My Cousin's New Haircut

Written by Iris Zhu from California, USA

One blazing summer after the school year ended, I left America and returned to my mother's hometown in Changsha, China. Along the Xiang River and capital of the Hunan Province, Changsha comes from a Mandarin word meaning “a long sandy place,” and it is average-sized. In China, this means around 10 million inhabitants. The city is known for its local, spicy cuisine and small, meandering alleyways teaming with bustling stores and restaurants.

I had not returned to China for over two years, and was eager to be reunited with my extended family. I bounded out of our taxi and up the stairs of the dilapidated restaurant. I took no notice of the crooked banister and timeworn menus, secure in the local folklore that the smaller and dingier a restaurant might appear, the more delicious the food it would serve. 

In the fog of steaming bamboo baskets of dim sum and the chatter of waiters, I almost didn’t recognize my cousin. Her long, glossy-black hair that used to fall down her back in elegance had been chopped off so short it laid rigidly above her chin.

“What happened to your hair?” I exclaimed, before even saying hello.

My cousin muttered something about school regulations, explaining that this particular hairstyle was strictly enforced on all female students. It was a way to prevent distraction from their studies. “They all have their hair this way,” my aunt said, amused by my bewildered expression.  

“Do you still dance?” My 12-year-old cousin had been a talented hip-hop dancer, and I remembered the videos I’d seen of her practicing in the studio. 

“No time.” She shook her head. “I have 12 hours of school every day. I actually should be studying now. Before you know it, I will have to take the Gaokao.” 

The Nationwide Unified Examination for Admissions to General Universities and Colleges is colloquially abbreviated to Gaokao, and it’s an exam required for all high school seniors who wish to enter higher education. As Alec Ash writes in The Guardian, the “score is the most important number of any Chinese child’s life, the culmination of years of schooling, memorization, and constant stress.” A single score higher than your peers gives you a whole new range of opportunities, while a low score could genuinely ruin your life. I couldn’t imagine the pressure that weighed on her shoulders, knowing one wrong answer on a test could change the trajectory of her future. 

We caught up over a meal of steamed buns, pepper beef, chili-smoked pork, and cold rice noodles. Bellies full, my aunt invited us over to her apartment complex. On the elevator up, an elderly neighbor, almost swallowed up by her obscenely long blouse, studied my cousin. Instead of saying hello, she lowered her eyes to ask, “What high school are you going to?”

My cousin responded meekly that she hadn’t begun to apply yet, and I was struck anew by her voice. She had never been so quiet before. We used to stay up giggling and doing each other’s hair, and playing with slime. Now she seemed to have the weight of the future clamping her mouth shut.  

Once inside the apartment, my cousin and I went to her room, as we used to do together.  I picked up a volleyball on the floor and inspected it. “You play volleyball?” 

“Not really,” she admitted. “It’s just for my sports examination.”

“A sports…exam?” 

“Yeah, each of us needs to demonstrate that we can set the ball 30 times in a row.” On top of everything else she had to worry about, my cousin also had to make sure she could literally juggle a ball so as not to lower her overall grade!  

When I told my mom about my concerns, she informed me that even when the kids here got into the top universities in China, like Tsinghua, they still faced a strong likelihood of ending up jobless and delivering takeout throughout the city. “How would you feel if the guy delivering your McDonald's had graduated top of his class in Engineering Physics?” 

Even little children in China are not shielded from the stress and academic pressure heaped onto them in their adolescence. Because of the large amounts of schoolwork and extracurricular activity that they endure daily, most young children turn to electronic distractions during their free time. Not surprisingly, over the last two decades, childhood and adolescent obesity has increased nearly 400%. It’s a startling turn for a country that fell victim to a terrible famine in the 1960s that killed nearly 20 million people. 

Today, an entire generation of Chinese youths has coined the phrase tangping (躺平), or “lying flat,” to protest against the social pressure to overwork and to find fulfillment through consumption. The movement kicked off during the pandemic in 2021 when a post on Baidu written by a blogger who had been unemployed for two years went viral. He believed that contemporary life caused too much unnecessary stress passed on by the older generation, and that he could find liberation through quiet quitting and opting out. “I can be like Diogenes,” he wrote, “who sleeps in his own barrel taking in the sun.” 

