Sidelines | Hanging by a thread of hair no longer

Sidelines is a column by CGTN's Social Media Desk

By the time I got my second haircut in March 2020, I'd looked like Grundgetta of Sesame Street.

Spring was forging on in Beijing then. But life in the city was still frozen in the epidemic driven fear. Discarded streets led to the still downtown where the barbershop I frequented had just reopened. Both weather and business were yet to warm up.

The first time was before the Lunar New Year which in 2020 came in January, the last month of an unforgettable year when different countries still had different agendas for the days ahead.

Normally there is a rush on cutting hair before the Spring Festival in China, which duly came and passed in 2020, and another one a month later. A haircut in the first month of the lunar calendar, as tradition has it, brings woes. Better do it on the second day of the following month, a ritual said could tip fate in one's favor. Whether you buy it or not, many people still loosely observe the convention. But the epidemic scuppered the second one in 2020 for many. Having nothing to do with anybody's haircut though, the fate of humanity did take a dark turn since then.

Trimmers and blowers sounded greetings from inside the salon. Face masks capable of blocking the trajectory of virus-carrying droplets was somehow powerless in preempting the ambush of shampoo smell and gel generated. Coming back to a place after a longer interim should be felt like seeing an old TV. Familiar details, strange sentiments.

The utmost length of time I can hold on cutting my hair without my colleagues mistaking me for somebody else is 40 days. Being more than 20 days overdue for a trim means I was a stranger even to myself. Beijing had contained the coronavirus fairly quickly, allowing hair-salons, among some small businesses back in service towards the end of February. But I was hesitant. How to get a haircut without removing the face mask eluded me.

The answer was we didn't have to. At least the handful of customers who preceded me to the hairdressers didn't, leaving it to the professional to maneuver along the strings attached to the face masks. A simple solution was wearing mask with band stretched around neck instead of ears. The epidemic had deprived us the normality as we know it from such trivium as cutting hair, dining out and going to work. We were forced to cope with a "new normal" of which the struggle between sustaining wildly untrimmed hair or cutting it wearing a mask was emblematic.

The customers coming on that day were still adopting the new way of life. We were sitting warily apart from each other like a bunch of hippies who couldn't find their hairbands in a hangover. Face masks protected not only our health but also dignity, before we could have one piece neater about life.

The unease was replaced by a bit of thrill as soon as I was seated, and the scissors started doing their wonders. As my forehead was being unveiled inch by inch, the face emerging in the mirror, still half buried in mask, looked increasingly strange. I hadn't seen myself in this short, neat, slightly spiky haircut for more than two months – and the concern at the time was, did I have to wait for another two months before coming back for another haircut because the virus moves in such unpredictable way? Looking from the side of my eye at the falling hair, I felt a mix of relief and powerless.

By the time the hairdressers finished I'd done a mental handshake with the me in the mirror, as if he was an old friend I hadn't seen for a while. Whatever that two and half months of time had changed about my looking was a little undone within one hour. Hardly anything else about our lives could be this quick. A look in the eyes of my hairdresser I knew he was busy but hopeful as people lined up to wrestle one bit of their old normality back from the pandemic's clutch.

Spring breeze greeted me on the quiet street, caressing my half-dried hair. It's refreshing, somehow strange and bitterly victorious like scoring one goal back in a contest where I had been trailing nil to 10. The pandemic had shattered the normality yet I, like many others, wasn't prepared to simply give in. Getting a haircut was almost a fight. Winning it, I'd had a tad of my old life back in place.

Thanks to the country's efficient anti-COVID-19 measures over the past year, we had gradually pieced our life togetheras it was before the epidemic, probably starting with that "fight" in the hairdresser. The Year of Ox had arrived in late January 2021 and another lunar February will come next week, time to observe the haircut tradition again.

Face mask still on the face, maybe. But more hopeful, surely.