There used to be a barbershop outside the gate of a school. It had been there for years, and its name was as plain as the place itself: Affordable Haircuts.
It was nothing like the hair salons that crowd every street corner with names promising “professional styling” or “image design.” There was no glossy décor, no bright front desk, no display of hair products arranged to look expensive. The whole storefront was less than ten square meters. Inside were two battered leather chairs, their surfaces cracked and worn, two rectangular mirrors stuck to the wall, one washbasin, and a few wooden stools. In the corner near the entrance sat an old fourteen-inch boxy color television. In the opposite corner, a narrow staircase led up to the second floor.
The barber was a middle-aged man, probably in his forties or fifties. There was a scar on his face, and he almost never smiled. In summer, when I went in for a haircut, I would often see him in a gray vest, his thick yellow-brown arms exposed, sitting on a wooden stool and watching television. His golden retriever usually lay peacefully beside him.
“Hello, I’d like a haircut,” I said carefully the first time I stepped inside.
He did not look at me. He simply stood up, gestured toward the leather chair with one hand, and kept his eyes on the television without saying a word.
After draping the cape over me, he glanced at my reflection in the mirror, picked a pair of scissors out of a box, and began cutting. The process was not very different from other barbershops: first he shaped the hair with scissors, then used clippers to remove the extra length, washed it, dried it with a blow-dryer, and finished with a few final snips. What made him different was that he never tried to make conversation. Sometimes he would even stop in the middle of cutting and stare fixedly at the television. It was as if, apart from the drama playing on the screen, other people’s lives held no interest for him at all.
When he took off the cape, I looked at my newly shortened hair in the mirror, then turned around to scan the payment code on the wall. Beside it was a sheet of white paper with the prices printed on it: men’s wash, cut, and blow-dry, ten yuan; women’s, fifteen; students in junior high school or below, five; seniors over sixty-five, five.
After paying ten yuan, I did not hear the usual WeChat payment notification. I showed him the screen on my phone. He only glanced at it briefly and nodded so lightly that it was hard to tell whether he had actually seen the payment page.
People say it is unlucky to get a haircut in the first lunar month, but many barbershops raise their prices during that period anyway. With my hair growing longer, I decided I would go back to Affordable Haircuts and get it dealt with there. On the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, I returned to the small county town where I worked. The next day, I went straight to the old shop.
The street was still lively, but Affordable Haircuts was gone. In its place was a new shop called A Ming Hair Salon. Beneath the fresh signboard was a completely renovated interior: bright lights, swivel chairs, new mirrors, and even a reclining shampoo basin, the kind customers can lie back in.
A young barber sat in front of a computer. He had a fashionable haircut, wore clean, formal-looking clothes, and had a knot tied neatly at his collar. As soon as he saw me, he stood up and greeted me warmly.
“Come in, handsome. Haircut or styling?”
Since I was already there, I thought I might as well not go somewhere else. After I sat down in the chair, the barber adjusted its height, looked at me through the mirror, and asked with a broad smile, “What kind of style would you like, handsome?”
“Just cut it short.”
He took a pair of scissors from his pocket and started cutting. While he worked, he asked where I was from, said my accent did not sound local, then asked why I had come here for work and whether I had a girlfriend. I answered politely. Then he suddenly stopped. I looked up and saw my hair in the mirror, uneven and half-finished, and turned to him in confusion.
Still smiling, he asked whether I wanted to sign up for a membership card. I declined, but he kept going.
“There are lots of discounts with a membership. A wash, cut, and blow-dry is only twenty-five, and perms are thirty percent off...”
When it was time to pay, I asked how much it was. He had his back to me and was sorting towels. Without turning around, he said, “Thirty-five.”