A Love Letter to My $20 Chinatown Haircut

I went through hair puberty in college. A few weeks into my freshman year, I got my first adult haircut at a local barbershop (sandwiched between a bagel shop and a FedEx). The walls were plastered with vintage beer ads and yellowing Playboy issues, and the air carried the unmistakable scent of a good ol’ American man—a lingering musk of leather, sweat, and shaving cream. As I settled into my chair, the barber handed me a cold beer—IPA, which I hated but sipped lightly in the name of politeness—and we exchanged small talk about the weather in North Carolina. And the grand finale: a hot-towel shave with a straight razor. 

A week later, I caught a glimpse of my reflection and was terrorized by the sight of my hair. An unruly tuft of hair rose defiantly from the back of my head; it was a proud peacock on full display. I would try to tamp it down with pomade, but the peacock kept on peacocking, no matter how many visits I made to the barber or how many hair serums I layered. Eventually, I came to terms with the peacock, accepting the new reality of my hair puberty.

But one evening, after journeying home to Southern California for winter break, I returned to my local hair salon, an Asian-owned mom-and-pop shop in a strip mall in the San Gabriel Valley. It was a world apart from my college barbershop: There weren’t any hot-towel shaves, no small talk, and no free beers. Just a Cantonese drama playing on a tiny TV and Wendy, an elderly Chinese woman who always smelled vaguely of Tiger Balm. “Did a white person cut your hair?” she asked when I sat down. “Chinese hair, you have to cut it so it doesn’t stick out, shuaí gē.” Mystery solved.

There isn’t much discourse around Asian hair. Most people would probably sum it up as unproblematic and pin-straight. But it’s so much more than that: Asian hair runs the gamut from jet-black and ultra-fine to frizzy and dense. And contrary to popular belief, caring for Asian hair requires special care and expertise. This was a truth I had always known but never quite acknowledged—countless cult-favorite American hair products have never really worked wonders for my damaged, ultra-fine hair—but I guess it took my hair puberty to fully come to terms with that. 

Gradually, I came up with a new haircare routine in hopes of permanently eradicating the peacock. I braved the terror of grown-out sideburns, attempted to trim my own hair while I was in my college town, and saved the big haircuts for my Chinese salon back home in between semesters. When I studied abroad in London, I leafed through dozens of salons before I finally found an Asian salon that felt like home. Before I knew it, I fell in love with my $20 haircuts, how my hair stylist understood the foreign language of my fine Asian hair, how they’d all call me shuaí gē, Chinese for handsome boy, and how, just like back home, everyone would speak Chinese to me and I’d speak Chinglish back.

I grew up somewhat ashamed of my $20 haircuts. Much of my coming-of-age as a gay Asian-American man was spent feeling left out of many Asian spaces. I nearly dropped out of Chinese language school and was unabashedly feminine, which made for snarky comments from family members (niáng niang qiāng, or “sissy man” in English, is a word I am all too familiar with.) My dad often stressed that, as the only son, it was my duty to carry on the Deng name, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t Asian enough or man enough to meet those expectations. Yet under the stark fluorescent salon lights, I found a pocket of peace where I didn’t have to spiral about who I should or shouldn’t be. Here, the aunties would take my hands in theirs, examine my nail designs with keen eyes, and say, “How cute!” When I dyed my mullet baby blue, the aunties would shout across the salon that I looked like a handsome K-pop star. And even when I spoke broken Chinese to them, they’d kindly carry on the conversation in Chinese, and I’d nod in response because I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say. 

When I first moved to New York a few months ago, I faced a lot of unfamiliar sights and sounds. But I soon found things that felt vaguely familiar to me: the weirdly spacious Wegmans in Brooklyn that reminds me of the Vons back home and the hearty steamed pork and chive dumplings at Shu Jiao Fu Zhou. Every few weeks, I lose myself in New York’s Chinatown, strolling past the Asian grandmas, their foldable shopping carts, and the cultural mishmash of overpriced vintage clothing stores and harshly lit boba shops abuzz with overwhelmed tourists. I stop by Mei Lai Wah for an irritatingly scrumptious pineapple barbeque pork bun and head over to 22 Pell, a Chinese-owned hair salon that I’ve been going to since I first visited New York. 

Inside, I know what to expect. I never have an appointment, but the receptionist always greets me with a “shuaí gē.” The buttery sweetness of egg tarts from the bakery next door comes in waves. The salon is abuzz with Asian aunties perched in vinyl chairs and gossiping in rapid-fire Cantonese, but there are also all kinds of customers with all kinds of hair (many of them Gen Zers who probably saw a TikTok about the salon’s $25 blowouts.) The wall is dotted with hair posters from the ’90s and Lunar New Year banners, their edges curling slightly from years of wear. Elaine always cuts my hair, and even though we don’t know much about each other, she says it all with her snips. It’s pretty much the same thing every time: fade on the side, long in the back, and texture in the front. The peacock is nowhere in sight, a long-lost echo of my hair puberty that’s speedily snipped away by Elaine. There are a dozen Chinese and English conversations happening at once, accompanied by the steady drone of hair dryers and the crisp rustling of plastic capes, but here, I lose myself in the calming chaos. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s home.