The Torture Seat by Chris Wu

I’m suspended in the chair, trapped in a staring contest with my own reflection. Joey moves around me with wordless precision, scissors glinting under fluorescent lights. I prefer the silent ones—stylists who treat conversation as an unnecessary extravagance. In this enforced stillness, I can practice the meditation I never actually do at home. Breathe in the mingling scents of hair product and disinfectant. Watch my pulse slow in the hollow of my throat.

Since I started getting haircuts on my own, anxiety has been my loyal companion. I simmer beneath the black nylon cape that renders my body invisible, transforming me into nothing but a floating head—the great and powerful Oz. My mind conjures disaster scenarios: a sneeze transforming my haircut into an inverted mohawk; a breaking news headline shocking the stylist into snipping off my ear; an earthquake sending scissors plunging into my carotid artery. 

Last time I drew the short straw in stylist roulette: a woman with electric blue hair and fingernails painted emergency-exit red. She pumped my hand, asking my name twice as if the first answer hadn’t registered. Her questions machine-gunned at me while I offered clipped responses, each syllable an effort. I felt the weight of her expectation, the unspoken demand to perform as Engaging Customer. Eventually, our conversation withered and died. The silence that followed was thick with her resentment, filling the space like the choking cloud of hairspray she’d later use. I sat rigid in that chair, watching her handle her arsenal of blades with what seemed like deliberate menace.

But today I’m lucky. Joey is Asian with spiky Goku hair, dressed in a white t-shirt and jeans that position him somewhere between hipster and FOB. His California cosmetology license, that flimsy laminated rectangle taped to the bottom corner of the mirror, bears the name V. Long Bui. Joey is just what he calls himself here, in this West Hollywood salon where everyone seems to be performing a slightly different version of themselves. I wonder about this transformation from V. Long Bui (which might twist on American tongues) to Joey. It reminds me of actors who adopt stage names, or Clark Kent to Superman, but in reverse, stripping away distinctiveness to blend in. I wonder if it’s simply a pragmatic sacrifice for easier interactions. But what pieces of ourselves do we trade in these compromises with a culture that stumbles over anything unfamiliar? I glance at my own reflection (Chris Wu, a name already engineered for minimal resistance) and wonder what my ancestors would think of our abbreviated selves.

Joey understands me. He doesn’t need to fill the air with words, and I feel no pressure to manufacture small talk. When he asks how I want my hair, I feign uncertainty even though I’ve been getting the exact same cut for a decade. I tell him I like the sides short, “maybe a two,” though I know with absolute precision that I want it exactly at two, with just enough taken off the top to maintain the shape. He asks when I last had a haircut. The truth is specific: my mother’s birthday, a day I’d scheduled the haircut early to make the obligatory phone call afterward with one less thing on my to-do list. But I deliberately overstate the time by a few weeks, a small deception to make him think more needs to be cut than actually does. The last thing I want is to sit here all day for what should be a twenty-minute job.

So he folds the tissue paper around my neck, a fragile barrier between skin and cape, and drapes the nylon over my shoulders. And I sit there, with nothing to do but watch my face.

I’m surprised to see an Asian face staring back at me. This happens sometimes, this momentary disconnect, as if I’ve been expecting someone else in the mirror. Someone who isn’t me. I don’t consider myself handsome, but there are times I’ve heard my face is attractive. When I look, though, my face appears puffy, water-logged. My nose seems flattened against glass. The terrain of my skin is marred by acne scars, little craters documenting a personal history, while two fresh pimples have staked new claims on my forehead. My eyes seem heavy under their lids. I stretch them wide, as if they’re new shoes that might loosen with wear.

My gaze drifts beyond the mirror, where the salon wall serves as a shrine to conventional beauty. It’s plastered with magazine cutouts of models, mostly shirtless men with torsos sculpted into impossible geometries. This is West Hollywood after all, where beauty is currency and religion. I study these men, not recognizable as individuals but as collections of familiar parts: the geometry of their jawlines and straight noses; eyebrows that crouch over spheres of sapphire; taut and veiny skin shrinkwrapping inflated muscles. I feel something rise in my throat—not quite nausea, not quite envy—that forces my excited attention back to my own reflection. And in this stark juxtaposition, I see myself as a model portrait of imperfection.

