Flushing is the illegitimate child of commercial Chinatown and the ghetto. Despite the fringes of outside society occasionally peeking in - an Old Navy, a Payless, the ubiquitous Golden Arches - it is mostly cramped and dirty and cheap. Sometimes the shopkeepers will speak English, sometimes they won't. The stores are stocked with foreign brands and unusual delicacies, the butchers sell strange parts of animal, and old women in ratty overcoats thrust pamphlets covered in characters as you walk by and try to ignore them. There are hipster asian boys in screenprinted jackets with orange mullets and cigarettes. We always eat at a si cai yi tang - four entrees and soup - where you are given rice and point to four dishes on a buffet-style table. They are invariably greasy and unreasonably tasty.
There's a man who always cuts my hair for eight dollars.
The salon is merely two rooms - a main one, lined in mirror, and a back room where I once had highlights done back in eighth grade. Somehow, by cobbling together my broken Chinese and some pictures, he has consistently delivered the perfect haircut, every single time. After he finished chopping off six inches of hair today, he commented something to the effect of,
every time you come in, you want something very different, a big change from long to short. You're young, I guess. He's right. I don't want to look better, I want to look different.
