Hair-Cutting Woes

Pretty much all of the Black girls that come to Asia learn how to do their own hair. My friends will go to Bangkok if they need braids or extensions because no one here can do that. You kind of have to become self-sufficient, which, when you're used to somebody doing that stuff for you, can be hard.

Once, when I lived in Korea, I went to get my hair straightened. I went to a salon that everyone mentioned was great with non-Korean hair, which I guess translated to caucasian hair. I don't find my hair terribly difficult to style — it's very thin, it's fine, I don't really have that much. So, I was like, 'Hey, it's not going to be that difficult, I'll explain, I'll show a picture.' But as soon as they started washing my hair I was like, 'No, this isn't right.' Here's how it went: She shampoos it all on the top of my head and it immediately turns into a tangled mess. She finishes washing my hair, takes a towel, and starts rubbing it all over my head — I'm just like, 'Oh. God. What did I get myself into?'

I go to sit in the chair and the guy looks at me, dumbfounded. My hair is still curly and wet and he reaches for the flat iron. I had to shout, "No, no, no, no! Blow-dry!" He then takes the blowdryer and just places it over my head — doesn't brush it through to straighten it first or anything. I physically had to take the blowdryer and the brush and show him how to do it. He finally finishes flat-ironing and the end result was okay. But, at that point, I thought, 'I'm never going to a salon in Asia again, ever.' It's been two years since I've had a haircut now. It's one of those things where there's a language barrier. If it was America, I probably would've said no and left. But there, I wasn't sure if they would understand me. So, you just kind of suck it up and deal with it.

With The Bad, Comes The Good

There's a little breakfast shop that I usually go to in the mornings, and one day I saw a mother and her daughter there; the little girl was half Vietnamese, half Black and the first time she saw me, her whole face lit up. "She has curly hair like me, she's brown-skinned like me," said this beautiful little girl. She ran up to me like I was her aunt or something. And her mom was like, "Oh my gosh, she hasn't seen a brown woman like you, she's just so happy. She's always telling me that she wants different hair and then she saw you."

Older women in Korea would actually come up to me and ask what kind of perm I had, because they wanted curly hair, and they wouldn't believe me when I told them it was natural. Even though everyone has straight hair there, the whole wavy/curly perm movement is huge.