The first time I truly studied my face, I was in eighth grade and battling catastrophic acne. I had been washing with harsh bathroom soap that stripped my skin, then slathering it with body lotion, a combination that made my face erupt in violent protest. My parents had never explained proper skin care; it wasn’t something we discussed in our household of practical concerns. I would press my face millimeters from the bathroom mirror, so close my breath fogged the glass. I examined my face as if through a microscope, horrified to discover what looked like actual holes puncturing my skin, massive pores clogged with sebum and dead cells. The disgust I felt was visceral, as if I’d discovered my body was defective, betraying me in ways I couldn’t control.

Since then, the mirror has been a reluctant friend. Cruel in its honesty, but ultimately telling me truths I need to hear. Just this year, I noticed for the first time a constellation of moles arranged in a neat line across my left cheek. Five brown dots, perfectly aligned like Orion’s Belt. I was seized by the fear that they had appeared overnight, a visible manifestation of some internal disease. More troubling was the possibility that they had always been there, that everyone had always seen this defining feature that had somehow remained invisible to me. How could I have missed something so obvious about my own face? What else wasn’t I seeing?

Joey uses the electric razor on the sides of my head, its vibration humming through my skull like a tuning fork. He works methodically, without conversation. Occasionally, he places his middle fingers on either side of my head and gently lifts, correcting my posture. The gesture is so familiar it creates a physical ache in my chest.

It’s exactly what my mother used to do.

Until I left for college, my mother cut everyone’s hair in our family. My father’s, my brother’s, and mine. Our tiny laundry room would transform into an improvised salon once a month. She would lay down newspapers across the linoleum floor, retrieve a wooden stool from the garage, and wear the same ratty nightgown for these sessions, a flowered thing faded to ghosts of blossoms, already so ruined that hair clippings couldn’t damage it further.

She would never speak during these haircuts. The only sounds were the mechanical buzz of the electric razor and the occasional snip of scissors when she worked the top. She would circle around me like a planet in orbit, her slippered feet shuffling across the crackling paper in a rhythm I still hear in dreams. I would sit there, sometimes fighting sleep, my body swaying on the backless stool. When my posture slipped, she would wordlessly place her middle fingers on either side of my head and lift, restoring me to proper alignment.

I never considered how intimate these moments were. Her fingers in my hair, her body close enough that I could smell the ginger from dinner still on her hands, the faint scent of laundry detergent that permeated the room. In a family where physical touch was rare and affection expressed obliquely, these monthly haircuts were perhaps our most sustained physical connection.

When she finished, she would stand directly in front of me, her face inches from mine. She would study my hair with intense concentration, turning my head side to side, looking for imperfections with the critical eye of someone inspecting produce at the market. Sometimes she would make a final adjustment, a single snip or a touch of the razor. And then, only then, would she speak.

“Ching ching,” she’d say, a phrase that wasn’t actually Chinese but something she had invented just for my brother and me. Her private language, meaning “cute” or perhaps something more specific that English couldn’t capture. The word hung in the air between us, a small bridge across everything unsaid.

Joey has become my regular stylist—a first for me. This is our fourth session, and we’ve developed a comfortable rhythm built on silence and the gentle pressure of his fingers against my scalp.

“You come far?” he asks, breaking our usual quiet.

“No,” I say, “my apartment’s just ten blocks away.”

He nods, meeting my eyes in the mirror. There’s something like fondness there, or perhaps I’m just projecting.

“Got roommate?” he asks, brushing hair from my shoulders.

“I live alone.”

He nods again, his hands moving to the clippers. The buzz fills the space between us.

“Girlfriend?” he asks casually. The question lands like a small betrayal.

