Against a worn strip of water buffalo leather, the Vietnamese barber slapped his straight razor back and forth. He paused to tilt my head back, leaving my Adam’s apple fully exposed to the blade. Looking up now, I saw the flowers of a flaming mimosa tree, its branches forming the delicate ceiling of this one-man outdoor barber shop. I smelled the incense of a nine-hundred-year-old Confucian temple a hundred feet away. I heard the bright bells of bicycles gliding down the wide Hanoi boulevard.
Yet we’d gotten off to a bad start, this barber and I. I figured he was trying to fleece me when, after I asked how much he charged, he didn’t tell me. But he was just being polite in Vietnamese fashion, saying I would pay afterward, as much as I wanted, only if I was happy. When I pressed the issue, he just waved me into his wooden chair. I got in, huffing, our cultures colliding as we attempted to communicate.
“How many fallen yellow leaves do you have?” the barber asked me, still whacking his long, gleaming razor against the leather strap. He was asking my age.
“Thirty-three,” I answered.
He asked what country I was from. “America,” I said.
“I killed many Americans during the war,” he said softly. “Many Americans.” Moments later, I felt the razor on my throat.
Only when the barber had finished shaving my face and was putting away his razor did it seem safe to raise the issue of price again. Years of travel had led me to anticipate this tactic: The merchant insists on an enormous, unmovable price after the service is rendered. But I hesitated bringing up the subject again. The barber seemed to read my mind nevertheless.
“We Vietnamese people are not so direct as you. We are easier in our ways,” he said. “For us, it is not so hard to trust.”
He pulled out his scissors now.
“So will I like this haircut?” I asked with a conspicuous hint of sarcasm.
The barber gave me a bright, scolding laugh, his dark eyes narrowing above wrinkles that suggest he had at least sixty fallen yellow leaves himself.
“I, young friend, am a sculptor. Under my hands, rough stone is turned into a beautiful, delicate statue.”
“So it’s an art form, hair-cutting?” I asked.
He responded sharply, leaving me temporarily confused. “No, it’s not an art form. Few people can really cut hair. It is a high art form.”
At this he lapsed into ebullient laughter again—and so did I, my suspicions gradually receding.
He began cutting my hair without once asking what I wanted, a common occurrence in my travels in the developing world. Nor did I try to direct him except to ask that he not cut it too short.
“Why do you cut hair outdoors?” I asked. “Is it too expensive to rent a shop?”
He feigned huge offense. “Not at all,” he said, now working the scissors across my bangs. “I have many, many clients. I have plenty of money for a shop. But why be a prisoner of walls? I prefer to be outdoors. I feel the wind and sun every day when I work. I smell the flowers of this tree.” He then quoted a line from Ho Chi Minh: “There’s nothing as good as freedom and independence. Nothing.”
Since his adolescence, the barber told me, all he’d wanted to do was cut hair. It was his one true passion. Even during the war he cut hair for his platoon. “
I was working on someone’s hair once when your country sent rockets into our camp. Rockets everywhere. I jumped into a foxhole still holding my scissors and comb.”
Now that the war was over, the barber wanted nothing more to do with it. “It was a bad time. I fought to make my country free. Now I just want to do good, to make people beautiful.”
As a matter of principle, he said, he never bought any of the tools in Vietnam still widely recycled from old war material. “When I need new scissors, I ask: Was this made from a tank? From a cannon? If so, I don’t buy.”
My haircut was nearly over now, and the barber suddenly made an announcement. The snipping stopped. “You’re the first American whose hair I’ve cut,” he said, swinging around till our eyes met. “I shot at many Americans, but never this. You’re my first.”
As he finished up, the barber told me he cut fifteen to twenty heads a day, every day, and he never missed work because of illness. Quite a record for a man his age, I thought. What was the secret?
“Never sleep late,” he said. “Eat when you’re hungry. And always help people. Always love people.”
Then he added, “I pray, too. I go to the pagoda twice a month and incense and pray for the peace and happiness of all the people in the world. I never leave anyone out. I’ve prayed for you all your life.”
Shortly thereafter, he pulled his barber’s sheet off me as if from a masterpiece. If not totally a new man, I felt like I was refurbished.
“What do I pay you if I’m very, very happy?” I asked, now quite won over by the original gentleman’s arrangement.
“Nothing,” he said with unbreakable finality. “That you are happy is big enough payment for me.” I protested effusively, of course, even tried leaving the money tucked in the mimosa tree. But it was no good.
“You owe me nothing,” he said.
We parted company with a handshake. As I walked away, it struck me that cutting a traveler’s hair must be nearly as interesting for the barber as for the traveler. Perhaps I had given him a minor amusement, a new, small way of thinking about himself. He, meanwhile, had given me something much more than a haircut.
For my haircut not only changed the way I look—but also the way I see.
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