July 5, 2006
Papa used to cut my hair when I was little. It was long and beautiful, but I didn't like it because it never did that neat "blow in the wind" trick that women's hair on TV did. By the time I was 12, I was cutting my own hair, which generally meant it never saw scissors at all. (I also made some attempts at cutting hair for other people, but I was forced to give that up after giving Eleanor a bald spot when she was 8 and I was 13.) I cut my own hair for so long that I didn't think I'd ever need to have it done professionally, especially since it's so 'forgiving' that it always looks okay.
In January, though, I realized that wanting to keep it short meant I had to have someone else cut it. I could do it, but it doesn't look as good--just ask David. So with 2 professional cuts now safely under my belt I thought I could get away with not cutting my hair till we arrived in Boise in August. But, it grows too quickly and it's too hot and humid here to endure, so today, an "extra" day in Beijing to run errands and see missed sites, I got another haircut.
The salon I went to seemed fairly Western in style. They had a nice waiting space where David read and made friends with the other people waiting. And there were lots of people waiting. With 1.3 billion people in the country, there's a lot of excess labor, so the people David waited with were actually other employees.
One of the ways in which China seems to be dealing with the excess labor issue is by 'under employing' people, which means there are 2-3 people per job. I have no idea if this is a government policy or just a natural outgrowth of having so many people, but here are 'extra' laborers everywhere. The upside of this is that people actually have jobs, so when foreigners walk into a restaurant, store or salon there are at least 6 people standing around with nothing to do, who can help with any translation/gesticulating that goes on. The downside is that as an employee people are probably bored stiff. (There are all sorts of 'economic' downsides, too, but I don't remember most of them, so we'll just ignore that side.)
One of the most interesting (and least pleasant) 'underemployment' jobs I've noticed is street sweeping. We've seen a couple of street sweeping machines, so I know they exist here, but for the most part the job is done by people. There are two people for every major block, one on each side of the street. These poor women (very few are men), have to deal with traffic constantly--the noise, pollution, anarchic traffic, near death experiences at least every 3 minutes--armed with only a large broom made out of twigs, a cart for debris, face masks and a thin orange safety vest. It's a long way from working in a nice salon.
The haircut, which David claims to like, by the way, cost Y30, or just under $4.
-Leah
