The Story of Hair

The Story of Hair

On Sunday morning, I tore off yesterday's page from the calendar and studied the new one, looking it over and over again.

"Ah, the tenth of October — so today is actually Double Ten Festival! But there's no mention of it here at all!"

An older acquaintance of mine, N, had just come to my lodgings to chat. When he heard this, he turned to me with great displeasure.

"They're right! They don't remember — what can you do to them? And if you remember, what good does it do?"

This Mr. N had always been somewhat ill-tempered by nature, often getting angry over nothing and saying things that showed no understanding of the world. At such times, I generally let him talk to himself and offered no opinion; once he had finished airing his views, that was the end of it.

He said:

"What I admire most is the way Double Ten is observed in Beijing. In the morning, the police come to your door and order, 'Hang the flag.' 'Yes, hang the flag!' From each household, a more or less reluctant citizen saunters out and props up a piece of motley foreign cloth. This goes on until evening — then they take down the flag and close the door. A few households happen to forget, and don't get around to hanging it until the next morning.

"They have forgotten the commemoration, and the commemoration has forgotten them!

"I too am one who has forgotten the commemoration. If I were to commemorate it, everything that happened around that first Double Ten would come rushing to my mind, making me too restless to sit or stand.

"The faces of so many old friends would float before my eyes. Several young men toiled and struggled for over ten years, only to have a bullet secretly take their lives; several young men, failing in their attempt, endured over a month of cruel punishment in prison; several young men, harboring lofty ambitions, suddenly vanished without a trace — even their bodies were nowhere to be found.

"They all passed their lives amid society's cold sneers, vicious slander, persecution, and ruin; now their graves too have long been levelled and sunk into oblivion.

"I cannot bear to commemorate these things.

"Let's instead recall something to be proud of and talk about that."

N suddenly broke into a smile, reached up and touched his own head, and said in a loud voice:

"My greatest source of pride is that ever since that first Double Ten, I could walk the streets without being mocked or cursed.

"My friend, do you know that hair has been both a treasure and a curse for us Chinese people? Throughout the ages, how many people have suffered meaningless torments over it!

"Our very ancient ancestors, it seems, still took hair lightly. Judging from the penal code, the most important thing was naturally the head, so decapital punishment was the supreme penalty; next came the genitals, so castration and confinement were also terrifying punishments; as for tonsure — that was trivial by comparison. Yet if one thinks about it, there must have been countless people who, simply because of their bare scalps, were trampled by society their entire lives.

"When we talked about the revolution, we made a great fuss about the Ten Days of Yangzhou and the Massacre of Jiading, but in truth these were merely a method. To be honest: the resistance of the Chinese people at that time was never really because they had lost their country — it was only because of the queue.

"The diehards were all killed, the old loyalists had all died of old age, the queue had long been firmly established, and then Hong and Yang stirred up trouble. My grandmother once told me that being a common person was truly difficult in those days — those who kept their hair were killed by government soldiers, and those with queues were killed by the Long Hairs!

"I don't know how many Chinese people suffered, met with disaster, and perished all because of this hair, which was neither painful nor itchy."

N gazed at the ceiling beams, as if lost in thought, and went on:

"Who would have known that the suffering of hair would fall to my lot too.

"When I went abroad to study, I cut off my queue. There was no other reason for it — it was simply too inconvenient. To my surprise, several classmates who still had queues coiled on top of their heads were very disgusted with me, and the supervisor flew into a rage, saying he would cut off my government stipend and send me back to China.

"A few days later, this very supervisor had his own queue cut off by someone and fled. Among those who did the cutting was Zou Rong, who became a revolutionary soldier. This man could no longer continue his studies either, and returned to Shanghai, where he later died in the Western Jail. You must have long forgotten this, haven't you?

