Hello Internet: This is a Story About an Asian with Naturally Curly Hair.
Born and raised in New Zealand to a Korean mother and Chinese Indonesian father, my childhood was a wonderful amalgamation of contrasting cultural communities as well as a frustratingly confusing jungle of multiple identity crises. I generally dealt quite well to my confused sense of cultural identity, but one thing that took me a while to come to terms with was my mop of curly, frizzy hair.
It hadn’t always been this way: before puberty struck, my hair was actually a manageable wispy mop of waves. However, nature had to be a bitch and once the pre-teen years hit, my once manageable mop became a tyrant of thick frizz. At this stage of the journey, I didn’t even realise I had curly hair. Because my mother and I had no idea how to manage the mop on my head, we treated it as one would treat straight hair: by brushing it a lot, which unsurprisingly, resulted in a puffy halo that I would just end up tying in a tight ponytail.
Growing up, I associated my frizzy / curly hair with being unattractive, messy and unprofessional. This was not so much due to being told directly of these associations (*cough* Mia’s makeover in Princess Diaries *cough*), but the fact that I had never seen traditionally beautiful Asian women portrayed on TV, film or even in books with the feature of curly hair. Add to the fact that my parents, two siblings and everyone in my extended family had jet black straight hair with slightly olive-based, warm skin tones, I thought there was something wrong with me: my extremely thick, frizzy, curly hair and pale, easily freckled skin being aesthetics anomalies from the rest of my family.
I cried over my hair for sure. I remember taking showers as a kid, lathering a heap of Pantene conditioner over my hair and praying to God that my hair would stay this way when it dried. It never did. (I was so repetitively scarred by this unanswered routine that I even wrote a poem about it). My saint of a mother probably experienced countless arm cramps from straightening my hair once every few days before going to bed. After a couple of years of the struggle and a very invested mother who shared the struggle with her gaggle of Korean friends, a Korean hairdresser suggested I get a Japanese chemical straightening treatment. I was amazed. I could have straight hair, even after I took a shower?! From the ages of 12–17, omma and I would religiously visit a Korean hair salon to get my hair chemically straightened my hair every six months. The regrowth was terrible but for me, it was a life changing event. For about 5 years, I had ‘straight’ hair and no one suspected a thing…
Until it was time for university. I decided to leave my home city and study up North for tertiary education and once I left home, I started to realise that getting my hair straightened was rather expensive for a student to justify. So I succumbed to tying my hair up in a bun and using a hair straightening semi-regularly. To say that my hair took to this well would be an understatement and a half. Having my hair regularly chemically straightened for half a decade, plus the fact that I was now using a hair straightener most mornings, my hair became so dry and brittle I often just tied my hair up in a tight bun to avoid exhibiting a halo of unruly frizz. It was during university, facing the realities of personal responsibilities away from my parents, that I began to discover blogs with tips about how to properly care for curly hair. Sure, most of them were written by beautiful African American women with very different kinds of curls to my own but at the time, I was stoked: a curl is a curl is a curl right? I poured into these websites, collated notes on the products they used and the methods they recommended. I discovered websites such as naturallycurly.com and finally got my hands on Lorraine Massey’s book “Curly Girl: The Handbook” from my local library. It was a knowledge bank that I would religiously add to on my own time and slowly tried to incorporate into my life in secret: sleeping on a silk pillowcase, drying with a microfiber towel, co-washing, shampooing with apple cider vinegar, getting rid of products with silicone and sulfates etc. It became an obsession of mine that I thought about a lot, but I didn’t want to share my story at the time because I felt embarrassed that no matter the effort, my hair would still look a mess. I went through periods when I would get super optimistic and last a decent time growing my hair out, doing regular hair masks and using natural hair products. But there were a lot of times when I was just so down about my hair that I would relapse into using a hair straightener or starting the cycle of chemically straightening my hair once again!
