Gold Class Master Hairdresser
I was a little disappointed when the “Century Workmanlike Scissors” hair salon had a makeover and changed its name to “Century Salon.” But I got over it when I discovered Zheng Ping working there. He delivers a first-class haircut for 50 yuan (₤3.33) and he can talk a blue streak about most subjects, particularly about Sichuan. The first time he cut my hair, about a year ago, his daughter had just been born and he had turned down a chance to work in the UK because he didn’t want to leave his young family behind.
This decision has paid off: the girl who washed my hair this week informed me that Zheng Ping is now a “gold class master hairdresser” and his rate has gone up to 90 yuan (₤6). As usual, when I sat down for my haircut he told me that I really need to let him perm my hair. “You don’t believe me”, he said, “you’re afraid of the result, but I know.” “I do believe you”, I said, “you are a gold class master hairdresser.” This made him laugh and he told me, “you really understand Chinese culture.” All these years of studying the language and living here, and no-one has ever told me that I really understand Chinese culture until now, and he is my hairdresser.
I’m not implying that Zheng Ping is a bad judge of Chinese culture, in fact this week he gave me a lecture on local history. I was telling him about our trip to the ancient Sichuan town of Langzhong over Easter weekend. He knew it well and told me that it was a frontier town between Sichuan and the rest of China, the first city that people reached after crossing the mountains from the north. He said that the Sichuan basin was settled repeatedly by migrants from other areas. The original inhabitants, the Ba and Shu peoples, who were responsible for the 3000 year old Jinsha Culture (the extraordinary bug-eyed gold masks and other artifacts unearthed at several sites around Chengdu), were gradually pushed out to the remote parts of the province as others arrived. Zheng Ping said you can still see people in some areas of Sichuan who look like those gold masks, with pointed ears and protruding eyes, and they are the descendents of the Ba and Shu. I think he might have been pulling my leg there, but his main point was that the waves of migrants explain the open-hearted nature of Sichuan people. That’s why we Sichuanese are so sociable and open-minded, he claimed, because we have always welcomed newcomers throughout our history.
Zheng Ping’s great-great grandfather was one of those migrants and he arrived in Sichuan with only his bed-roll and a few tools. But he was successful here and by the end of his life had built a vast wooden house for his family. Zheng Ping’s grandfather grew up in that house but it was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and Zheng Ping never saw it himself. He stopped blow-drying my hair completely at this point to shake his head over the loss of that beautiful house.
During the Cultural Revolution Zheng Ping’s parents were sent to a remote area to work and they stayed to raise their family. He grew up in Aba Prefecture, on the Tibetan Plateau in the western part of the province. In the 90s I took several overland trips through Aba, hiking and hitching on trucks or riding interminably slow buses across the spectacular grasslands. There are only a few small towns, no more than a couple of cross-streets and a bunch of pool tables. Nomads ride into town to shop and play pool, and their horses hitched by the store-fronts lend a wild-west feel. The few Han Chinese are either working for the government or running small restaurants, but none of them seem very happy about it. So it was a pleasant surprise to hear Zheng Ping enthusing about his childhood there. It can’t have been an easy life: his older brother and sister died, and his mother still refers to him and his younger brother as “3rd son” and “4th son”, although he has been the oldest for more than 20 years. But Zheng Ping only talks about how beautiful it is in Aba, and the incredible hiking trips he took with his friends every summer. He said it was a wonderful place to grow up.
I asked whether he stayed there for high school and he said he did, and that he was influenced particularly by one very open-minded teacher, who taught him and his friends to appreciate their surroundings. This teacher had been a student at Beijing University in 1989 and, as a result of his involvement in the events of that year, he was exiled to a remote corner of Sichuan, like Zheng Ping’s parents before him. It sounded as though he had made the best of it, and made a deep impression on his students.
I thought about Zheng Ping and his teacher recently when I met the writer Qiu Xiao-Long, who was in Chengdu as part of the Bookworm Literary Festival. He has written a series of mystery novels set in Shanghai, featuring a poetry-writing detective, Inspector Chen. My friend Ingrid moderated his talk and took him out sight-seeing the next day, and I joined them for breakfast. We went to a small street lined with food vendors in an area scheduled for demolition and ate soft Tofu with chilli sauce. One of the stalls was called “Lao Geming” – Old Revolution, which caught Qiu Xiao-long’s eye. He told us about a restaurant in Beijing that caters to the nostalgia of Educated Youth who were sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. It serves food like millet porridge and bitter greens to guests seated cross-legged around a kang, a raised square oven that is the centre of rural homes in northern China. The restaurant has guest books, different ones for different provinces, where former Educated Youth can search for their old companions and leave messages saying “I was in such and such a village in Hunan Province, call me on this number if you remember me”.
Ingrid said that made it sound as though some people had positive experiences at that time, perhaps some did enjoy learning from the peasants and building the new China. But Qiu Xiao-long said that for the vast majority it was a bitter experience. As young people from the cities they were ill-equipped to cope with manual labour and harsh rural life and they were generally not welcomed by the local people. He said that many young women were raped by village leaders, or were forced to sleep with them to get permission to return home to the city. “Those who do have fond memories are not nostalgic for the experience”, he told us, “they are nostalgic for their youth.”