"A few years later, my family's circumstances had greatly declined. If I didn't find some work, I'd go hungry, so I had no choice but to return to China. As soon as I arrived in Shanghai, I bought a false queue — at that time it cost two yuan — and brought it home with me. My mother said nothing about it, but the moment anyone else saw me, they would first examine the queue, and upon discovering it was false, would give a cold sneer and condemn me to a charge of capital punishment. One of my own clansmen even prepared to report me to the authorities, but later, fearing that the revolutionaries might succeed in their rebellion, he dropped the idea.

"I thought that a false one was no match for a real one in straightforwardness and ease, so I simply discarded the false queue and walked the streets in a western suit.

"As I walked along, mockery and curses followed me all the way; some even trailed behind me, shouting, 'That reckless devil!' 'Fake foreign devil!'

"So I stopped wearing western clothes and changed to a long Chinese gown. Then they cursed me even more fiercely.

"At this last extremity, I acquired a walking stick and fought back fiercely several times. Gradually they stopped cursing. But I was still cursed in unfamiliar places where I hadn't fought back."

"This matter filled me with grief, and I still recall it from time to time. When I was studying abroad, I once read in a daily newspaper about a certain Doctor Honda who had travelled through the South Seas and China; this doctor knew no Chinese or Malay, and when people asked him, 'If you don't know the language, how do you get about?' he picked up his walking stick and said, 'This is their language—they all understand it!' This infuriated me for several days, but who would have thought that, without even realizing it, I too would end up doing the same thing, and that those people would all understand?...

"In the early years of the Xuantong reign, I was a supervisor at the local middle school. My colleagues avoided me as though I were plague-stricken; the bureaucrats watched me as though I were a menace. All day long I felt as though I were sitting in an ice cellar, or standing beside an execution ground—and yet the reason was none other than that I lacked a queue!

"One day several students suddenly came into my room and said, 'Sir, we're going to cut our queues.' I said, 'No, you can't!' 'Is it better to have a queue or not to have one?' 'Not to have one is better...' 'Then why do you say we can't?' 'It's not worth it—you'd be better off not cutting them. Wait a while.' They said nothing more, but pursed their lips and walked out of the room. In the end, they cut them off.

"Ah! This was terrible—people were buzzing with talk about it! But I simply pretended not to know and let them come to class with their bare scalps alongside all the queues.

"But then the queue-cutting contagion spread: on the third day, six students at the Normal School suddenly cut off their queues, and that very evening six students were expelled. These six could neither stay at school nor go home, and they endured this until more than a month after the first Double Tenth, when at last the brand of their crime faded away.

"As for me, it was the same. Only, in the winter of the first year of the Republic, when I went to Beijing, I was scolded a few times. Later, the people who had scolded me had their own queues cut off by the police, and I was no longer insulted. But I did not go to the countryside."

N looked extremely pleased with himself, then suddenly his face darkened:

"Now you idealists are clamouring again about women cutting their hair, and creating so many people who gain nothing but suffering!

"Aren't there already women who have cut their hair and so cannot get into school, or have been expelled from school?

'Reform'? Where are the weapons? 'Work-study'? Where are the factories?

"Let them keep their hair, marry, and become daughters-in-law: forgetting everything is still happiness; but if they remember something about equality and liberty, they will suffer all their lives!

"I want to borrow Artzybashev's words and ask you: you have promised the golden age to the children and grandchildren of these people, but what have you given to these people themselves?

"Ah, until the Creator's whip falls upon China's back, China will for ever remain this same China, and will never change a single hair of its own accord!

"Since you have no venomous fangs in your mouths, why must you paste the two large characters 'viper' upon your foreheads, to lure beggars to beat you to death?..."

The more N talked, the wilder he became, but the moment he saw that I was not very willing to listen, he immediately closed his mouth, stood up, and took his hat.

I said, "Going back?"

He replied, "Yes, it's going to rain."

I silently saw him to the door.

He put on his hat and said:

"Good-bye! Forgive me for disturbing you. Fortunately, tomorrow is no longer the Double Tenth, and we can all forget."

(October 1920.)