h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I looked around at h2g2 and thought, seeing this entry;"I'd like to post here two real stories about my shopping adventures.
This is about getting a haircut by Chinese profs.




The past few weeks I’ve been daydreaming about what I could do with my grey/darkish hair, since I suddenly slightly felt like I was a member of the marginal guild of painters and artists and the like.

Maybe a little horsetail?
Yurghh, just like all those other frustrated guys in their mid-life crisis who feel they need to take motorcycle lessons and find a girlfriend half their age, make some claypots in a workshop every week and go cry at a haptonomist about their battle of life.
Lost battle, lost time.
Besides that, I have to admint that I’m a little choir-boy deep down inside, but there are worse problems than that.
So I decided to cut it all off. I’m fortunate that both suit me well.

In my neighbourhood , unfortunately , there is a hairdresser who infuses his customers with racist chats. The “oh my god, don’t look at me, I feel I’m a loser “-gaze can be clearly seen in his eyes.

A couple of hundred meters further down the road, is another hairdresser and that’s a relief to me. He’s an old man.
His barbershop is an old-fashioned one, with a floor and basins of granite, and the chairs date from the fifties. His radio is always tuned to classical music. I experience it each time as a relief when I’m there.
He has only one shortcoming; he cannot cut!

So most of the times when I’m there, I’m taking the lead and tell him what to do from the very first minute. Despite my control however, he still sometimes manages to cut a huge part of my curls. When I complain about it, shocked, his fatherly reply is often: “well, it’s just hair anyway”!
That answer puts me in an unescapable coma at the moment that I realize that all mankind is like the universe: absurd.

Unfortunately, the very old man is ancient and is close to his death. Therefore, with each visit, it’s always a gamble whether he’s still alive.
And indeed, after having spent a good part of the summer at my workshop near the Belgian border, I read the following note at his shop door after my return: ”because of private circumstances the shop is for the time being closed”.

Probably the man has now reached the loony Roman Catholic “limbo”, where people who cause doubt within god’s mind about where to send them, must sit and wait.
Anyhow, this is really bad news! What to do now!?


Heroically, I take my decision to flee my neighbourhood and almost by basic instinct I walk into a rather poor area around three o’clock. Looking around from my bicycle I see a small pub with its door wide open, showing five men sitting at the bar.
I enter it and ask if anyone can tell me if there is any barbershop in this area.
One man appears to have the guts and capability to descend from his bar stool and tells me with a paralysed tongue that there are as many as three barbershops; “with all very sweet babydolls”.

After this alcoholic recommendation I decide to check out all three of them and eventually I choose for a Chinese hairdressing salon. Possibly from a subconscious faith that they might be people who can understand and handle a person like me.

I simply do have a passionate hate against all those trendy hairdressers, with all their ins and outs, who would turn Alfredo inevitably into a clown and that would know that the inside of me already ís one, so he could never act by surprise any longer. That would be a sell out of lunatic opportunities.

I enter the Chinese haircutting world and immediately a solemn and nice Chinese lady of about forty years old comes straight to me .
She is wearing alluring black clothes and she must have spent at least one hour this day for all her make up. For me she did not need to do that, but in the early morning she probably didn’t expect someone with the name “Alfredo” would come along to try a Chinese haircut.

I ask her if I can have a haircut and I can walk straight to an empty futuristic chair where the action will be performed.
As soon as I sit, I ask with lots of care, if the radio could be turned down a little and she addresses a boy of 25 summers. He changes the broadcasting station, and suddenly the radio produces hard Rock music.
You may already guess the problem; they speak and understand almost solely Chinese.

My inner tension starts to increase tangibly.
My throat gets almost strangled with some kind of towel, but I do not falter, because I must first and for all create a new survival strategy.
Furthermore I am wrapped up in a conventional, white hairdresser dress.


