April Li
Qiu was only 21 when her hair began to fall out in clumps.
She’d moved to Brooklyn nearly a month ago, when the streets were slushy and brown. The January had been wet; it always rained and never snowed, cold droplets prickling her face as she hurried onto the J platform at Marcy Ave. At night, crossing the dark between curtain-drawn brownstones, Qiu sometimes misstepped into deep pools of stale rainwater collecting off the sidewalk. She tried not to think about all the litter, piss, and rats that might’ve also passed through the puddles. The rats were the worst. New York had been okay so far; it was bare and frosty, sure, but the novelty was still there—the miniscule square footage of Qiu’s apartment, the hot stink of the subways, the quarters-only laundromat she’d managed to avoid using but once in the four weeks she’d been here—all these dissonances could be reframed in Qiu’s mind. The rats were the one thing Qiu could not reconcile herself to, and she didn’t foresee that changing any time in the near or distant future.
In the shower, under the pounding city water, thick strands of hair tangled between Qiu’s fingers, sluiced along her arms with the stream, nestled in the creases between her waist and stomach. She could feel the threads whisper against her feet as the water washed them down her body. Sometimes, the strands hooked around her toes, worming into the crevices between each digit and restricting her blood circulation. Even as she fished them out, she’d still feel a phantom band around her toe, the ghost of the strand wrapped tight to the knuckle.
She tried to scoop up the hair that she could, skimming her fingers along her waist and thighs to lift the strands away from her skin. It could have been almost sensual except Qiu didn’t feel that way at all, she felt mostly scared when she looked down at the dark clumps gathered between her fingers. Against her tan skin the stray strands were barely visible, ticklish but difficult to actually brush away. But collected in her hands they became black nests, thick and viscous, looking grossly human for something detached from any body. There was something elastic and resistant about the strands—like fishing nets, or the green mesh fencing Qiu’s parents would put up in their garden to keep the Massachusetts deer out, the kind that blended in with the grass and tangled you like a caught fish if you didn’t look carefully. But those nets were meant to be indestructible. Grasping the piles of hair in her hands, it seemed as if the slightest touch or tug caused Qiu’s hair to detach from her scalp. She had never felt more breakable, more brittle.
For the hairs that inevitably escaped Qiu’s grasp, whirling together at the drain, she imagined them slipping into the sewer system that ran beneath the city, floating out west with the empty beer cans, the old receipts, the limp plastic bags, the rank fluids which inevitably collected on train tracks, the garbage juice, the piss and the shit, the rats, until it all dumped out in a rush into the East River.
*
It wasn’t that Qiu had never lost hair before. Her shedding had become a thing in high school, her mother nagging her to collect her hairs from the bathroom tile. It was during the years when the slightest remark or sigh would lead to a clash between them. It was the years when Qiu’s father had left to work in China, and she could remember the liminal time in between the decision and the act: the shrill screech of her mother late at night, her father’s stubborn silence in return. The next morning there was always a tight-lipped cordiality between them and it began to solidify and expand until their split-level became suffocating with the gelling tension. It always felt like Qiu’s mother thought the sharp edges of her hurt could punish everyone else in the house in return. Qiu resented her mother for it, the constant martyrdom.
Then, her father had left. They’d driven him to Logan Airport with curt goodbyes. It was so clinical, the only words leaving their mouths being purely logistical ones. Both Qiu and her mom stayed in the car. Her mother let slip a Make sure you have your passport, which her father responded to with a non-committal Mn. Then he was swallowed up by the sliding doors.
*
Qiu stepped out from the shower, steam and familiar resentment rising off her skin. As she went through her rituals, she was glad for the foggy sink mirror and the way it obscured her reflection and the shape of her body from herself. It was the only mirror in her place—she hadn’t yet mustered up the energy to lug a full-length home. In Brooklyn, unlike in her childhood suburbia where strip malls of expansive chain retailers abounded, she was hard-pressed to find a Walmart or Target nearby. In her mind, she kept writing off the mirrors in the sidewalk antique stores as unnecessary, and unnecessarily expensive, purchases. But her thrift had also saved her from confrontations with the jarring unfamiliarity of her appearance. In New York, surrounded by strangers, Qiu found that she could navigate the city with a comforting sense of invisibility.
