Travel Diaries #28 - Barber
A short story about the iconic barbers of Hanoi, communication issues, forging relationships across language barriers, and being forced to sit with the discomfort of getting your hair cut.
I’ve never felt comfortable sitting in the barber’s chair. There’s something awkward about being faced with your own reflection as you try to talk to someone through a mirror. And imagine having a fella in to take a look at the sink or fix a socket in the kitchen and instead of making a few words of chit-chat over a cup of tea and letting him get on with it, you’re forced to sit in a chair facing your own reflection, and watch yourself as he walks around you and begins to get to work not on a corner of your house, but on your head, while half the world sits listening to you in the same room. Agony. Not to mention the fact you’re trying to have a serious conversation with half a haircut. And sure isn’t he the barber – how the hell am I supposed to know how I want it cut?! I’m in my thirties and I’m still not able to describe with much accuracy what I want other than
“Ara just give it a bit of a trim on the top. And a trim on the sides as well actually…”.
I guess you just have to sit with it.
One of the most iconic images of modern Hanoi is that of the barbers who practice their trade at the sides of the Vietnamese capital’s hectic streets. A barber’s chair sitting in front of a tree or a post with a mirror nailed to it, the tree also offering some respite from the sun, which swelters in the muggy summers. Cigarettes dangle from mouths, men in slacks and white vests wearing green army helmets on heads, The Lads loiter hunched over on the backs of parked-up bikes. The shit gets shot, life a throwback to the old days, which for now still remains intact.
The language barrier might cause some confusion, of course. But really, how much does any barber ever listen to you? How often do you just get the same haircut as everyone else that day, or does the barber just give you the same haircut he has himself? Just say as little as possible and get it over with. It’s only going to grow back again anyway. Sometimes the language barrier makes things easier, really. You can’t pretend to understand each other. Ngọc Anh was one of Tây Hồ’s best-known and best-loved barbers. He worked on the chicane corner on Tứ Hòa beside the burrito restaurant Salt ‘n’ Lime, just around from the lake. Younger than many of his peers, his familiar get-up of trendy thick-rimmed glasses and colourful flat-peaked snapback cap made him stand out, visually; the fact that he was deaf and mute also made an impression on his customers.
It probably made the whole process of getting a haircut a whole lot easier, to be honest. Less room for error. The barbers rarely spoke much English. All language is a lie, in any case, and trying to communicate the nuances of your preferred hairstyle to someone from the other side of the world through beginner’s English or Vietnamese is just asking for trouble. The less said the better. There was an already an implicit assumption that there’d be some miscommunication with this guy. But Tommy – as he called himself in the Asian tradition of adopting an English name for the benefit of foreigners – was a skilled craftsman with a gift of intuition, and for less than two euro he gave the best haircuts in town.
The less said the better.
Inevitably, the queues on the footpath beside his chair were often out the metaphorical door due to his popularity with locals and ex-pats alike. Once I was squatting on the low concrete wall that served his waiting area, feet planted amidst the bits of broken terracotta paving tiles, hiding from the sun in the shade of large green palms. I asked through gestures and exaggerated lip movements (he was a good lip reader) if I should come back later that day, or tomorrow, but he calmly encouraged me to be patient as he typed a message into Google Translate:
“I’m away for two or three weeks doing rehearsals for a show”
He was a dancer in a musical stage production. He showed me pictures of the show he was doing in a couple of weeks, his familiar beaming face sticking out among a row of young hip-hop dancers.
The things you learn.
And of course, he made sure that the few extra minutes I’d to wait in the shimmering haze of passing motorbike exhausts was worth it.
When I moved to the other side of town, my friend Jesse recommended a guy who was based off a small street between Kim Mã and Giảng Võ, a short but fairly congested bike ride away, right in the thick of the sprawling amorphous city centre. Unlike the more traditional barbers that lined Hanoi’s streets, Tuân*1 (pronounced ‘Twun’) even had his own shop, a narrow room with modern furnishings on a small alleyway, the walls covered in iconic movie posters, framed photos of pouting hair models and celebrating footballers, black and white images of chicks on motorbikes, and various messages in tattoo-style fonts.
