by Mike Tidwell (Democratic Republic of the Congo 1985–87)

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 barbershop. I smelled the incense of a 900-year-old Confucian temple located around 100 feet away. I heard the bright bells of bicycles gliding down a 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 demurred. 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 fallen yellow leaves,” I said.
     He asked what country I was from. “America,” I said.
     “I killed many Americans during the war,” he said. “Many Americans.”
     Moments later, I felt the razor on my throat.
     It’s a fact of traveling life that if you wander far enough from home, sooner or later you will need a haircut while on the road. It’s an experience I learned early on not to dismiss as routine. With an open mind and flexible fashion standards, the overseas haircut can be one of the most edifying, satisfying experiences the road has to offer.
     After all, the barber’s chair is where you’ll experience the most intimate contact you’re likely to have with the local culture. Even the friendliest guides and cabbies and rickshaw drivers don’t touch you, don’t run their fingers through your hair and fuss over the aesthetic possibilities of your face. When it’s over, you’re transformed, usually in more ways than one. If nothing else, you’ll look more like the locals, because no matter what kind of haircut you ask for, what you get is the local variety. Forget the charms of being invited into people’s homes or wearing colorful national clothing: A local haircut is your one best shot at partial assimilation, a chance to assume a part of the local culture onto your own body.
     My first overseas haircut came in Africa, under the eave of a grass hut in a tiny village in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. When the barber finished cutting, he obsessively swept up every bit of hair from the dirt floor, then plucked, one by one, the tiniest fallen hairs from my neck and shoulders.
     These he poured posthaste down the hole of a latrine, saying he didn’t want any of the nearby witch doctors using my hair to work bad juju on me. Now there’s a service worth a handsome tip.
     Once, in a slum in Bangladesh, an 18-year-old barber cut my hair and then massaged my shoulders, temples, hands and, finally — saying it would help me better pray to Allah — my eyelids, rubbing them so gently it nearly put me to sleep. In an oil town deep in the Amazon jungle, I once found the only place for haircuts was the local brothel. A prostitute dutifully trimmed away my sludge-flecked hair, then seemed disappointed when, newly beautified, I didn’t avail myself of other services.
     In Istanbul, amid the tangled alleys lining the Bosphorus, a barber once nearly set me on fire, using a lighted match to give me the sort of “singe-trim” around the ears that was the fashion there. It turned out to be the best haircut I’ve ever had.
     That afternoon under the mimosa tree in Vietnam, my education was continuing. The barber had finished shaving my face and was putting away his razor. Only then did it seem safe to raise again the issue of price. 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 suggested he had at least 60 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 is 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.”
     Branches swayed overhead as I glanced at the mirror on the mimosa trunk. My hair was taking shape, reminding me again that, when it comes to barbering, the world is not yet one village. I’d found in most of Latin America that timid cutting tends to leave your hair longer than desired. (The Che influence?) In Central Asia, you’re lucky if you have any hair left when it’s over. And in Vietnam, you tend to get both: really short hair on the sides and foppishly long hair on top. Staring uncertainly at the mirror, I reasoned that at least while I stayed in Vietnam I would be a work of art.
     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.”
     Before I could tell him the honor was mine, he asked a favor. “When you go home, will you thank your president for lifting the economic embargo on my country?”
     I said I would, glad of the chance to redeem a little of my initial personal brusqueness toward him.
     “Then,” he added, a scold returning to his voice, “tell your president to lift the embargo on Cuba.”
     My haircut was complete. But the barber wasn’t finished. It is, I’ve found, the rare faraway haircut that does not serve up at least one new experience, whether it’s the eyelid massage or the finishing spray of lime juice a barber in Mexico once put in my hair. From a leather pouch, the Vietnamese barber pulled out six long, narrow metal tools. They looked like surgical equipment. One tool had a pointed tip. Another had a strange tiny spoon at the end. A pair of tweezers was so long they looked like chopsticks joined at the fat end. “I want to clean your ears,” he said.
     “Not everyone needs this,” he said. “But looking at your ears, I can see you need help. Can you hear okay?”
     “I think so,” I said.
     He assured me he wouldn’t hurt me. This was an ancient Vietnamese tradition, but, he added dolefully, one that was dying out. “I tell young people, just like the floors of your house or cups for tea, you have to clean your ears. But no one understands anymore. With skillfully cleaned ears, a man is a new man.”
     He went to work, guided by a penlight fastened awkwardly to the side of his head. I braced myself. In went the pointed thing. Then the spoon thing. Then the tweezers. After some initial apprehension, the experience became oddly tranquilizing and even enjoyable. It felt like I was getting a massage inside my head.
     As he worked, the barber told me he cut 15 to 20 heads a day, every day, and he never missed work due to 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 light 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 of me as if from a masterpiece. Shave, haircut, ear cleaning. If not a totally new man, I certainly 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 unbreachable finality.  “That you are happy is big enough payment for me.”
     I protested effusively, of course, even tried leaving the money in the crotch of the 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. Thanks to him, I could hear just a little bit better.
     Or is the word listen?

“Hanoi Haircut” is exerpted from Mike Tidwell’s new collection of travel essays, In The Mountains of Heaven: Unlikely Journeys on Six Continents. Lyons Press will publish the book in August.