My low point was when I decided to get my hair bleached and dyed blonde. My mindset at the time was a screw-it-all mentality and I decided that my tutoring job at the university could pay for the upkeep of my sleek, straight, and blonde hair goals. I quickly realised that maintaining straight AND blonde hair was a financial and maintenance nightmare. Shocker. It was after this experience that that I decided to dye my hair with black henna and stopped using straightening irons and hair dryers all together. I also started to become more diligent in researching my personal curl profile and trying products suited for my particular type of hair.
A major turning point that happened quite recently was getting a hair cut and hair care lesson from a salon that specialises in curly hair. Having stalked their Instagram for about a year, I finally managed to nab an appointment with senior hair stylist Christine at Neel Loves Curls in Melbourne. Since I was planning to go to Melbourne to visit a friend over Easter break, it was a perfect opportunity to visit the salon I had been admiring from afar. For the longest time, I had been Googling hairdressers in New Zealand that specialised in curly hair with very little avail. I even ended up visiting a few salons that came up in the results but I quickly learnt that these self-professed curly hair specialists were hardly trained in the Curly Girl method: the biggest tell-tale was cutting my hair while it was wet! So to say that I was a little excited to have my hair cut at Neel Loves Curls would be a tad bit underplaying my true emotions. I was frickin’ stoked. Christine was just the best and she was so patient in teaching me the exact technique to give my hair the moisture it needed. Honestly, this haircut changed the GAME for my curly hair journey: my parents actually thought I had gotten a perm when I sent them photos after the appointment! The exact routine I follow and products I use will be explored in a latter blog post but for the meantime, the summary of my active hair journey to date has been compiled by yours truly in the collage below.
Initially, I had created the collage as an ode to my obsession for transformation montages, but I now realise that it probably serves better at being a critique of ‘quick’ transformation montages in the context of reality.From 2010–2019, the collage outlines almost a decade long journey in reaching the state of hair I find myself with today. For me, it is a solid reminder that the quick fix transformation montage is usually not a sustainable reality and that lasting transformations take time and consistent effort.
So you may ask: have I made it? Is 2019 the year that my life is all stardust and rainbows concerning the attitude towards my own hair? Ah. No. If I could provide a metaphor for my current feelings towards my hair it would be this: think of an ugly ass stray cat who keeps showing up at your doorstep that you slowly become fond of because of its consistency at showing up at your doorstep. The longer you stare at its squished nose, under bite and beady eyes, it somehow begins to look, dare I say, cute? You become rather attached to the thing. And now you find yourself trying to figure out how to look after and feed this stray cat until you just end up adopting as your own.
I admit the imagery is a bit crude but yeah, it is a pretty accurate representation of the progression of my attitude towards my natural hair over the past 9 years. While over time, I have been able to slowly accept many of the physical attributes I would have previously deem as unattractive (my small monolid eyes, pale skin, freckles, being short, perhaps the very fact that I looked Asian in a western country), accepting my hair in its natural state is still an ongoing struggle that I battle with today. The reality of this ongoing struggle, as well as the difficultly I have faced / am facing in finding a relatable community around the theme of Asians with naturally curly hair, is the main reason why I have decided to start this blog series focusing on my personal curly hair journey. I hope to no longer struggle alone!
The last thing I want these series of blog posts to be is a giant pity party for Asian girls with frizzy, curly / textured hair. I fully acknowledge that I am so so privileged in many other ways and that my personal struggles with a mop of dead cells sprouting from my head holds very low importance in comparison to issues such as global warming, mental health, racism and poverty… But I simply want to share my ongoing story of an Asian reality that I never really got to hear / look up to / share while growing up. There is no shame in people with naturally curly hair who decide to get their hair straightened or bleached or whatever! How you treat your body is your choice and your right. However, I do believe that the voice of standard versions of beauty have been extremely dominant in mainstream media and I just simply want to give voice to a version of beauty that I am trying to define for myself. :)
Now enough of me spewing out my life story! If you have made it this far, thanks for being an unpaid digital therapist. the rest of the mane musings series will be less of a shrink session and more of a chill, shared journey of embracing naturally curly hair as an Asian female living in New Zealand.
mlc.x
All illustrations on this article were created by the author. For more information follow my journey on instagram and youtube.