While my hairdresser starts to cut very firmly, a beautiful young Chinese woman - who enjoys this globe for about 21 years – walks away into a backstage room. Despite all my doubts, after a few minutes I still decide to get involved in real life contact with my Chinese cutting lady. Besides that, we áll know, that if our body is being touched for a while, ány human being starts to talk. So do I.

At that moment I hear someone coming in our direction from the backstage room and I suddenly ask my lady smoothly: “is that your daughter, who is entering now?”
The lady is not at all amused by my words, seeing her face in the mirror; “shé, my daughter?? My daughter, shé !!“

I thought that my inviting words could really become a bridge between our very different worlds.
But the source of her bewilderment appears to be an old, shuffling Chinese granny, a generation we Dutchmen almost never get to see, because they are doomed until death to fold egg rolls in Chinese kitchens. They seldom come outside, just like the cooks. I know, because I once had a Chinese friend and was a regular in all kinds of Chinese kitchens.

In the eyes of my lady - as the mirror shows me - I can read that mány diagnoses are crossing her mind about this Dutch farmboy she’s cutting right now.
Well, I thought that the young beautiful person who just went báckstage was returning with the same age. To me that seems rather predictable. Time goes fast, but even in Alfredo’s world there are limits.

Well, it really made her silent, even towards her colleagues, and that’s véry uncommon, as far as I understand the magical Chinese life.
So I decide she needs a few minutes to relax.

My frightened soul tells me however, that her way of cutting does not permit a silence longer than three minutes. Also under hér control gaps in my beloved hair are clearly created, just as my former old man used to do. My hair needs to be saved again.
With full speed I think of a strategy and tell her what my wishes are about my very own hair.

After two minutes she appears to be ‘fed up with me and says firmly;
“me now cutting, you looking later in mirror”


“Me now cutting, you looking later in mirror”?!
Where ám I?? Whát’s happening here? Is there any help? An interpretor maybe?
No help to be discovered, not anywhere near anyway. No mediator to be found.
So I do capitulate at last, but still I pray for a second to Maria about all my sorrows and yes, it appears to help. After ten minutes I am permitting myself to conclude that with this result, I’ll survive my cycle tour through town as long as I’ll bike directly to my appartment.

Maybe Maria has nothing to do with it. Maybe this year it’s the Chinese “year of the rabbit”. According to Chinese astrology, I am “a rabbit” and when it’s your year here at this planet, you get a little help from your cosmic friends.


As a finishing touch, she hurls a mirror around my head for a second or two and all I say is;”O.K.”
Still, a last doubt crosses my mind en I ask her, while my finger touches the back of my neck; “You shaving here?”
“Yes, yes, shaving here” and I can tell from the look of her face that for this extraordinary client of her ,she is willing to make a little show by swinging trimmers around my neck.

Finally it’s time to pay.
“How much do I owe you?”
“Thirteen euros and fifty cents”.
I pay fourteen euros and leave the 50 cents at the counter. Not the slightest idea why, but this question shrinks into nothing, when I look at all the other questions that came up into my mind in the last hour.


On my way home I suddenly meet my “television daughter”. She works in a TV production company and works around the globe. Now it appearently hás to happen, that on this fragile moment, it’s her who must see me my new look and yes, what I already feared ……
“What has happened to yoú?!”
I get off my bike.
I tell her the whole story and at the end of it I ask her; “what’s better; with a cap, or without”
“Uh, well, take your cap off”, she asks and I show her the Dutch-Chinese culture clash that reshaped my head.
With a soft undertone, full of empathy, she replies; “you better leave it on”.

Arriving at home at last, I decide instantly to put all this drama into a new story, which is very good to calm down my nerves. Next to that, once it’s written I don’t have to tell the whole story over and over again, while friends and children can estimate what they can expect when they meet me somewhere in the next four weeks.

“China is booming”, is what I often hear and read these days.
Indeed, very “booming” in my experience.
They júst do things their very own way!
Even when Alfredo is around!



Alfredo, December, 2006.