“No,” I say, and leave it at that. He doesn’t ask more. I find it strange that he would assume I’m straight, here in West Hollywood of all places. I wonder if I should feel offended, or simply disappointed that he doesn’t know me as well as I’d imagined. We finish in silence, heat rising from my collar. It’s a shame without a logical source. As he spins me to check the back with a hand mirror, I think about Tinh.

I was seventeen, working at Starbucks the summer before college. Tinh was Vietnamese, forty-something, her black hair always pulled back in a perfect ponytail. For months, we exchanged only operational phrases. 

“Need more grande cups.” 

“Out of skim.” 

“Your customer’s waiting.”

One slow afternoon, she broke our pattern. “Where you going to college?”

“Yale,” I said, the word carrying both pride and embarrassment.

She nodded. “My son needs help with writing. English not his first language.”

“Mine either,” I said, though not exactly true. English was my first language, but it shared space with Mandarin in my childhood home, the two languages tangled like headphone wires in a pocket.

“You tutor him? I pay.”

I agreed for reasons unclear even to myself. Curiosity about a Vietnamese household? A desire to be helpful? Either way, I found myself at her apartment complex. Beige stucco and window AC units dripping condensation, eerily similar to where I’d grown up. Inside, plastic-covered furniture and walls adorned with Jesus alongside family photos. The air carried fish sauce and rice, familiar yet distinct from my mother’s cooking.

Her son sat silent at the dining table, notebook open, watching me with his mother’s same careful eyes. He seemed small for ten.

“This is Chris,” Tinh told him. “He help you write.”

I sat beside him, uncertain how to begin. My questions about his interests met with single-word responses, his gaze fixed on the blank page.

“Write a story,” I finally suggested. He seemed bewildered.

“About what?” he asked.

“About anything.”

After some consideration, he produced three sentences about a dog finding a bone. I praised his idea, then prompted for details. What kind of dog? How did he find the bone? How did he feel?

He added two more sentences in careful handwriting. I corrected grammar, showed him quotation marks for dialogue.

After forty-five minutes, Tinh appeared with a check. “Thank you. He learn good from you.”

I pocketed the fifty dollars. “He’s doing great. He has good ideas.”

The boy remained silent, still staring at his notebook.

I never returned, and Tinh never asked again. We reverted to our professional silence, passing supplies and wiping counters, that brief intersection of our lives sealed over by mutual, unspoken agreement.

In Joey’s mirror, I watch his composed face as he puts the finishing touches on my haircut. I wonder about the stories he’s constructing in the silence after my truncated answer, what assumptions have replaced his questions.

“Okay,” he says, removing the cape.

“Thanks,” I say, standing and reaching for my wallet. I leave a generous tip, a small apology for a transgression neither named nor acknowledged.

Next month, I won’t call Joey for an appointment. Instead, I find myself spinning the stylist roulette wheel again, perhaps searching for that first intoxicating feeling: the novelty of someone other than my mother cutting my hair. 

The second month of college, I found a barber through word of mouth. Matthew operated from a small space beneath a boutique hotel. His workspace bore no resemblance to our laundry room: sleek black chairs that adjusted with hydraulic hisses, mirrors framed in brushed metal, the sophisticated scent of sandalwood and mint from products arranged on glass shelves. Matthew himself was compact and energetic, with dark-framed glasses that gave him the look of a young architect.

I sat rigid in his chair, nervous and oddly excited. When he started talking, asking questions about my major and where I was from, I felt a wave of discomfort. I didn’t want to respond, not because I was shy, but because I was certain that speaking would cause my head to bob uncontrollably. I was convinced that any movement would result in a laceration. So I answered in telegraphic bursts: Yes. No. Texas. Cool.

Later, I wondered why my mother never spoke during our haircuts. Was it concentration, a cultural approach to service, or simply that we had nothing to say to each other? Perhaps silence was her natural state, and those monthly haircuts were just one more space where words failed to bridge the gap between us.

