WARNING: Unlike most other stuff on this site, this post has absolutely nothing to do with restaurants or food. Not even a little bit.
When you live abroad, sometimes the merest hint of dealing with local bureaucracy can fill you with bone shaking dread. Simple things that I had once taken for granted, like getting a sim card, take hours. Days, even. If you thought buying a router and connecting your internet was hard before, try doing it in Japanese.
Getting a haircut is basically like picking a ticket to a particularly dubious lottery, with very few winners and far too many self-conscious losers. My hair, despite being a mongrel mix of weird and wonderful ethnicities, is generally best dealt with by barbers sympathetic to and with deep experience of Afro-Caribbean hair. Clipper cuts might look easy in theory, but in the wrong hands you can very much come out looking a lot more military than you had bargained for, especially when you are dealing with restless curls.
Sitting down in a new barber shop brings me out in a cold sweat, in anticipation of the various pitfalls ahead. I have learnt to look out for these portents of doom. Wetting my hair before it is cut. Callously “lining up” my forehead and cutting off my widow’s peak. Going in straight down the middle with a clipper that is too short. Using thinning scissors. All of these generally mean the worst, and even though I usually catch them too late to stop, understanding their impact does at least give me some extra time to work out the shortest route to the nearest hat shop.
Many of these painful lessons were learned the hard way. Having moved round the world to Hong Kong, and a few short days before starting a new job in a law firm where suits and ties felt mandatory, I placed my trust in the hands of a local barber whose name I didn’t get and whose language I didn’t speak. Through a complex series of hand gestures and (as it turns out, deeply flawed) understanding of the differences between the metric and imperial systems, we agreed that I was looking for something short on the side and longer on top. I figure the man must have trained at the local prison, because the momentary relief of agreeing in principle on what was about to happen quickly and painfully evaporated as he went straight down the middle of my scalp with a clipper so short it felt like he was giving my head a Brazilian.
Though the experience of walking into a new workplace looking like a man who had recently been prepared for his last walk down death row to the electric chair was a painful one, it was, happily, an isolated incident. This is, slightly improbably, because of the incredible appetite of the Ghanaian community for exploration beyond their borders, and, perhaps more importantly, their propensity for setting up a decent barber shop wherever they land. Wherever I have lived in the world there has always been a kindly Ghanaian man who is skilled with a pair of clippers and bestowed with an entrepreneurial spirit. This is true of London (of course), but also Hong Kong and even Tokyo.
I love these men. Not only have they brought their considerable skills to foreign shores and saved hundreds of brown and black men the ignominy of a misshapen afro or the clean-shaven opposite, they have all somehow localized more than most expats ever could. They have learnt the language, met local wives and girlfriends, had children, put down roots, and all while battling the less-than-flattering stereotypes that East Asia foists on dark-skinned men. Despite their enthusiasm and skill, there is an invisible ceiling above which Lee, Sammy and the rest somehow cannot reach past.
Sammy’s client list in Hong Kong, managed by way of a WhatsApp group that just felt like a constant stream of brown-skinned fist-bumps, was basically a list of all the brown and black Western men in the territory, from investment bankers to Disneyworld dancers. I found him by simply asking a black dude I met in a bar. I thought I’d somehow gained entrance to a cool secret society, but it turns out I could literally have just asked any brown or black dude and they would all have led me straight to him.
Lee’s shop in Tokyo was a little piece of Accra on the second floor of a building in Roppongi that also doubled as a hub for the local Filipino community. Lee used to be a body builder and for some reason I am not sure of thought I was from Manchester. The faded photos on the wall that you stared at while getting a fresh cut were an odd mixture of him grinning with former Asian girlfriends and others of him in almost no clothes doing awkward body builder poses.
The challenges that Lee and Sammy face are not small. Disappointingly large numbers of East Asians still see dark skinned men through the awkward lens of the 1950s. Something novel, intimidating, impressive and alien all at once. The drug dealer/nightclub bouncer archetype still has legs out here. Sammy complained at me about this once. “They think we’re all selling dope” he complained as he brushed and clipped away. I sighed and showed sympathy, all the while knowing that my British accent and fairer complexion made it more likely that people thought I was a local tailor or garment importer. By comparison, drug dealer seemed quite sexy.
As it turns out, Sammy did once try to sell me drugs, including a questionable natural aphrodisiac, but I felt he was doing it when he misinterpreted my sigh, or perhaps took pity on me when he saw the glint of jealousy in my eye when I pretended I could also be mistaken for someone edgy enough to be casually offered drugs.
Vague offers of narcotics aside, the memory of these men and their happy-go-lucky spirit of adventure fills me with joy every time I think about them. Underserved communities coalesce around them and feed off the feeling of being at home in their hands. Their shops are quite apart from the cities they inhabit, but are indelibly part of its rich fabric. Their very presence gives international cities the right to be called just that. Without them they are just, well, places full of mainly the same type of people. Ten thousand bankers and lawyers couldn’t contribute as much as these men have to helping ordinary people go about their everyday lives with breezy-self-assurance. They are kind, adventurous and proud. And they all do one hell of a fade.