Some Chinese Gen Z-ers and millennials have taken this inertia even further by describing their mindset as bailan (摆烂, or “letting it rot” in English). Because they are dissatisfied with a shrinking labor market and almost 20% unemployment, they openly advocate for self-indulgence and defiance by doing the bare minimum while at work, ignoring goals that don’t seem attainable. The idea, nearly nihilistic in its outlook, has its roots in sports, where a losing team might intentionally hasten its defeat to end the game. 

I was starting to understand my cousin’s anxiety better and to fear the environment in which she was growing up. Had my parents not sent me to an international school at a young age, my cousin’s life could have easily been mine. 

Even though I didn’t choose to immigrate to California, I suppose I embody another online neologism: “runology” (润学), which comes from the English verb “to run” which refers to the decision to flee overseas in response to worsening conditions in the economy and increasing political and personal repression. More and more young Chinese want to escape the pressures my cousin faces because even if they can find a job after university, they face the prospect of a “996” workday, which goes from 9 AM to 9 PM six days a week at many IT companies. That’s simply no way to live. My parents were determined that their children would not be burdened with these pressures, and therefore made the early decision to send my brother and me to an international school to learn English. When I graduated from middle school, I opted to study abroad in the US, which is how we came to immigrate to the States. 

After hearing about the hair policy at my cousin’s school, I thought back to my school life in the US. Just that spring, the student council had advocated for a change in the school dress code to prompt an environment in which students could prioritize self-expression and inclusion. The new dress code read that the school sought to “create an environment that balances an emphasis on inclusion with developmentally appropriate opportunities for self-expression.” The student body allowed for someone to wear a hoodie or a hijab or hibiscus pink hair in school, for example. I wondered how my classmates would react to hearing that on the other side of the world, there are students who had no say on the length or style of their hair. 

The next morning, my family embarked upon a traditional ritual: visiting my grandparents’ grave at the Shang Shan Yuan cemetery in the center of the city to pay our respects. From the hillside where they were buried, you can see Orange Island Park. Towering over the groves of pomelo trees and bamboo, a gigantic windswept granite head of the young Mao Zedong surveys the landscape like a hero from the cover of a thrilling adventure novel. I wonder how he would have felt about lying flat and “letting it rot”. 

Being with my family in such a sacred place filled me emotional ambiguity: on the one hand, I felt grateful that my parents had sent me to an international school from such an early age so I could study abroad (an experience I wish my cousin could share in; her family, finances, and language barriers prohibiting her from leaving the country). On the other hand, as we burned spirit money–joss paper offerings for the afterlife–and laid cups of tea by my grandparents’ gravesite, I missed the deep connection to my extended family. These ancient rituals honored my ancestors in ways they never would have been honored in America. 

Our week in Changsha ended too quickly, and I soon found myself climbing back into the taxi taking us to the airport. I waved goodbye to my cousin’s family with a heavy heart–who knew when my next trip to China would be? Living in different countries and separated by distant time zones, there were so many blanks in my cousin’s life that I might never fill in. In another two years, she would be my age, and so I found myself wondering who we might become by the next time our families intertwined. I wished I could share some profound gift or advice with her, but nothing I gave or expressed to her could help. 

Our lives had diverged too far. 

My cousin’s chopped, conformist haircut was the ultimate symbol of restrained self-expression and social thought in China, which, from the time of Confucius, has been rooted in hierarchical organization. Her way of living contrasts with the system in the US, where we are encouraged to challenge authority and practice freedom of expression and speech. My Chinese family lives under ever more restrictive social norms that are growing more difficult to escape. My mother has often offered to bring my cousin to America over holiday breaks, but with incessant cram schools and endless studying, she has no time to take a break. Our families have barely enough time to visit each other. The only times I get to see my cousin are when I visit her.

Nonetheless, in Chinese culture, families are said to be bound tightly by blood. An ancient proverb states that“an invisible red string connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but will never break." No matter the distance or time apart, my life in the US and my extended family's life in China will always be connected by this invisible red thread of fate. Still, I ventured to hope that one day my cousin might choose to break free from her life dictated by test scores and school regulations. I couldn’t change her life overnight, but if she ever chose to take that step, I would be there to help and support her. With that reassurance in mind, I took one last glance backwards, and boarded the plane to fly home.