Me, Me, and Me | Hyunyoung Cho | Visual Art

Me, Me, and Me, Hyunyoung Cho, photograph

It cost hundreds of dollars each time, discounting the one experiment in the basement of a piss-poor renthouse. My hair was one of the things she could control. It was one of the things, among very few, that she could give me—something which she could never have.

It was sometime in late middle school, I think, when I stopped letting my mother take me to hair salons. Instead, I made my first appointment at Great Clips. I wanted my hair short. Shorter than it had ever been.

Soft, caressing hands brushed across my scalp as the hairdresser rinsed the soap from my hair. This hairdresser liked to chat, I noticed, but I simply wanted to listen.

After washing up, they set me up in a chair and began to cut and we passed into a gentle quiet.

To myself, I began to wonder. What would my mother’s reaction be when she saw my hair? She’d been the one to give me the money and send me off, but she hadn’t been the one to raise the idea. Would she dislike my new hair? Would she think it ugly? Would she be ashamed of this daughter of hers, whose hair was untamable? I can’t say I ever liked her tyranny over my hair.

But for a moment, I thought bittersweetly as the hairdresser finished up and brushed off the loose hair from the cape and presented myself in the mirror—it looked alright; not good, not bad, just alright—it didn’t even matter. Because I was

here alone, for the first time in my entire history of appointments—and that had been my choice.

At fifteen years old, I made a stupid, impulsive decision. My mother found me in the bathroom, alone. Her face was stricken, and her mouth was taut while I stood there, scissors in hand, motionless, waiting for reprimand or assurance or a smidge of anything, as long as it would spur some kind of reaction from her, before lowering the scissors and meekly asking if she’d help me finish the back. It would look too terrible otherwise, I thought, even if there was hardly anything left to save. She took up the scissors.

Snip, snip.

The hair fell away, onto the tiles in the bathroom.

All was quiet, save for the blades next to my ear.

Snip, snip.

If asked, I couldn’t tell you what I was thinking back then. Why I decided to shear off nearly all my hair. Just that I’d been upset. That I’d been grieved. Toward the world, my mother—maybe myself.

Snip, snip.

My mother hardly said a word. It wasn’t the first time she’d been stunned into silence, but I did wonder what she thought.

Mechanically, she pulled out an electric razor from underneath the sink and began shaving.

It was then, I realized, that this was the first time I had let my mother touch my hair, perhaps in years. She used to be the one who took me to appointments. She was the one who chemically straightened my hair, and who, unknowingly, had somebody turn me into a lion—but she was also the one who used to cut my hair.

Just trims. Quaint. Peaceful. We did it right in her bathroom, straight over the bathtub so that the hair would catch in the basin. She treated me so gently back then when she touched my hair, reverent like she was touching something precious, like something she wished she could have called her own back when she lived, destitute and unpopular, in Fuzhou.

No, I thought softly, looking at her tiny body. What she touched was her daughter.

We never said I love you to each other. In China, you don’t say that; it was just the culture. Just like how we didn’t say “thank you” to people close to us, or how we celebrated New Year’s every year with sticky rice and moon cakes. Instead, you showed it through your actions. Whether that be fruit left at the doorway after a fractious argument or slaving away twelve hours every day in a Chinese buffet in order to afford that once-in-a-lifetime trip overseas for your only daughter. For all that she’d given me in appointments, money, and severity, she had also given me this.

“Is this alright?” she asked. She didn’t say whether it looked good or terrible, though she would later tell me that anything was better than my lion hair from when I was eleven.

I touched my hair tentatively. I knew she didn’t like it. Her face was flat, her brows were furrowed, and her lips were pursed, like she badly wanted to say something but refrained. This was hardly the kind of haircut she would have wanted her daughter to have, but I was the daughter she did have.

And for her, that was enough.

“Yes.”