For this reason, Qiu glanced away from the sweating mirror as she brushed her teeth. But as she bent down to spit, her eyes caught on the reflection of her lowered head. In the dripping condensation, her hair part stood stark, white, and shockingly wide. Qiu stared, taken aback, at the top of her head. It was the first time she was looking at her reflection head-on for weeks. Against the broad split of her scalp, all her empty follicles were visible. A jolt went through her: was she balding? Her heartbeat jumped at the thought.
Qiu could not recount what she did that week. She must have left for her non-profit job each morning and come back each evening, but she could not remember what grant proposals she’d written or what documents she’d filed. All she could remember were, abstractly, the subway rides: how, holding onto a pole Monday morning, she glanced down and suddenly all she could see were hairlines. The commuters’ hair parts resolved into white snakes, wriggling back and forth through the tops of heads. That Wall Street lady, trim in her trench coat and ponytail slicked back, part thin and straight. The middle-aged woman, bundled in scarves and puffy coat, with her grocery cart: a river ran through her hair, with tributaries running like vertebrae down either side. Qiu realized, heart sinking, that her own hair was eroding into these formations, too.
At night, she navigated her bartending shifts in a fugue state. She mindlessly wiped tables, poured shots. She was sure she made some cocktails wrong in her distraction. But no one said anything, or if they did, she did not register.
On Friday, there was someone new at the bar. Her name was Chelsea. Chelsea stuck her hand out to shake, but she was shorter than Qiu and Qiu could see the top of her head, hair part painstakingly sharp and tight. The other girl’s hair, unlike Qiu’s frizzy, lackluster mess, fell in the kind of sleek and shiny sheets Qiu had always envied. And the blackness of it, so far from emphasizing the ugly starkness of her part as Qiu’s did, made her head seem thick and full.
Chelsea had an air of expectation about her as she looked at Qiu, but Qiu could only mumble, “Nice to meet you.”
She saw the movement of Chelsea shrugging and turning away, but she didn’t catch the expression on her face. Qiu meant to feel embarrassed, but she couldn’t dredge up much feeling to care in the moment.
Throughout the night, Chelsea flitted to and fro around the bar. She already seemed more adept at bartending than Qiu, to whom the deft social agility required of the job had never come naturally. It was clear that Chelsea had zest, style, and gravity. Qiu could tell she was impressing their other coworkers and the management, deeply—and immediately. If Qiu was honest with herself, she was deeply impressed, too. She felt a pang of inadequacy.
That night, Qiu pulled up her phone and typed in Chelsea’s name. It appeared Chelsea had gotten a BFA from NYU. She posted artful candids against Friday-night streetscapes, still standing out, sharp and sculpted, in her deadly eyeliner. She was clearly an actual artist, not like Qiu, who’d studied Art History but had never cultivated enough talent of her own to go anywhere with it. Chelsea had been a department darling at NYU, and now she worked at a gallery. Qiu stalked Chelsea’s Instagram and LinkedIn extensively, stewing in her own misery.
Eyes burning from staring at her screen for so long, she dared to pull up a new tab on her phone. My hair is falling out but I’m barely in my 20s. What is wrong with me? The internet churned back lists that made Qiu’s heart pulse in the back of her mouth and ears: Severe acne. Excess facial hair. Feelings of depression and anxiety. Male-pattern baldness. Weight gain, especially in the midsection. She read everything out of the corner of her eye, too fearful to look at it head-on. Still, she burrowed deeper into a tunnel of furious Google searches, WebMD links. Irregular menstrual cycles. Hormonal imbalance. High risk of miscarriage and endometrial cancer.