I always got the same haircut, the one my mother had perfected over years of practice. A conservative Asian cut. Parted neatly to one side, faded on the sides, practical and unremarkable. It never occurred to me to want anything different. My hair was something to be managed, not expressed through. When I started going to a barber, I simply transported my mother’s vision to a professional setting, carrying her aesthetic forward like an inheritance.

One afternoon, I was in the waiting area outside Matthew’s cutting room, attempting to decode a macroeconomics textbook. The small space was quiet except for the distant hum of scissors and the occasional burst of conversation from behind the partition.

“Jackie Chan!” The words cut through my concentration like a misplaced razor. I looked up to see a young Black boy, maybe seven or eight, sitting on the bench across from me. His legs swung without reaching the floor, sneakers lighting up with each kick. “You’re Jackie Chan!” he repeated, his finger aimed at my face like a weapon.

I smiled uncomfortably, the expression feeling plastic on my face. The boy proceeded to make exaggerated kung fu noises (“Hiya! Hua! Eeya!”) while chopping the air with small hands. Heat rose to my face. I knew he was just a child, absorbing and reflecting the world as it had been presented to him, but that somehow made it worse. I couldn’t escape even through childhood innocence. I couldn’t stop him without becoming the angry Asian man, confirming some other stereotype.

“Hey, how’s it going? I’m not Jackie Chan. My name is—” But he didn’t pause in his performance, didn’t hear me attempting to insert myself as a human being with a name rather than an actor from movies. I sat there, my textbook now a shield held against my chest, waiting for his interest to wane. Eventually, a woman emerged from behind the partition (his mother, I assumed) and collected him without a glance in my direction. I considered saying something to her, but what would I say? That her child had momentarily made me feel like I was nothing but my features, nothing but a collection of racial signifiers assembled into a face that wasn’t even seen correctly?

Matthew called me in. I sat in his chair, the memory of the boy’s words still echoing.

“How’s it going?” Matthew asked, his hands already at work draping the cape around my shoulders.

“Great,” I lied.

“What are we looking at?” he asked.

I hesitated, the question sounding loaded, then said, “You know, I think I want to try something different this time. Think you can switch it up?”

The request surprised even me. I’d never deviated from my mother’s template. But suddenly I wanted something else, something that wasn’t hers, wasn’t connected to the boy in the waiting room, wasn’t predictably, stereotypically Asian.

Matthew did something bold. Instead of combing my hair to the side in the familiar pattern, he swept the front upward, creating a small peak that transformed my face in subtle but significant ways. It made me look younger, which was never really an issue for me at twenty. But it also made me look—there was no other way to think about it—gayer. Not flamboyantly so, just less confined by expectation. I stared at this slightly altered version of myself in the mirror and felt something loosen in my chest.

After the cut, Matthew leaned me back until my neck rested in the plastic curve of the washing basin. The position left me startlingly vulnerable, my throat exposed, my head cradled in a man’s hands. He turned on the water, testing the temperature on his wrist before directing the spray across my scalp. He squirted shampoo into his palm and began to work it through my hair, his fingers strong and deliberate. The sensation was scary and pleasurable. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had touched me with such careful attention.

Looking up, I noticed Matthew’s arms as he worked. His biceps flexed with each movement. I felt an unexpected surge of attraction, not just physical but something more complex. He was touching me with such intimate care. And I felt safe with his strong hands grappling my head. I wished my mother could touch my head and stand back and look at my face and say something to me. It wouldn’t even have to be “ching ching,” since no one said that anymore.

I climbed the steps from Matthew’s underground salon into the October afternoon. It was cooler than usual, the wind sweeping around my newly exposed neck. I felt refreshingly naked. As I walked back toward my dormitory, my eyes began to water. I didn’t want to admit it, but I was feeling so alone.

#

Chris Wu is a Taiwanese American writer from Texas. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in New Orleans Review, Hobart and Litro Magazine. He has written and produced for television. He lives in Los Angeles with his husband, their daughter, and a cockapoo. www.chriswuwriter.com

4 September 2025