The Barber and His Prostitutes

I made my annual pilgrimage to my barber today at EP.

It is one of those dilapidated shopping malls near where I used to go to university. You know the one - with a Carrefour and a Fajar to anchor it, and a few small businesses run by Malay and Chinese owners. One of the smaller malls.

I parked at the same spot near the lifts from memory, and pressed the button to the second floor. I walked past the same old back corridor with its rows of little known or neglected shops.

At the first corner, there was a lady with immaculate skin, dyed hair and a little too much makeup. She is wearing a black blouse and a denim miniskirt, and solicits me in Mandarin. I shake my head, and look down and keep walking.

I am approached by a second girl about ten metres in, almost a carbon copy of the earlier girl.

She is trying to entice me to buy something, but I did not possess enough Mandarin to understand her, and I kept walking with my head bowed and my hands in my bermuda pockets.

She is persistent and follows me for a little while, but I hear her voice slowly fade in her rapidfire Mandarin as I hurried away from her.

My Once A Year Barber

I arrive at the familiar barber shop and plop myself down on one of the waiting couches. I look at my barber, who is meticulously cutting the hair of the customer before me. He looks up for the briefest of moments with a slight nod of acknowledgement.

He belonged here - his hair dyed, short at the sides but long behind (I wondered who cut his hair for him), his wide-collared workshirt made him look more like he was going to a nightclub than to work, his fake Levi's jeans held up by an equally unauthentic Louis Vuitton belt, and his boots harked back to an era where it was still fashionable to wear Doc Martens. He looked youthful for his forty-something years, although his tanned, sagging cheeks were starting to tell a different story.

The corner shop is over a decade old, as evidenced by the yellowing cover of the hot water showers where he washes customer's hair, and the cushions looked unchanged. I peer over at a pile of Mandarin and English magazines for waiting customers, some of them dating back to when the shop first opened.

There was a printed sign detailing the prices - "Adult Cut - RM13, Teenager Cut RM 10- 13, Hair Dye..." and underneath there was a sign hastily scratched in red marker pen - " Untuk Tahun Baru Cina - Tambah RM 3." (" In Keeping with the Chinese New Year Celebrations - Add RM3.")

He was a little too meticulous if you asked me, because he took a whole half hour to complete the haircut of the gentleman before me, and I had to pee once while waiting, making my way past the Chinese women who were unrelenting in trying to get me to try whatever it was they were selling.

Just A Little Off The Top, Please

It was finally my turn, and I told him how I wanted it in Cantonese - short at the sides and back, and a little off the top. And leave the sideburns alone.

He reached for his comb and started raking my hair, while making his all-too-familiar customary greeting of how I had very sparse hair for someone so young. And as usual, I grunted my non- commital Hai lo (Yeah, lah).

He wraps a tea towel around my neck to protect it from the vengeful prickly stray hairs that would fall victim to his scissors today, and wraps a colourful protective plastic sheet over my body.

He reaches first for the clippers, and begins the uphill slopes that would form the new landscapes of my side and back profiles.

He starts the compulsory chatter, and asks me if I am going anywhere for the Chinese New Year.

Not wanting to let him know that I was going back to Melbourne, in case he decides to charge me more than the RM 16 that he was going to rip off me, I tell him No, not really.

I ask him where he's from, and he said that he was from around here, although his parents were from elsewhere. One corner of his mouth lifted into a smile as he reminisced how he would never stay in one place for too long. Even as a barber, he would not stay in any shop for more than a year because of his wanderlust.

That was before his daughter came along, of course. She was about five months old when he started work here in KL, and now, over a decade later, she was almost ready for secondary school. Her younger brother, who wasn't even born yet, is now in his first year of primary school. Sap yat lin le... (Eleven years already le...), in the same shop. I did a quick calculation to try and remember how long I have been coming back to him for.

The Women

We stray into a moment of silence as he reaches for the scissors and comb, and the sporadic but persistent shouts from the Chinese women, outside jolt him -

"An mo, lau pan! Ni yau mah?" (Massage, sir, for you?)

"Tiu le ah seng ah... Hai yau kiu, mm hai yau kiu..." (Fuck you, man... these women, ah, calling all day long you know...) he complains.

He starts to work on my hair, and his eyes are intent as he manicures my head. He has perfected the art of talking while cutting hair, though, and he starts talking about the Chinese women whose voice continue to call out to every man unfortunate enough to pass within sight of the corridors.

A Foot Job

This was a very well known phenomenon in Malaysia - immigrant Chinese women from China masquerading as foot masseuse who offered "extra" (read: sexual) services for an additional fee.