Qiu thought back to high school, when her mother eventually began nagging her to collect her hairs from the shower drain, too. It was disgusting to Qiu how, when she’d pull the clumps out, they’d sometimes unearth more strands that had buried underneath, which lifted out with globs of conditioner clinging onto them, sagged heavy with water. The clumps piled up in the trash can with her and her mother’s bloody pads, the heavy-duty kind that felt like diapers and were always obvious in Qiu’s jeans. They bought their pads in jumbo 108-count packs from Costco, packs Qiu would shred through every month, sometimes more than once a month.
Qiu thought about what it might mean to have a faulty womb. Maybe it was better if she wouldn’t be able to have children. If she had always hurt her own mother so much, she wondered what she might inflict on her own children, even if inadvertently, even if in the distant future.
From her inception, Qiu had carved out her mother’s womb, rearranged her insides to make room for her own. Qiu hadn’t wanted to release her grip on her mother’s body—she’d been a C-section baby, the doctors slicing up her mother’s stomach on the table. A fact Qiu’s mother never failed to bring up: the way Qiu had terrorized her body since the beginning. It was a debt Qiu could never recover. In a way, she was still robbing her mother. The same way she’d taken and taken, since birth—since even before. That was what it was between them: in their bones, they knew each other too deeply, cut each other too sharply.
Qiu’s eyes became so dry and fatigued that she finally put her phone down. But she could not fall asleep. She had a nagging feeling in the back of her head, like she was forgetting to address something urgent. She felt an impending sense of doom.
*
Qiu began to notice piles of hair left on her pillow when she woke up in the morning. She studiously gathered them into the trash can, but the next morning there’d inevitably be more hair, the strands collecting into black nests.
For the first time, she realized how truly alone she was in this city. She wondered how she would go about finding a doctor. The buildings felt uncaring, turning their impassive facades toward her, not revealing any of the lives they held inside.
In the midst of all this, Qiu almost forgot to buy her train ticket home. Her mother had been nagging her about it, at an incessant frequency by the time the weekend loomed. Qiu replied just enough to keep her mother at bay: I’m going to, I’m just really busy. I’ll look this weekend. Except she didn’t, and it wasn’t until Thursday afternoon when she saw the notification light up her phone (Qiu, Did you buy ticket yet? Better hurry.) that she remembered.
Qiu couldn’t fall asleep that night. Her stomach roiled with her tossing and turning. She woke up in a hurry and just barely missed the train that would have gotten her to work on time. An unlucky start to the new year. She managed to send a 新年快乐 to her parents from her seldom-used WeChat account, adding on a sticker she had saved from ages ago: a sheep that bài nián-ed. It wasn’t the year of the sheep anymore.
*
By the time she got onto the Amtrak that afternoon, Qiu had a headache. The nausea from last night had not gone away. She wondered if her pants were too tight and that was making it worse. As the train pulled away from the station, Qiu felt something rising in her esophagus. She stumbled down the aisle toward the lavatory, trying not to bump into people’s seats as the tracks sped under her feet.
The metal door barely slammed shut behind her before Qiu was bent over the toilet. She tried not to breathe in the stench too deeply but the thing in her throat was choking her. She hacked and gagged. She felt the webby mass scratch along her throat and then it flew out of her mouth, a big black clump of hair. There was bile caught in its strands. Seeing it, Qiu gagged a few more times, wanting to expel the feeling from her mouth.
She stood up. Her limbs felt weak. But she was alone. There was nothing for her to do but clean herself up and go back to her seat.
Qiu closed her eyes, felt the thrum of the Amtrak vibrate beneath her. The thought that came to mind was that she missed her mother. If she fell asleep quick enough, she could wake up and be home in a blink. Leaning back, she let herself dip into unconsciousness with the back of her head against the headrest.
