Last Day With Long Hair

Its hard to put my finger on things sometimes, every once in a great while there is a moment of clarity, of knowing who I am and why I’m here. Or maybe the moment is not knowing those things but being content not to quite know. I look back at the things I’ve done and I wonder if that was really me, or someone else. I’m letting down my hair, because this will be the last time in a while I will feel it crazily waving every which direction over my shoulders and covering my neck. Lately, although I like my hair, it has become very burdensome, a heavy awkward thing. My wavy hair is the style for HK this summer, but it feels sort of like a let down.
Six years ago, the last time I was in HK, I was still a kid barely out of High school full of insecurities and full of the drive to prove myself, yet terrified. It was a hard experience for me to be here, with my boyish haircut and figure everyone thought I was a guy. At first it didn’t bother me, I was more or less used to this, having had short hair on and off since I was eleven. But, eventually among the loneliness of being a foreigner and the angst of wanting to be at least recognized as a girl if not recognized as Chinese, I broke a little inside. I remember getting my hair cut in Hong Kong in 2001 and almost crying when the barber thought I was my dad’s son. I remember that year, my first year in College, feeling like I was two people, such a fractured little girl realizing how angry I’d been, realizing how proud and childish I was. It was sort of a monument, or milestone in my life to visit Hong Kong that year; I remember reflecting on the last time I’d been there and how much I’d changed since that time.
Ten years prior, when I was eight years old, going to Hong Kong changed my life. That time it was because we were going to christen my Dad’s marriage to my step-mom by having a Chinese marriage banquet. I can’t recall much of that time because it blurs together with all my other HK early childhood experiences. We essentially picked up some additions to our family. Being eight I didn’t understand the gravity of the situation and I didn’t realize till after Annie, Jackson and Vivian came with us that they were staying indefinitely. I remember Annie’s family crying at the airport, and Vivian and Jackson crying. I felt bad, I didn’t know how to feel, I felt almost guilty that I wasn’t the one to be moving away. An entire new life appeared before my eyes, a new family, and a new existence. Another ten years passed along, I got taller, adolescence happened and then I was back in Hong Kong. I was walking around as a young woman instead of a little girl, but still very childish. I didn’t know what to do with myself; I felt self conscious, and very masculine, very tall, very skinny and very white. I hadn’t yet come into an understanding of what it meant to be me, to be my Euro-Asian self, and so Hong Kong helped me to know my Dad’s history a little better, but it also made me wonder what else I didn’t know about who I was. When I got back from Hong Kong and started my second term at OSU, I decided to grow out my hair. It was time for a change, I wanted to explore my Chinese-ness and my hair came to be a symbol of that, a symbol of that experience in Hong Kong and the uncertainty it brought out in me. It was also a conscious choice to want to appear more feminine, which was a foreign concept to me until that time…yes I was a bit of a late bloomer at 18yrs old. I never put much stock in trying to look good. But, over time I softened a little, was a little less rough and tumble.
So coming to HK again with long hair in the summer, was a bit foolish. But it meant something to me. I wanted to be accepted, to be seen as who I am, but it was sort of silly. Because, well, how can a person be a hair cut? It’s just part of who we are not the “who we are” in itself. My hair was indeed the longest its been in six years when I arrived here, but I decided to get a trim, more just because it is hot here and I wanted it to be a bit less heavy. After two weeks though, I’ve gotten more and more sick of this mop on my head, it’s a bit of a hassle. More than that, I feel the need to make a choice to do something very Brenda Chung in Hong Kong. I used to think that people wanted me to be a certain way, to make choices that pleased them. I used to think that especially about Chinese people because they feel free to tell you if they think you look better in contacts, or tell you if you slouch etc. Actually it is that they just feel free to tell you those things, but I don’t think I could forgive myself if I change who I am based on these kinds of observations. I am probably the only one who expects myself to live up to everyone else’s expectations. So that is the long version of why I am cutting my hair short in Hong Kong again. Just to say something about who I am becoming, “Oh, here you are,” I want my hair to say, not to hide me, but to bring me out in the open. Tomorrow is the big day, wish me luck!!