《發廊》英語讀后感
Like a needle quickly ed into the vein, Wu Xuan’s novella Hair Salon draws blood right from the beginning. Despite its terse sentences, unsentimental tone, and smooth language, it explores an uncomfortable scenario with dualities. As readers, we are told by the narrator that his younger sister will be opening up a hair salon in the same city where he teaches history in a middle school. However, hair salon is a misnomer because it doesn’t offer haircuts at all. Situated in a forgotten alley behind the railway station, the salon provides two main services of shampooing and massage, with a largely male clientele.
Instead of elaborating on the relationship between the siblings, the story traces the path Sister Fang Yuan take from a country girl to an owner of the hair salon / massage parlour in the city and the reactions of people along the way, including her brother the narrator, his wife, her parents, relatives and fellow villagers. However, given the scope of the issues involved, the novella doesn’t expand on many threads it generates but simply puts the characters into prototypes, not withstanding a shocking twist in the end. Whether it is the narrator, Fang Yuan and her husband Li Peilin, each person represents many more out there. Even though things happen to them, they are not really always in control but merely being dragged along by a bigger force. More importantly, once they enter the city, everyone is just a part of the locomotives that carry China forward; and there is no way back.
Although there are moments when I wish our characters could be more multi-dimensional, what I like about Wu Xuan is his ability to elevate the tragic to a comical level, so that the readers may ponder between tears and laughter. For example, an anecdote in the novella concerns one of narrator’s fellow villagers, who weeps for her daughter killed by infanticide fifteen years earlier, because had she been alive, she would have being able to improve her family’s lot by working at a massage parlour.
Such is the humour, wit and the acerbic tone Wu Xuan employs in his story telling and one cannot help but sense a wounded pleasure at the end. His work demonstrates that fiction is still the best way to tell the truth.
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