a chronology of hair
2002
Loi is the only Asian hairdresser Mom trusts this side of the Bay Bridge, so it’s the only place we go to get our hair cut. “Same as usual?” he asks in his perfect Vietnamese English. I sheepishly point to one of the male hair models in his faded stylebook and his eyebrows arch toward the sky. He looks to Mom for approval. “If that’s what she wants…” Miles of someone else’s hair fall to the floor and an entire universe spins inside me. On the walk back to the car my feet barely touch the ground.
2014
Every day on testosterone feels like a new chapter the first year. Every time my voice cracks, my heart flutters. In the bathroom mirror, I pour over the landscape of my face, searching for evidence of change in the shifting tectonic plates beneath my skin. My fingertips are caught by something prickly somewhere along my jawline: my first chin hair - lonely, awkward, proud. Over the next six months, the hairs above my lips follow suit and begin to sprout; seeds I’ve always carried with me but have only now figured out how to water.
2016
All I want is to have Jason Momoa hair for our wedding. I want to be like my cousins on my mom’s side. The ones who ooze that easy and treasured masculinity, the ones for whom their long hair is an inherent part of their place in our family as Hawaiian men.
I have top surgery and reconstruct the chest I longed for as a child. My scars are wiry braided rope, like what our ancestors used to sail across the Pacific; at times my own voyage feels like the most wild and certain thing I’ve ever done.
2017
The wedding photos arrive and my whole body flushes hot with regret. I search for Jason but all I see is the girl I was before, smiling hard on the happiest day of my life.
2019
I’ve unwittingly signed a devil’s contract with patriarchy: I suffer in silence, I don’t ask for help when I need it most. Like when I make a terrible decision and hurt my friend in the process.
Lost in my shame on the commute home, I do a double-take at the receding hairline in the rearview and nearly plow into the car in front of me on the 880-South. I feel betrayed by my body, and the undetectable metamorphosis already in motion: becoming a man who has convinced himself that he is alone in his pain.
2020
I apply Rogaine religiously for two years straight, and it preserves some of my dignity. But the ravaging fear and hopelessness of the pandemic makes quick work of the thinning hair still clinging to patches of my scalp. Dad stares back at me in the mirror.
I should just shave it all off. I want so desperately to shed the daily reminders of this rapidly decaying young-man-hood.
2021
I am an island in an archipelago, trying to understand what it means to be hoisted into the status of elder when there are so few others like me. I daydream of dinner parties with greying, balding trans kin, trading horror stories about our deteriorating bodies and the new places where we’ve begun to ache. A round table draped in linen, a bowl of mandarins and a cache of soothing balms and blunts for sharing.
2021
Marching with pro-abortion organizers along Congress Avenue on a sweltering Saturday in Austin, I spot Adri beelining towards me at warp speed: young and masculine with bright eyes and a full head of bouncing cinnamon waves. I do my best to quell the envy swelling within me.
They nearly tackle me from the side, pressing their head into my chest, wrapping their entire wingspan around me, squeezing me tight with a loving urgency.
Being inside of Adri’s embrace is a medicine I didn’t know I needed. Privately, I thank them for the hug and they crown me with a title I’ve never felt worthy of carrying: a beacon of possibility,
and for the first time in a long time,
I forget how much I miss my hair.