Storytime Tapestry Newsletter

The newsletter devoted to spreading love and cultural awareness around the world.

April 7, 2007

Wonders of the Orient

A Kun (Jastine) Leng Column

Shadows Behind Fashion:

In West China, Sighs of Worry as Teenage Dropouts Increase

Jastine Leung

Xichang, Sichuan, China -- Stepping out of the front door, I was blinded for a moment by the white, fizzing sunlight.

It was a really warm day, an unexpected heat that bridged the cusp between spring and summer. I was on my way to the hairdresser’s shop after I last did my hair four months ago.

The hairdresser’s shop was in a long room above a supermarket, reached by a steep flight of stairs. There was a groove worn in each step by the customers who climbed and descended in a regular stream.

This was first time I had ever come to the place. It smelled of cigarettes and hair oil. At times the smell of popcorns would climb the stairs along with a client and when the door opened the waiting girls lifted their noses together.

“Just get that mop of mine cut,” I said to my young hairdresser, who pointed at me with two fingers, a cigarette wedged between them. Then I seated myself in a light, updated swivel chair with foot pumps that kept silent as the hairdresser adjusted the height of the seat.

I watched him fish a pair of scissors with delicate blades out of his case and get down to his work.

To hold boredom at bay, I glanced around. Colorful photographs of female models with various fashionable hairstyles hung above a picture rail that ran along the wall. At the end of the room, a row of chairs were employed by a number of patient customers.

In front of me was a full-length mirror flanked by shelves overflowing with a mixture of plastic combs, bowls of blue liquids, shaving mugs, scissors of different sizes, hair brushes and, stacked neatly in a pyramid, ten bright red tubs of Arch.

I eyes my hairdresser when he trimmed my bangs.

A callow youth with spiky maroon hair. His visage was so thin that his cheekbones highlighted incongruously.

“How old are you, MM?”

I was startled by his outburst question, for he was silent for most of the time, except when he broke off from cutting and took a drag on his cigarette, sending a wisp of grey blue smoke like the tail of kite twisting into the air.

“Seventeen,” I replied. “And you?”

He looked up from his work at hand and glanced into the mirror, seeing me looking back at him. He smiled. “Nineteen.”

I was once again stunned. “You didn’t go to a college? I thought guys your age should be in colleges...”

He remained speechless for a spit minute. “I dropped out of junior middle school at 14.”

“Why?”

“I did rather bad at school. Moreover, I come from the countryside and I’ve got a bunch of brothers. My family could not support all of us to school. I am the second oldest and the oldest hadn’t even got into school. The younger ones are also leaving one by one after primary school.”

“What—what are they going to do?” I asked.

“Do manual labor like building, or learn certain skills preparing to work as chef or hairdressers, just like me.”

“So, how about your salary?”

“It depends. We obtain only 25% of the fees customers pay. The rest is for maintaining the shop.”

“And your family approved?”

“As long as we could collect enough money to support ourselves...”

I felt a bittersweet sensation plunge in my stomach. I dashed a squint at the photographs of models with fashionable hairstyles on the walls, and fell into musing.

With its integral interests in design, from bangs to ringlets to the whole cascade of hair, pure black as well as colorfully dyed, the hairdressing industry’s contribution to people’s imagination on the head is something so ubiquitous now as to seem commonplace. Fashionable hairdressing bends the rules and exaggerates everything. What we call hairstyles have long been melted into lifestyles. We are now more and more desperately needing the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe our peculiar like for all the latest in the continual creative play of urban life.

It has almost never crossed anyone’s mind that dark shadows might be lurking somewhere in the glory.

“Middle school dropouts, from 17 to 20, from poor counties, diligent and na?ve—they are at least 90 percent of my workers,” said Mr. He, an owner of a hairdresser’s shop in the commercial district of central Chengdu.

Mr. Liu, one of the renowned senior hairdressers in Xichang city, confided that he himself had just graduated from primary school. He was capable of writing nothing except his name. “Almost all my employees hold the same education degree,” he added. Mr. Xiao, the only worker there that had a diploma of a junior middle school, said he was suffering from a sever stomachache. “My pay would not allow me access to better food,” he said with frustration.

As far as I am concerned, a number of village juveniles in the poor west region of China drop out of school at an average age of 15 and begin the work of their life—dish-washing, hairdressing, and waiters etc. Approximately 63% of them are forced to leave school due to the poverty of their families, 27% due to rather dissatisfying performance at school along with inability to catch up with the lessons, and about 10% are out of visceral dislike for studies, according some rough statistics. Their income per month is usually 300 yuan, to a large extent robbing them not only of the sumptuous lives enjoyed by their urban contemporaries but also of the precious dreams of youth.

For all the worry over the youngsters’ future, a sociology professor analyzed, “Admittedly, they would breath new life into fashion industry due to their deftness and creativity. Meanwhile, they might better prepare themselves for adulthood and grasp certain basic skills earlier. But what about their personal quality? They are still immature in both psyche and physique, to say nothing of their insufficient education and narrow views, which determines that they can not possibly improve with themselves even though they achieve huge success in their career. I think it’s not doing much good, in that it stifles the possible development of the youth while leading the whole industry to a lower quality of service; furthermore, it brings the society a surplus flow of callow attendants, which would not benefit much. I personally suggest that the local government regulate juvenile education in order to better improve the overall quality of the population.” Finally, the anonymous professor characterized West China’s hairdressing climate and landscape as open and permissive, like stretches of blue sea ot sky, explorative and adventurous, ripe with possibility and peopled by those who sought that out. “But it might leap to zenith had more people of higher quality been involved.”

When my hairdresser had finished, I hopped down from the seat and saw a cascade of hair run down the length of my shoulder, glistening charmingly in the sun. Aftermath I paid 6 yuan to check out.

The sun was still strong when I reached the pavement outside the shop, but it was less fiery now, already beginning to drop from its zenith.

Jastine Leng

 ghoul_pink_fantasy@yahoo.com