Jimmy, my barber, talks about how these centres have started to sprout in the past few years. He talks about how desperate these women were for customers - usually men in their forties or fifties, who may be able to resist their siren calls maybe for the first six months, but who usually give in to their persistence in the end.

(An mo, lau pan!)

He reminisces about a father and son who ran a shop upstairs from him, and who were his regular customers. The father was in all sense a straight man - he didn't smoke or drink, and had no vices as far as the son knew. Then one day, out of the blue, the father elopes with one of the women downstairs to China, leaving his wife and children high and dry.

The last time Jimmy cut the hair of the son, apparently the father had returned several years later to KL, devoid of money, too embarrassed to reconnect with the wife or children, who refused to acknowledge him.

Love Potion Chiu Hau (No.9)

Ngo mm zhi lei sun mm sun la, pat ko ngo sun hei tei yau lok took ke... It tit lo yan yum do ke si ah... met yeh te pei sai hei tei ke... (I don't know if you believe it or not, but I believe that these women have probably put some charm into their drink or food, and once the old man consumes it, he is finished. He will give everything to them, and there's nothing the family can do about it.)

Moh, moh...

Kam lei ke sang yi tim ah? (So how's your business?) I ask him.

Ngo ke pang yau tong ngo kong, wah, Jimmy, lei yau ho le... yat yat te yau kam to leng lui pooi jhu lei... tiu lei ah seng ah... (My friends keep telling me about how lucky I am to be surrounded by pretty girls, but fuck them, what do they know...)

He tells me about how these women have been harassing his customers, even teenage boys, until his business has suffered. Their favorite targets were the polite old men, who usually succumbed after repeated requests. The women were almost a law unto themselves, unafraid to gang up, three, even four, at a time, and harass a male customer until he said yes.

(An mo, lau pan! Yau mah?)

Jimmy almost spat as he recounted how they would even wait outside the toilet near his barber shop to wait until a man had finished his business, and then harass him again. His recollection is peppered with expletives as he recounts how his earnings have gone down from two to three thousand ringgit a month to just a paltry thousand over now, as long-time customers were reluctant to return due to these female vultures.

Hair-raising

(AN MO, LAU PAN!)

Suddenly Jimmy erupts, and he looks outside of his shop and yells to no one in particular "FREE FARK KING!!" "FREE FARK KING!!" He does a little ridiculous sarcastic dance with his comb and scissors, and returns to my head, scowling.

Moh, moh, moh... Moh lei ke hai lah, moh! (Massage, massage, massage, massage your [rhymes with vagina] lah, massage!) he mutters under his breath.

I listened in silence, the rhythmic snipsnipsnip of the scissors playing near my ears, and watched my reflection in the mirror. I could see one or two Chinese women walking past my mirror, their dyed curls curtaining their dolled up faces, throwing disinterested glances towards Jimmy, who was having a great time cursing them.

Jimmy then calmed down as he continued his foray into my half-sculpted head, and then recounts how he knew of customers who were regular visitors to these massage parlors, who would get a handjob while waiting for their turn to have their hair cut in his shop.

He laughs as he tells of the men who wouldn't last five minutes, and who would have to part with RM30 for the pleasure. Some were longer lasting, though, and he recollects one person who went for hours, with both the customer and the prostitute bathed in sweat by the time they were done.

The Barber and His Prostitute

He was no angel himself, reminisced Jimmy, as he put the finishing touches to my head. He remembers visiting a prostitute himself in the early days of his marriage. He had just had an argument with his young wife and was looking for someplace to blow off steam.

He ended up hiring a hooker, and they went to a nearby hotel, but in his own words - fuck knows why it took him so long to come that night. He might have been feeling uneasy he says, but laughs as he recollects how after 'playing' for an hour, he still didn't ejaculate, which was the standard ending transaction here in Malaysia.

The Chinese prostitute, exasperated, told him that if he wanted to continue, he would have to pay extra, which he refused. And according to him, she dressed so fast it made his head spin, and was walking the streets again before you could say "blow job".

(An mo!)

The protective plastic cover came off first, followed by the tea towel, which Jimmy lashed a few times against my neck to rid me of any stray remaining hairs. I reach into my wallet and pull out two ten ringgit notes and hand them to him.

Mm sai chaw lah... (Keep the change) I tell him, thinking about his two children.

Ho, Gong Hei Fatt Choi ah... (Okay, Happy Chinese New Year ah...) Jimmy said, smiling, as he turned to clean his barber's chair of my loose hair, and reaches for the broom to sweep up an hour's worth of severed foliage.

I walk away from the shop in a different direction, and the mamasan, sitting in a corner, who has probably observed my alliance with the barber, watches me out of the corner of her eye, and does not call out to me.