, forgotten mall, tucked upstairs next to the Korean and Mainland Chinese restaurants, the one that serves very good 饺子。You pass a small private gym that is always empty, hang up all those layers of winter coats on her coatstand, and wait on the big black leather couch for her to finish with her current customer, or to emerge from the little booth behind a wall in the corner of the salon where, she has confessed, she watches K-drama compulsively during her free time. When I arrive this time she has a Korean client, a small woman with a grey pixie cut. They are just finishing. The sounds and cadence of the language are familiar to me from my own compulsive K-drama binges, from Signal, It’s OK Not to Be OK, Vincenzo, and most recently, Extraordinary Attorney Woo. Those stories that are so well crafted they reach out of the screen and grab you, so that stopping the next episode from starting becomes an act of iron will.

The syllables trip over themselves. She sees me and smiles, introduces her customer to me in English. A few more clips, and it’s all over. The client pays up, takes her coat and a black quilted velvet handbag, with a soft pompom attached to its handle, which both women proceed to admire. Only $20, the customer says to me proudly on her way out.

So long, C. says, your hair. How many months? After we put the cape on, she first takes me to wash my hair in the shallow basin at the back of the shop, with its soft chair and groove for my neck. She shampoos and washes and then cradles my head as she dries it, almost as you might hold a heavy fruit in your hands. A sense of absolute confidence in her as my muscles relax: she is sure of the weight of a human head, just as a football player is sure of the weight of a ball. At the end of the process there’s a moment when we both work unconsciously together: she wraps up my head with a towel, and at the same time I raise my head and then stand up, return to the cutting chair, that chocolate leather leather and chrome throne in front of the big mirror with its baroque frame. 

She bustles. She wears her baseball cap all the time. She is tall, big-boned, strong. At sixty, she is a grandmother, and she still goes out for runs in Stanley Park each day. Even when it’s raining, she laughs. She doesn’t mind the rain. 

She cuts my hair very quickly. Koreans are always moving so fast, she tells me. That is why I can cut your hair very fast. And that is why Koreans will not wait, even if there are only two or three people in line. They will go elsewhere. And I laugh and say that in Singapore if you see five people in line you’ll join it, because there must be something good on the end. She smiles back. After thirty or more years she still does not quite fit here. Her English is good enough for communication, but limited: at times we bump up against the edges of language, and I have to rephrase. But I sense that she is happy in this lack of fit. Her family is in Seoul and from time to time she will fly to see them. She will show us pictures of her grandchildren. But she loves being alone. She has a camper van painted a bright dayglo orange that she parks in the streets nearby, each day in a different place. She’ll take off every now and then by herself, to go and pick blackberries on the Sunshine Coast, or drive on a longer road trip all the way down into the States. Then she’ll come back, go back to cutting hair for her regular clients and for the tourists that come from Japan and Korea each year. She likes Vancouver, I sense, for the possibilities of solitude that if offers, the absence of the constrictions of social expectation.

In the silences I look in the mirror, and see pieces of the salon reflected back at me, shattered. Red terracotta tiles on the floor. A chocolate-coloured ceiling that matches the colour of the chairs. White walls, punctuated by electrical outlets. The click of the scissors. We talk again On Netflix, K-Dramas are at the very best six months behind the current trends. She updates me. Do I know that Song Joong-ki, the star of Vincenzo, has married again? An Englishwoman. They are expecting their first child.

She finishes quickly. She looks at me from several angles, makes a few final clips, an experimental touch or two with the trimmer. Most often, my partner is waiting for her turn. We trade places. I put on all those layers of winter clothing again, but when I turn to say goodbye to C., she is already absorbed by her new customer. She moves on, quickly. First the cape, attached with Velcro. Then the washing. I’m left standing.  So I go out, down the stairs, out of the door of the mall, feeling something of her delight in being alone, the crowd on the street that thins as I make my way into the heart of the West End, the breath of cold air on the nape of my neck and the rims of my ears in the thin winter sunlight.