When she next awoke, the train was passing through nondescript New England farmland. It was long into the nighttime now, but in the new-moon blackness outside the window she could still see vague shadows zipping by: pocked fields, telephone wires. The big tree skeletons that stood gnarled and looming. In New York, the trees all arched their bare branches over the streets, lined up in neat rows beside the brownstones. They knew nothing of this wildness, this openness. In the distance, squares of light hovered—and Qiu had missed this too: houses with their own little stone paths to the front door, PVC siding, basements. The familiar roll of the mountains in the background. She wanted to see highways again soon.
Qiu found the car at the curb of the station entrance. It had only been a little more than a month since Qiu had left her mother at this station, yet all the unexpected missing she had felt on the train became even more acute now. The car trunk, the passenger seat, felt familiar. The look of her mother’s face in profile. The moment felt weighted to Qiu, yet their conversation was flushed in normalcy. “Hi,” was all Qiu said. Her mother asked the usual questions as she put the car into drive: Did you eat anything on the train? Was it cold? You must be tired, right?
Facing the darkness of the highway, with only the stretch of road that fell into the headlights’ beams visible at every meter, Qiu felt a tenderness rise up in her throat for her mother. She tried to look at her without moving her head. She could see her mother’s slim hands on the steering wheel, illuminated in fluorescence each time they passed beneath a highway light, then falling into shadows again. Her mother had tight skin and stark veins—they stood in dark grooves on the backs of her hands. Qiu felt the urge to say, “mā mi.” Just that, just mā mi, like she was five years old again, calling out for her mother. Mā mi, help me.
“I’m kind of hungry,” Qiu said, over the sound of the NPR newscasters’ voices.
“You have missed home food, haven’t you?” her mom said with amusement, reading into the statement. Qiu had always hated when her mother did that, projecting something out of nothing-words. But this time it was true, and maybe that was what Qiu had been trying to say.
“Yeah,” she agreed. In the car, where they didn’t have to look at each other, where they sat in darkness going in between one real place and another, it always felt easier to say things.
“We have lots of food at home,” her mother said. “Dad steamed fish. Tomorrow we will wrap dumplings.”
Her father had come back at the beginning of the week for the holiday, but Qiu knew they had waited for her to make dumplings. She guessed he must be jetlagged still, if it was her mother picking her up from the station and not him. Her mother disliked driving, and was not good at it. Qiu wondered how it had gone, if her father had volunteered, maybe meaning it, maybe not actually. If her mother had said Forget it, I’ll just go or if she had said No need, I can go. Qiu didn’t know which one was worse, the lack of expectation or the courteousness. She wondered if her mother was feeling like a martyr about it. But her mother’s calmness in this moment felt peaceful, not volatile.
It made Qiu sad, to realize that her mother had had to get used to driving. Alone, everywhere, all of the time. She wondered if her mother ever got lonely, one person in their three-bedroom split-level by herself. Cleaning so many rooms that weren’t even dirty from being lived-in, just dusty from disuse.
Thinking about this now, Qiu wanted to stay awake for her mother. They were still forty-five minutes away from the house. Qiu didn’t want her mother to feel like she was driving alone. Even though it was still quiet, just the low hum of the program jingle playing on the radio—so familiar that it was part of the white noise around them, along with the sound of the tires against the road. Even though they were not saying anything, and Qiu’s mother must have thought that she was trying to sleep. Qiu sat upright, kept her eyes wide and alert, as if that would amend something, this feeling of debt that she carried around in her feet. The last thing she remembered, though, was the blackness of the backroads once they pulled off the highway, all trees and remnant piles of chunky asphalt snow by the intersections. Then she was asleep.
*
In the end, the weekend slipped by uneventfully, the way weekends at home always did. The hours never seemed to move the same in that house, it liked to catch and linger. Qiu often felt she was a child again, when time moved at a slower pace and the years plodded by lethargically. Still, all weekend, Qiu had a nagging feeling in her brain, like she was running out of time to say something.
Sunday arrived with a sense of disappointment. Qiu packed her duffel, feeling like the day was already over although it was morning. When she went downstairs, there was Chinese fruitcake on the table.
