🌝 Mid-Autumn Festival in Sydney, and my hairdresser is going home 🏡

Friends have been sending me cute little GIFs for Mid-Autumn Festival on WeChat since this morning. It is today, apparently.

It was my favourite festival as a child. The lanterns were the point. Mooncakes and tea came with them. By my teenage years, the excitement had begun to fade. After moving to Australia, I often forgot the occasion altogether. Some years, a display of mooncakes in Haymarket reminds me. Here, Mid-Autumn arrives in spring.

I have been back in Sydney for almost a month. My hairdresser is preparing to leave.

A few days ago, I went in for a haircut at the salon I have been going to for twenty years. I overheard him telling the customer in his chair, “We are closing end of this month.”

That was how I found out.

Someone in my Asian LGBT community first recommended the salon. I needed a hairdresser. The rest I discovered over the years.

It is in an old-fashioned mall on George Street. The exterior gives nobody much reason to go in. The salon does.

The owner is Thai, and so is his team. Most of them have been there almost as long as he has, and I am comfortable in any of their chairs. The customers are mostly Asian migrants. Among them are plenty of people from our LGBT community, along with other regulars and their partners. After more than thirty odd years in business, the salon has become one of those places people recommend almost as a matter of course. Of course you go there.

It is somewhere to gossip without first explaining your background or your relationship. Sometimes you want to discuss your hair. Sometimes you want to discuss everybody else, especially which ladyboy has supposedly stolen whose boyfriend this time.

The staff know the regulars, and the regulars know one another. Whether everyone knows how much everyone else knows is another matter. If the salon ever wrote a memoir, there would be a sudden interest in proofreading.

Between them, the team have cut and coloured my hair through more changes of style than I care to count. They have all had an off day. A disappointing cut or colour did not cancel the years of good ones.

I know something about being judged on your last appointment. I am grateful to the people who remember the others.

Now the owner has decided to close the business and return to Thailand.

He could keep working for years. There is always more money to earn, another year the business could keep going. He would rather use those years while he has the health and energy to enjoy them.

I can be a slut about plenty of things, but I am faithful to my hairdresser, my masseur and my GP. 20 years is a serious relationship. I am being very supportive, considering nobody consulted me about the abandonment.

When he first came to Australia, he was already a senior hairdresser. He could not find work as one at first, let alone open a salon. He started as a shampoo boy and worked his way up until people noticed. Eventually, the salon in that unremarkable mall was his.

He came believing life would be better here. There is a Chinese saying, 外國的月亮比較圓, which translates as “the moon is rounder abroad”. It is our version of the grass being greener on the other side, with a little teasing about how easily we admire anything foreign.

Now, after more than 30 plus years in Australia, he wants to go home. On my last visit, he showed me a photograph of his hometown, lush and green. He can have a simpler life there and still go elsewhere whenever he likes.

Was life better here? He built a business that lasted decades. People found work there, and people like me found somewhere we wanted to return to. He came looking for a better life and, along the way, made Sydney a little easier for other people to live in.

Going back to Thailand does not undo any of that. He simply wants something different from his days now.

Perhaps the grass is greener elsewhere. In his case, it might be a paddy field.

He is leaving at a time when everyone seems to be arguing about who is arriving. I barely followed the news while I was away. Back in Sydney, it feels as though every time I turn on the television, someone is talking about migration. How many people are arriving. Where they will live. What it means for housing, rents and everyone already here.

I know living here is expensive. Migrants get the bills too.

While I listen, I think about the salon. The owner employs people and pays tax. His customers work too. Some do the tiring, poorly paid work that is easier to describe as essential than to persuade people to take on.

After 20 years of visits, I cannot picture that salon as a room full of people putting pressure on Australia. I picture people getting their hair done, talking, earning a living and spending some of it.

It is a strange habit, listing his contributions as though he needs a reference. He is retiring, not applying for a visa.

I also see Australians leaving because they feel the life they want is becoming too expensive here. They are looking overseas for somewhere their money might stretch further, where they might have more time for themselves.

It is a familiar ambition. My hairdresser had his own version of it when he came here. I have mine every time I change Australian dollars for Ringgit or Baht.

Of course, being able to take Australian earnings or savings somewhere cheaper changes the calculation. A place that feels wonderfully affordable to a visitor may feel quite different on a local wage. The person serving dinner might be dreaming of Australia.

A holiday can make a very convincing case for a country. It rarely shows you the paperwork.

I loved being away. I was also glad to come back to Sydney. Going back to Malaysia to see my mother and coming home to Australia both sound perfectly natural to me, until somebody asks which place is really home.

Mid-Autumn has its own story about leaving. In one familiar version of the legend, Chang’e drinks an elixir of immortality to prevent it being stolen and rises to the moon, leaving her husband behind.

She gets to live forever. There is still someone missing at dinner.

At the salon, the reason to gather is more ordinary. Hair grows. Eventually, another appointment comes around. Over the years, those visits have kept people in one another’s lives.

Mid-Autumn sets aside an evening for that company, with mooncakes to share and tea to pour. My hairdresser has spent decades fitting people into his working day. Now he would like some of that time for himself. I hope he gets it.

For those of us left behind, there will be other salons. It is the rest that will be harder to replace.

When my hair was done, I took down the number of everyone on his team and asked them to tell me where they go next. Faithful, as I said.

Before I left, I told him,

“Thank you for everything, I will miss you, and congratulations.”

I meant all three.

The greetings are still coming in as I write. I am in Sydney, my mother is in Malaysia, and the man who helped make this city feel familiar is preparing to return to Thailand.

So where is the moon rounder, once you have people to miss on both sides?

______

Read Chinese Version here