Ponytail
by Joshua Wetjen
Hong Kong’s Queen’s Road East stumbled awake with the noise of car horns, shouting construction workers and clanging rods hitting lorry frames as they backed into alleys, a pile driver thudding a finale behind green webbing draped across bamboo scaffolding. My father raced to the tram steps as it pulled to a stop, dragging a shopping bag weighted with our broken disk drive. “No Radio Shack here,” my father had said when it had clunked off. We’d been in Hong Kong three months. Everything was mysterious.
I followed him up those steps, then felt a tug on my scalp. A woman held my ponytail in the tips of her fingers. She had a brown coat, pearl earrings, a jade bracelet and hair cut stylishly so that her bangs swooped across her forehead. She had a single mole on her left cheek, and she was beautiful. I jumped.
“Zou-san,” the woman said. She let the ponytail drop.
I was the only “gweimui” around, the only “foreign ghost girl.” I’d been told Chinese people tugged the hair of blonde kids for luck—lies, I assumed. Anyway, I had no friends. I wasn’t lucky.
My father hadn’t noticed and gave me several brown copper twenty cent pieces greening with rust, their little curved ridges like pie dough pinched the day before Thanksgiving. I plopped my fare into the slot. A bunch of people pushed us further on. The bell rang for the tram to leave.
I saw the woman’s shoes through the legs of the other standing passengers. Patent leather orange pumps, shiny in the light as the sun peaked across buildings. “What’s special about my hair?” I asked in a small voice drowned by street noise.
The floor rattled as we rode through several stops. The crunch of street signs and buildings and cars passed through the tiny front windows next to the tram driver who wore glasses with silver frames and a blue shirt.
“We get off here,” my father said. He yanked the “stop” cord near the window—windows open for ventilation, wooden-framed like those of a tiny American house, but windows you could never reach because the seats were always full.
The tram stopped, shrieking on the steel tracks. My father and I brushed past two teenage boys in their school uniforms. The accordion doors of the tram slid open. I leaped down its steps to join my father on the traffic median. A tram came the opposite way with a Winston Salem cigarette ad—the giant cigarette package looming.
My father said, “Here,” and he pointed us to the crosswalk where people ignored the crosswalk sign. “I think,” he said, with his pursed smile. My father said our neighbor was a computer expert. We had to trust his advice for the computer repair shop, though the man claimed to have quit smoking, smelled of stale nicotine tar, and combed a few threads of dyed black hair across his bald spot so that it looked like the start of a cartoon drawing against his gleaming, peach-colored scalp.
I saw the beautiful woman’s head bobbing through the crowds on the sidewalk, her gorgeously styled hair so much more fashionable than the average woman back in Connecticut where we were from. Our eyes met from across the block. She smiled, then walked into a beauty shop, where I assumed she worked. A beautician—a worshipper of beauty. To my mother such places were a sort of church. I thought, “Maybe I am actually beautiful.”
I felt so homesick and lost. Kids at the American school picked on me for my lankiness and bucked teeth. I wanted to be ugly on purpose, hideous, to not have anyone I didn’t want near me. I wanted to be a monster. I made sure my hair was especially ugly. The dirtiness of my hair was mine. The oily, tangled strands of my unbrushed hair often needed a shampoo, their unkempt ropes of wheat-gold held in place by the same ponytail the woman had touched.
My father pulled me forward by the elbow. His breathless walking made me wish I was with my mother, even with her judgment. Her hair was also beautiful, gorgeously dark brown, shining and lifting in curls when she didn’t straighten it, what she had inherited from her own Sicilian American father. “Shame on you,” she often said, when I didn’t brush my hair.
That night at home, my father cheered when the repaired disk drive buzzed and chewed files onto disks. But my mother’s hair had gathered in clumps by the shower drain like it often had recently, little dark and gray threads like calligraphy, falling from the stress of our move to Hong Kong. “You see. It doesn’t last,” my mother said as she pulled her remaining strands into a tiny braid.
It was my turn. My mother ran the water for my bath. For once, I yielded to her care. I said, “Let’s play beauty parlor.” She washed, conditioned, and brushed my hair like a beautician.
I touched my head afterward, wondering if there was such a thing as fingerprints on hair strands. I tried tugging my own hair has in hung down over my shoulders. It was wet and slippery. It slid right through my hands, like water.
Joshua Wetjen is a high school English teacher living in Minneapolis and working in St. Paul. When not grading or chasing his two children, he likes to tinker on his jazz guitar and try new restaurants with his wife. His work has appeared in Opossum, Newfound and Yalobusha Review.