This decision has paid off: the girl who washed my hair this week informed me that Zheng Ping is now a “gold class master hairdresser” and his rate has gone up to 90 yuan (₤6). As usual, when I sat down for my haircut he told me that I really need to let him perm my hair. “You don’t believe me”, he said, “you’re afraid of the result, but I know.” “I do believe you”, I said, “you are a gold class master hairdresser.” This made him laugh and he told me, “you really understand Chinese culture.” All these years of studying the language and living here, and no-one has ever told me that I really understand Chinese culture until now, and he is my hairdresser.
I’m not implying that Zheng Ping is a bad judge of Chinese culture, in fact this week he gave me a lecture on local history. I was telling him about our trip to the ancient Sichuan town of Langzhong over Easter weekend. He knew it well and told me that it was a frontier town between Sichuan and the rest of China, the first city that people reached after crossing the mountains from the north. He said that the Sichuan basin was settled repeatedly by migrants from other areas. The original inhabitants, the Ba and Shu peoples, who were responsible for the 3000 year old Jinsha Culture (the extraordinary bug-eyed gold masks and other artifacts unearthed at several sites around Chengdu), were gradually pushed out to the remote parts of the province as others arrived. Zheng Ping said you can still see people in some areas of Sichuan who look like those gold masks, with pointed ears and protruding eyes, and they are the descendents of the Ba and Shu. I think he might have been pulling my leg there, but his main point was that the waves of migrants explain the open-hearted nature of Sichuan people. That’s why we Sichuanese are so sociable and open-minded, he claimed, because we have always welcomed newcomers throughout our history.
Zheng Ping’s great-great grandfather was one of those migrants and he arrived in Sichuan with only his bed-roll and a few tools. But he was successful here and by the end of his life had built a vast wooden house for his family. Zheng Ping’s grandfather grew up in that house but it was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and Zheng Ping never saw it himself. He stopped blow-drying my hair completely at this point to shake his head over the loss of that beautiful house.
During the Cultural Revolution Zheng Ping’s parents were sent to a remote area to work and they stayed to raise their family. He grew up in Aba Prefecture, on the Tibetan Plateau in the western part of the province. In the 90s I took several overland trips through Aba, hiking and hitching on trucks or riding interminably slow buses across the spectacular grasslands. There are only a few small towns, no more than a couple of cross-streets and a bunch of pool tables. Nomads ride into town to shop and play pool, and their horses hitched by the store-fronts lend a wild-west feel. The few Han Chinese are either working for the government or running small restaurants, but none of them seem very happy about it. So it was a pleasant surprise to hear Zheng Ping enthusing about his childhood there. It can’t have been an easy life: his older brother and sister died, and his mother still refers to him and his younger brother as “3rd son” and “4th son”, although he has been the oldest for more than 20 years. But Zheng Ping only talks about how beautiful it is in Aba, and the incredible hiking trips he took with his friends every summer. He said it was a wonderful place to grow up.
I asked whether he stayed there for high school and he said he did, and that he was influenced particularly by one very open-minded teacher, who taught him and his friends to appreciate their surroundings. This teacher had been a student at Beijing University in 1989 and, as a result of his involvement in the events of that year, he was exiled to a remote corner of Sichuan, like Zheng Ping’s parents before him. It sounded as though he had made the best of it, and made a deep impression on his students.
I thought about Zheng Ping and his teacher recently when I met the writer Qiu Xiao-Long, who was in Chengdu as part of the Bookworm Literary Festival. He has written a series of mystery novels set in Shanghai, featuring a poetry-writing detective, Inspector Chen. My friend Ingrid moderated his talk and took him out sight-seeing the next day, and I joined them for breakfast. We went to a small street lined with food vendors in an area scheduled for demolition and ate soft Tofu with chilli sauce. One of the stalls was called “Lao Geming” – Old Revolution, which caught Qiu Xiao-long’s eye. He told us about a restaurant in Beijing that caters to the nostalgia of Educated Youth who were sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. It serves food like millet porridge and bitter greens to guests seated cross-legged around a kang, a raised square oven that is the centre of rural homes in northern China. The restaurant has guest books, different ones for different provinces, where former Educated Youth can search for their old companions and leave messages saying “I was in such and such a village in Hunan Province, call me on this number if you remember me”.
Ingrid said that made it sound as though some people had positive experiences at that time, perhaps some did enjoy learning from the peasants and building the new China. But Qiu Xiao-long said that for the vast majority it was a bitter experience. As young people from the cities they were ill-equipped to cope with manual labour and harsh rural life and they were generally not welcomed by the local people. He said that many young women were raped by village leaders, or were forced to sleep with them to get permission to return home to the city. “Those who do have fond memories are not nostalgic for the experience”, he told us, “they are nostalgic for their youth.”
posted by Cat Platt at 4:17 pm
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