Tuân, like Ngọc Anh, was around the same age as myself, give or take a year. He resembled a living version of the posters and imagery adorning the walls of his shop, rakishly thin with perfectly coifed and dyed hair which changed colour with the months, sleeves of tattoos on his slim arms, smaller than he looked owing to his build and his country of origin, his look matched that of many young barbers in a city where they’re either very old, or very young. Preparation for the haircut would always involve him giving me a complimentary wash and head massage at the sink at the back of the shop (a luxury his roadside industry peers generally couldn’t offer), before he’d urge me to “wait me one minute”, my arms trapped by my side under the black barber’s cloak tucked in around my neck, as he nipped outside to engage in the same local ritual as so many other barbers, mechanics, restaurant workers, or men of any profession or job the country over before they set about their task at hand: taking a huge long rip off his thuốc lào pipe, the potent bamboo tobacco water bong so popular with Vietnamese men. He’d come back into the shop, eyes watering and throat spluttering, and as I knew myself from experience with the stuff, powerfully stimulated to the point of light-headedness, ready to get to work.
Tuân’s English was limited to just a few nouns and verbs, with little in the way of grammar or connecting vocabulary, though he’d always make an effort. He took his efforts at speaking English seriously, each single word thoughtfully chosen and enunciated with a narrowed brow, like he was trying to envisage the word in the front of his mind and bring it into existence. There’s a physical effort required to contort not just your mouth but your whole body into speaking languages from the far side of the world; something I knew too well from my own similar efforts at speaking Vietnamese – at times he’d watch in the mirror as he’d stop moving around me in order to force out a sentence he’d carefully chosen, his effortful gasps and utterances sometimes mimicking the effects of a pre-cut inhale of his tobacco pipe.
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Unlike many tales of friendships formed through language barriers in distant lands, I wouldn’t say Tuân was the stereotype of the smiling friendly local. Sullen and a bit reticent, with a cool air of aloofness. He was always professional as a matter of pride and welcoming when I’d park up at his shop – he knew me through my connection to our mutual friend - “friend – Yesse”. We’d exchange simple bits of conversation about the goings on in our lives; he seemed to be always in a bit of bother with the missus, his wife of four years, usually for what seemed like a harmless bit of staying out late drinking with his mates.
The Tết holiday, or Lunar New Year, is a week-long celebration in Vietnam of equivalent importance and festivity to our Christmas. I happened to be getting a pre-holiday haircut and Tuân asked if I would come to his home for dinner one evening during the week. He was organising a New Year’s party for his customers. I was only delighted at the invite – the Vietnamese tend to be incredibly hospitable at this time of year, even to complete strangers and foreign visitors, and I’d known of many people who’d been invited to similar gatherings at the homes of friends, colleagues, landlords and strangers off the street in a way I couldn’t imagine being reciprocated at Christmas time back home.
Down a darkened alley in a part of the city I hadn’t been before I found Tuân’s parents’ house, where he lived with his wife and their four-year old daughter. Shoes off at the door, of course, as I was enthusiastically ushered inside to sit around the bamboo mats that covered the marble living room floor all the way to the kitchen at the back. The mats were covered in plates and dishes of uncooked food – thinly sliced meats, various bits of chickens from the body to the feet, clumps of beans and mushrooms and leaves and green veggies – waiting to be prepared by plunging into steel pots that would bubble on small portable induction stoves; the hotpot is the preferred cooking method for special occasions in many parts of East Asia.
Over the evening an endless ritual of taking food with chopsticks and placing it slowly into the pot before dishing out the results some minutes later to any plate that was half bare, local rice wine served by the bottle into shot glasses at quick regular intervals. A couple of Tuân’s friends spoke perfect English and helped with translation duties amongst us for the evening; my Canadian friend Jesse (‘Yesse’) , who’d introduced me to Tuân, and a fairly rude Chilean guy who also worked as a teacher in the city, being Tuân’s other western customers, and friends. Tuân’s wife hung about in the background while we chatted, ate, drank, smoked cigarettes and listened to terrible Vietnamese dance music on Youtube, his daughter occasionally breaking free of supervision to run in amongst the guests and the assortments of food. My carefully-selected gift to my host of expensive European beers were sampled and grimaced and politely laughed at, them preferring the known and gentler qualities of the 20 cent-a-can Bia Hanoi. Every so often the ubiquitous thuốc lào pipe was passed around, the smoking of which I always felt I must accept when offered as a duty of cross-cultural etiquette.
