My Hair｜A Parody
MONTHS before my graduation from senior high (a school that is not very strict about hairstyles), I started to wear my hair long. Feeling that I would enter the university brand-new, I neglected the upcoming apocalypse: every boy admitted into HNU must have gone through a hellish period: the military training - boys are required to get a crew cut to begin with. It’s a condemnation on all the pretty boys. I was fortunate enough to hear of the misfortune, so I cut my hair in advance, feeling rather debonair when seeing those flurried boys hurrying around looking for a barber’s shop under the horror that the training would start the next day. But my plan had to reset anyway. Blast it. Nevertheless, after approximately two years, I managed to fulfil the wish. Still, it is my first time to wear the hair as long, so it is expected that I’d encounter something unexpected. Let’s not touch sociology; that the suggested length of hair of a particular sex is the result of social construction – another important question, perhaps, but not mine. Let’s keep to me myself. What’s the effect on me of wearing hair long as a boy?
In the first place, it makes me feel it. Keeping your hair long does have this effect. Long hair produces its own sense of presence, and as a result, the subordinate of me makes me its subordinate. I wake up every day to see a Medusa in the mirror. A restlessness comes over me. I comb it, hard, and consequently it causes slight hair loss – totally normal, but another restlessness comes over me. Hairline receding. Hair transplant. Wig… These false foreboding always end by stressing me. Driven by that I ought to do something with it, I got it trimmed, 5 bucks, nothing seemed to have changed. As I was mourning for the unworthy purchase, my friend amiably acknowledged that I looked more thoughtful and intelligent than before. I contentedly claimed the compliment despite the credibility. My hair’s existence is ever-enhanced. I’m like a slave to it.
In the second place, it makes me feel different. Feeling that I’m wearing a headful of buds of marjoram, I must be the one and the only beauty in the streets. A camphor flower fell upon my head, tangled up in my hair. Ah, my Golden Apple. Mine. It was not as golden as I thought it would be. Before I could read the script on it, I saw other ones fall down. She’s got one. He’s got one. Big deal. Even the land got coronated. Plenty. Not mine anymore. I was not mighty enough to turn them into stones, I dared not cut off their costly hair that earned them each a glorious coronation, and limitations of this sort beset me on every side. Then a wind came and decoronated us all, under the belief that Aphrodite was not among us.
In the third place, it makes me look like a girl. I’m already fed up with it, especially when I went to the public loo. In they came, they flushed, they feared, they faltered, they flinched. Poor boys checked the M/F sign over and over. In they came, again, embarrassed. I’m not sorry. Maybe I am sorry. Misapprehending, impatience and impoliteness form an asocial trinity in the human mind, none of which are virtues, yet all of them will easily rise from daily communications. Communications are mutual, so is that asocial trinity. People misapprehend my look as female and I misapprehend their intention as malice. People are not patient enough to see me clearly and I’m not patient enough to explain myself. Thus, people have to apologise for their impoliteness and I apologise for mine (though mostly to myself). We have not yet learned to manage our condescendence and empathy; they are still entangled with our urge to get over with each other.
And this brings us to our fourth and final point: it makes me feel that I’m in control. My hair, my realm, my reign. Having seen me get a crew cut (out of an unwilling voluntariness), my grandpa exclaimed in schadenfreude, “that’s the right thing to do!” Oh, shut up. There is no righteousness in it. All men are short-haired, but I’m not all men. It is forced on us by the social conventions and stereotypes as the prototype of being “male”. It is also forced on us by our psychological recognition towards ourselves and others. I wear it long because I want to wear it long, not for the intention in which may lie the germs of unconscious obedience and of rebellious or radical deeds to overthrow the conventions. My mind in the society is, and ought to be, conscious and independent.
Reversed subordination, pseudo-uniqueness, late-coming empathy, conscious independence, I do know that someday I’m going to cut it off myself, willingly, not as an appreciative offering to the gods, nor as an intended breach of my Nazirite vow; but as a conscious act purely out of my own autonomy and as a reasonable wish to have control over my own deeds.
