In Search of Lost Time

Hair salons in China are renowned, particularly in the expatriate community, for the doting service and almost excessive hair washing opportunities that they invariably provide. Unfortunately, no amount of solicitude for the hirsute is sufficient to overcome the lamentable reality that few Chinese men have any facial hair worth speaking of. It is therefore advisable, when offered a complete and seemingly luxurious shave, to run in the other direction as fast as seems reasonable, taking care not to knock over any men of delightfully ambiguous sexual orientation on the way. Should you fail to heed this advice and find yourself face-up in a barber's chair, the wooden back of which is telling you that inter-personal shaving probably never entered the algorithm used by this particular chair manufacturer, at least devote your best dialectical efforts to explaining that no matter how strongly the barber thinks he has applied a sufficient amount of his preferred shaving agent (water), he is gravely mistaken. As he uses his bare blade to poke around in stupefaction at the sight of uniform stubble, muster your most saccharine susurrations in support of a soft and steady shave, with the hope that his thoughts will turn to those joys of life that do not require bedeviling the bewhiskered. You will otherwise emerge partially shaven, wondering about the origins of the phrase "Chinese water torture."