Foshan, Guangdong.
A sudden downpour had just passed.
At the end of Short Street outside the Ancestral Temple stood a shop of middling size. Inside were five or six apprentices, all young, their hair meticulously combed and waxed, their faces clean-shaven, their black-and-white clothes and trousers exceptionally neat.
It was a barbershop.
There were only three old wooden chairs inside, relics of who knew what year, polished smooth by customers coming and going. The floor was paved with dull, gray stone slabs. It had perhaps just been mopped, for patches of water still clung to it.
The storefront was old, and so were the sounds coming from it.
On a small table in the corner, an ancient hand-cranked gramophone slowly spun a record, crackling as it played. It was not an operatic aria or a little ditty, but the Peking opera "Meeting of the Single Blade."
Though the shop had many apprentices, it had few customers. An old man with missing teeth sat there beaming, his eyes comfortably closed as he reclined in a wooden chair, chin raised, listening quietly to the Peking opera while a barber worked a blade over his head.
The blade was a razor.
Young though the barber was, his skill was remarkably seasoned. The blade, just a few inches long, spun nimbly between his fingers as he shaved whiskers, groomed the face, scraped around the ears, and trimmed the sideburns. The peculiar sounds of hair and whiskers severed beneath its edge flowed together without interruption, seeming to answer the urgent gongs and drums of the gramophone. His movements flowed like water, pleasing to the eye. Only after the tip of the blade gently turned in the hollow of the old man's ear, curling out a ring of whitish down, was the job complete.
The old