The weight of limited communication made our conversations over the evening that bit more meaningful, every word wrestled over in each other’s language charged with greater strength for it, as well as the touching generosity of Tuân and his family inviting us into their home in such a fashion. He explained that his daughter’s nickname was ‘Gâu’ – meaning ‘Bear’ – amusingly but affectionately named for her rather large size for a girl of her age.
The little Bear burst with life and the light of a blissful four-year-old, leaping and jumping and running around the place for the evening, climbing on my back from the couch as I sat barefoot and cross-legged on the ground, before running back to rock in the loving arms of her father, him clearly doting on her with a rare warmth he mightn’t have displayed too often in his shop by day. Tuân would periodically disappear to reassure his parents upstairs that everything was fine with the commotion downstairs and that we wouldn’t be up too late, the multi-generational living arrangements that are typical of Vietnamese life having him caught between playing the role of the teenager, the husband, the father and the young lad in his twenties who just wants to hang out with his mates.
It was several months later before I saw Tuân again. We exchanged a few words throughout the course of the haircut, as we always tended to do, partly due to the lack of mutual language, partly due to his generally brooding demeanour, and partly of course due to my on longstanding discomfort with the situation of getting my hair cut. He told me he was moving shop, to an address that sounded like it was farther to the south of the city and closer to his family’s home, away from the relatively central part of town his current shop was in. No more than the complete lack of language made sitting in Ngọc Anh’s barber chair a bit more comfortable for me, I enjoyed how the pressure of having to make inane chit chat with the person doing your hair was eradicated by the language barrier. Instead, the few words we exchanged held greater weight, meaning focused with laser efficiency on basic words, acute communicative performance being more manageable than the chronic labour of making small talk in my native tongue.
I wonder about his beautiful young daughter, the one with the endearing nickname who brought such a smile to her father’s face:
“Con Gấu thế nào?”
“How is the Bear?”
A lengthy pause as he searches for the words in English.
“Not…good” Tuân splutters.
His eyes well up and redden as I try to track his movements behind me through the mirror, looking as though he’s just taken a hit of the thuốc lào pipe.
He continues:
“Baby…
…no…
…me…”
Getting words out in English was always a challenge to him, though one he took on defiantly.
I couldn’t quite work out what he was trying to say. As many conversations often turn in these parts, we turn to Google Translate.
“Wait me one minute” he says as he takes the phone out and types out his problem on his device.
I take the phone from him with some hesitation, growing worried as to what crossing the language barrier might reveal.
“đứa bé không phải của tôi”
reads the Vietnamese text at the top of the app, the part he’s entered into the phone.
On the bottom in larger bolder text comes the translation:
“The baby is not mine”.
I’ve never felt comfortable sitting in the barber’s chair. There’s something awkward about being faced with your own reflection as you try to talk to someone through a mirror. Some things transcend language barriers. Sitting there with your face reddening as you try to empathise with the pain someone has just chosen to share with you, with your arms trapped by your side under the black barber’s cloak. Trying to maintain some measure of dignity and compassion, feeling entirely useless as you try to ask him if he’s ‘okay’, knowing full well that even if you could speak this other person’s language, you wouldn’t have the slightest clue of what to say to him.
The haircut halts, Tuân stops moving behind me as the physical exertion of contorting his body to speak commands every bit of his attention. Each word comes stuttering out, the excruciating pace this time caused not just by Tuân’s wrestling with the foreign language but the weight of what he’s trying to articulate, the meaning of every word focused with laser-like precision on each distinct word. Each word stabbing at his chest as he relays in agonising detail how he’d found out that his wife had been with another man some time before or around when they’d got married, a painful fact he’d only found out since I’d been at their home for dinner.
As he wipes his eyes and clears his throat, he continues cutting my hair, assuring me he’s fine and that things will be okay. He seems more angry than sad, his English laced with the usual defiance in the face of adversity.
The discomfort of life can often transcend all linguistic and cultural barriers.
And in your awkwardness you wish for nothing more than for everything to be lost in translation.
Your arms trapped by your side, trying to awkwardly track the other person’s movements in the mirror, with all the seriousness of someone with half a haircut, as they try to get to work in and earn their living in and around your head.
I guess you just have to sit with it.
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Unlike Ngoc Anh, Tuan isn’t my friend’s real name, for reasons which will become clear if you finish the story.
Man, I was not expecting that haircuck at the end.