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Tuesday, 11 March 2008

A close shave?

(published in Map Magazine, Nanjing, September 2007)

Finding a barbershop shave in China is extremely difficult for the more 'hirsuite' among us, as Benson Wallace finds out the hard way...

Those of you with heavy beards will know what a drag it can be to have to hack away at a stubborn beard every morning before work so that you can conform to the norms of respectability, and not scare away small children. Conversely, you will know how relaxing and liberating it can be to exercise your right not to shave when you're on holidays. An extension of this freedom, that I discovered while travelling in the developing world, is having someone else, a professional barber, shave that wild and untamed holiday growth for you.

During my travels, I had become so accustomed to this lifestyle, that by the time I arrived in China, I had ceased even carrying a razor or shaving cream. In India, for example, there had been an abundance of barbers just waiting to give you an expertly smooth shave, whenever you needed one, for about 5RMB (50 Euro cents). That said, I arrived in the Middle Kingdom at a time when I had been exercising that freedom not to shave a little more than usual – I hadn't shaved for four weeks, nor had a haircutfor about nine months – and found that I wasn't so well received this time around.

It would be the fourth time that I had set foot on Chinese soil, so for me, it was starting to feel like my second home. Obviously the feeling was not reciprocated, however, as I ran into some trouble at the customs checkpoint when I presented my shaggy, long-haired, bearded, prisoner-of-war-like self at the counter, looking completely different to the face on my passport. I was asked to present another form of identification, but unfortunately all I had was a driver's licence photo that looked even more clean-cut than the one in my passport. Thankfully, after a few more suspicious looks, I was allowed to pass into the country.

Seeing that I was continuing to get strange looks from the locals (more so than usual, at any rate), and that if I wanted to find a job, it was looking like I might have to take the advice of George Thorogood's 1993 hit single “Get a Haircut”, I decided that the first order of the day should be to get said haircut - and while I was on the subject, I badly needed a shave. Finding a barbershop capable of doing both of these things turned out to be a difficult task in a country where most men have about three hairs on their chin. I practically had to get quotes for shaving my beard - they'd look at me and say "you want me to shave that? Buddy, that's gonna cost you. I'll do it for 25 Yuan". Many times, I was refused service altogether. Sometimes, it almost felt like barbers would see me walking down the street and hastily shut their door and close their windows, like a scene from one of those old western movies where the lone gunman strides into town.






This is the kind of customer that even the most experienced of barbers has nightmares about










Eventually I found some cowboy in a back alley who did it with a blunt cut-throat razor for my target price, 5RMB. Then I discovered the real meaning of Chinese torture. Every stroke had me taking deep breaths, kicking my feet and squirming in my chair. I tell you, if you ever need me to confess something, just take me down to the local hairdresser's, strap me into the chair, and have them shave me with cold water and no soap.

Mind you, the price paid for a shave did not always correspond with the quality of the shave, as I was to find out through the rest of my journey – I had some reasonable shaves for 3RMB, and some very bad ones for 15RMB. Often, I was charged a “heavy beard surcharge” or “extra razor surcharge”, but a brand-new razor meant nothing when it was in the hands of an inept young girl who was working in a hairdressing salon that was a front for a "special massage" parlour.

Things got more difficult the further south I went (while northern Chinese can usually grow a goatee, Cantonese men have virtually no facial hair or body hair), and by the time I got to Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province (aka Canton), there was just no market for barbershop shaves. I don't think there is even a word for "razor" in Cantonese, and the word "beard" refers to the two long strands of hair poking out of a mole on your chin that you've been growing all your life.

Finally, after trying out a few of my local barbers after moving to Nanjing, and finding that the shaving process was not only painful, but also time consuming, I slowly began to let go of my stubbornly-held romantic notion of going down to my local barbershop for a shave every couple of days. I once read a piece of travel advice that went something like, "Countries aren't designed to make travellers comfortable. They're designed to make the citizens of that country comfortable". This certainly rings true in China, a country where a can of shaving cream costs the same as a day's wages for an average worker (and 2-3 times what it costs in the west, more to the point), and where most men change their razor once a year. I guess I'll just have to keep forking out for those Mach-3s after all.


Copyright Benson Wallace 2007

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