"In America My Hair is Falling Out in the Shower", Wahid Al Mamun
even though spring rears her infant head through the communal window.
even though, as of 2019, i have switched to a natural conditioner made of olive oil extract that my mother had bottled into miniso bottles over winter break. i had insisted on olive oil because it smells more palatable than coconut. even though i only wash my hair three times a week. you get away with that here because it’s not so humid, even in spring. but my hair is falling out.
the other day someone had asked me if singapore was part of china. no lie. to you this sounds like a cliché. like, come on wahid, this is 2019, and these american kids can speak better mandarin than you. (they can actually speak mandarin.)
to which i say – but my hair is falling out.
did you ever read between the lines when you read harry potter because you had nothing better to do. i did. hermione granger had bushy hair. angelica johnson has hair which looks like worms sprouting from the dark peat of her scalp. of course they weren’t white. (we’ll talk about hermione some other day.) for this is what i think it means to be white – to have good, healthy hair.
yesterday an ethiopian girl in my dorm straightened her hair because she had to present a pitch.
today i had my fourth free therapy session in this school. i am in therapy because halfway around the world my mother’s hairline is receding. i do not tell my therapist that i am scared of clogging up the drains of my communal dorm bathroom. or that I am more scared that everyone else will figure out it was me.
every time i run my fingers through my hair i feel like i am aging by a year.
this quarter i am in a graduate anthropology class about pacific colonialism even though i am only a freshman, and the white professor knows more about singapore than i do, but not by much. he introduces pre-colonial singapore to the class not as a sleepy fishing village, but as a thriving bugis trading port. i am the only student who is surprised by this. in a similar vein, it takes me three whole weeks to realize my anthro professor has a huge bald spot, encircled by a thicket of white hair.
a girl at a party told me my hair was cute. i said, i don’t believe you. because i didn’t. in retrospect this was probably a mistake, but i am happy she didn’t have to find out my hair is falling out.
i think everyone here wants to be rich. so they become econ majors. there is a starbucks in the economics department, and the seats in the foyer are heated. the economics department is named after a chilean banker named alvaro saieh, who is a trustee of the school, so he must be very rich. he is also very bald. i think this is what happens when you want to put your name on monuments.
i do not want to put my name on a monument. but still my hair is falling out.