“Happy birthday, Qiu Qiu,” her dad said. Qiu looked at her parents in surprise. They never did birthday cakes. Her parents must have driven out to the Asian mart in the morning.
Qiu watched her parents light the two candles on the cake. She was 22 today, and she was balding. She was 22 today, and she was still becoming. In Chinese culture, the number two was lucky and so were pairs and doubles. But Qiu did not feel that luck was on its way to her. She felt alone, lost, confused. She felt like a child, unformed, undeveloped. She did not feel like a woman. Her body was a mystery to her, even more so now that it was rebelling against her.
The weekend had come and gone and she had never said anything. Never said, Mom, help me. Mom, I’m scared. Mom, I think I’m sick. Mom, something’s wrong. Mom, I need your help. Mom, I need you. Mā mi, Mā mi. She had imagined herself saying those words, but when it came down to it, and she looked up at her mother’s face through the saccharine candle smoke, the sounds could not come out of her mouth. And the time to have said something was eclipsing, and Qiu was getting back on the train, she was going back to New York, back to her topsy-turvy life, all having only said a whole lot of nothing.
*
Qiu was in the bar bathroom for the fifth time that evening. The patrons must have thought she had incontinence or something. She kept running her hands through her head, and her fingers came away with clumps of hair. It was never-ending, like a recurring dream Qiu had where she spat out watermelon seeds that became her teeth and they would keep coming and coming, her gums releasing each one without resistance and her body filling up with the dread of knowing her mouth would soon be empty.
Qiu kept pulling more and more hair out of her head, wondering when it was going to run out, but unable to stop. She observed herself in the mirror clinically. There were visible patches of scalp on her head, and she didn’t know how to feel about it. That is, she felt nothing. She looked at herself, this unrecognizable person, who must have been a different Qiu, a not-Qiu.
The door swung open.
“Dude, what’s going on?”
It was Chelsea. She held the door open with one hand, and had her other hand propped on the doorframe. She peered in, taking in the scene before her: Qiu in front of the mirror, surrounded by strands of black hair. Much of it was in the sink, which Qiu dreaded trying to clean up.
Qiu looked back at her. “I…”
Chelsea came into the bathroom fully, letting the door swing shut behind her. She came up beside Qiu and surveyed the scene in front of her. “This is nasty,” she said. Her eyes widened. “Sorry, I don’t mean your hair. I just mean that it’s all in the sink with the water and stuff….”
Qiu laughed. It was all so absurd. “It is nasty,” she said.
She went to the paper towel dispenser and pushed down the lever over and over, letting a long roll come out. She folded it over onto itself until it was thick enough for her to not risk making contact with anything in the sink. She placed it over the hair. The wetness of the sink immediately began to seep into the paper, the cheap brownness beginning to disintegrate.
“Ew,” said Chelsea.
Qiu laughed again.
“Maybe toilet paper,” Chelsea proposed.
They went into the stalls and grabbed the rolls off the toilet tanks, ripping off long ribbons and clumping them up, pulling hair and bits of shredded paper towel from the sink, squealing at the grossness.
“Where have you been?” Chelsea asked, as she wiped at the drain. “The last few nights, I mean. You were gone.”
Qiu felt mild surprise. “I went home for the weekend,” she said. “Chinese New Year.”
Chelsea nodded. “How was it?”
“Home’s…home.”
Chelsea nodded again. They worked in silence for a while.
“They’re gonna be wondering where we are,” Qiu said. The managers.
Chelsea shrugged. “Who cares?”
Who did care? About any of it? The thought might have been lonely, but instead it was liberating. Chelsea did not seem to care that Qiu’s hair was falling out. Nobody cared, except Qiu, who had been so obsessed with caring about everything and everyone.
*
Qiu was excited for her shift. She was excited to see Chelsea. She hadn’t realized how much more fun the menial, the sometimes irksome, tasks could be, if there was someone to do it with you. She hadn’t realized how quickly the time could pass. Now all of it was more fun, and interacting with the clientele was too. It was like a little game, an inside joke, a secret.
