Hairdressers are notorious for the quality of their small talk. Mine is different. While we started out with small talk, our conversations have taken a dark turn. She’s an Asian lady of around 65 with a strong accent. The first few times I went there we kept topics limited to the weather and the neighboring businesses. This changed with the third or fourth haircut, when I asked where she was from,.
She was born in Vietnam. Her father had been working for the Americans during the war, and when they left, he was sent to prison by the North Vietnamese. The family, including her brothers and sisters were without anyone to provide for them and suffered mistreatment by the new regime. One of her brothers paid a smuggler to leave the country aboard a boat. As soon as they were out of sight of land, the smuggler threw him into the water, where he drowned. A sister suffered severe and repeat abuse (I didn’t dare to ask for details) by the North Vietnamese. After a few years of this, they were informed that their father had died in prison. She was eventually able to leave the country and made her way to France and later California.
More recently, I see her younger colleague more often, who is also from Vietnam. The last time she cut my hair, she asked if had any travel plans, and I told her about my upcoming business trip. She said that she missed traveling for work, and when I asked her what kind of work related trips she used to go on, she revealed that she used to do “import-export”, traveling all over South East Asia. She would buy hardwood in Myanmar and sell it in Japan and Taiwan. The Japanese were insistent for every piece of lumber to have exactly the same color and dimensions and paid well, while the Taiwanese didn’t care about consistency but paid little. When exports from Myanmar got banned, she would ship the wood to Cambodia first to get around the restrictions.
On occasion, she visited the crews cutting the wood in the jungle. Since they were so remote, the only way to reach them was by helicopter. The local warlord was taken with her. He showed her around and when she commented how pretty the poppy fields looked, he explained that they were opium fields and insisted that she smoke some with him. In her words, “he was a scary man, I was the only woman around, and when he asked for something, you couldn’t say no.” She left it at that.
Nehaveigur 