She had wondered why Chelsea wanted to become friends with her. Maybe want was too strong of a word. They had happened to become friends. But still, Chelsea had chosen it, had chosen to stay.
That was the mystery of it all. Here was Chelsea, too cool, too adequate, fully formed, while Qiu felt too young, still becoming. Maybe it was that Qiu hadn’t done anything wrong yet. But still, she hadn’t done anything right, either. Perhaps she didn’t have to do anything right or wrong. Perhaps it was alright just to exist, and maybe that was enough for Chelsea to enjoy her company, the way Qiu enjoyed Chelsea’s.
When she got to the bar, Chelsea was already there. Chelsea greeted her with a grin, half mischievous, but also half sheepish, a look Qiu hadn’t seen on her before.
“I brought you something,” Chelsea said.
“What do you mean?”
“Here,” Chelsea said. She pulled a plastic DuaneReade bag out from behind her back. A mass inside of it shifted.
Qiu made a face. “It’s not a rat, right?”
“No!”
“Okay, okay, just checking.” Chelsea had learned how much Qiu hated rats. Qiu had otherwise made it through the worst of it; the bite of winter was beginning to mellow out. There had been a promise of spring recently, the city could feel it. The rats were the one thing that remained unchanging.
“Take it,” Chelsea said, holding the bag out again.
Qiu took it from her and opened it. At first she didn’t realize what it was.
“It’s a wig,” Chelsea said.
Qiu pulled it out. It looked uncanny; the hair looked real, like another version of all the clumps that had come out of her own head, except the wig was shiny and neat, not tangled knots of web. “Where’d you get this?” she asked.
Chelsea paused. “It’s one of my mom’s that she doesn’t want anymore. She has cancer. So she wears wigs.”
“I—didn’t know that. About your mom.”
Chelsea shrugged. “Do you want to try it on?”
Qiu considered. “Actually…I think,” she began. She didn’t know what she was going to say until she was saying it. “I think I’m going to get rid of my hair.”
Chelsea smiled. “Want help?”
*
“Are you ready?” Chelsea asked. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the sound of the wind. Her hair whipped around her, creating a dark halo.
They’d brought a stool out to the pier. Despite the wind, there were white blossoms coming onto the trees, the earth a reminder that tides change.
Perched on the stool, Qiu’s hair was blowing in front of her face, too, making her squint. “I think so.”
Chelsea shook her head hard. “Are you ready!” she yelled, drawing out the syllable with her mouth open wide for the wind to rush in. Qiu’s mother would have had an aneurysm. She always said not to swallow any cold air.
Qiu turned her own head toward the river. Manhattan’s skyline stood cold and silver against the sky. She let her lungs fill with air. “Yahhhhh!” she screamed into the grey expanse.
The wind picked up her voice, blew it around. Qiu didn’t mind if people nearby heard her. She wondered if the sound had carried out to the ferries on the water.
Chelsea stepped closer to the stool and took a lock of Qiu’s hair between her fingers. Qiu closed her eyes. She felt the cold metal of the razor against her temple. “Okay, I’m doing it,” Chelsea said. The razor buzzed on and Qiu felt it slide against her scalp. Then a pause.
Qiu dared to breathe again. She opened her eyes and lifted her fingers to feel the shorn edge of her head. “Let me,” she said, holding out her palm.
Chelsea placed the dark lock into Qiu’s grasp. Here it was, her hair, a second ago a part of her body, now not. The nerves, dying in an instant. She raised her hand and released her fingers. The strands caught on gusts of air and blew out into the wide open. Qiu watched as wind ferried some of the strands out past the rail’s edge, black wisps drifting down and landing in the water.
She was 22. Her hair flowed out west, into the East River.
April Li is a senior who grew up in Connecticut but considers various places home. When she’s not writing or trying to obtain a degree, you can find her loitering around Costco sample carts or in your local library. She hopes to one day be back pain-free.
