Mr. Moustache

The last couple of months, for no particular reason besides being lazy and liking a warm face while biking in the cold, I have been growing out my beard.  China is kind of a wasteland when it comes to facial hair (I’m not sure where movie makers get the idea that all Chinese villains and/or wise sages have Fu Manchus because I cannot recall having seen a good one yet) so it was fun to see what people did when they noticed.  Some of the more memorable reactions:

• One of my friends here helps take care of a little boy who is in transit from an orphanage to being adopted.  He’s pretty clingy to my friend but we took him swimming one day and when in the vicinity of my beard he would get this look of wonderment in his eye, let go of my friend, come over to me and start petting my beard like it was an cat or dog.  He was absolutely memorized by it. Hilarious.
• A worker at a parking lot joked with me when I dropped my bike off asking if I was La Deng (Osama bin Laden) and that he was going to arrest me and turn me in for a $10 million reward.  Not sure where he got that figure because the internet says it’s actually $50 million but either way, that’s a lot of money for a Chinese parking lot attendant.
• A friend and I were walking down the street when we passed by a group of guys sitting out in front of a store.  They saw me and started to chuckle and talk amongst themselves then one of them yelled something at me. I didn’t understand what they said so I asked my friend and he told me they asked if I needed help finding a razor.
• This isn’t Chinese-related but my sister is working in Switzerland as a nanny for a family with two kids ages 5 and 3.  One day when I was video chatting with her the kids came in and saw my picture on the computer. They dubbed me Monsieur Moustache (she’s in the French speaking part of Switzerland) and from then on whenever I talk with her and they are around, they always yell out “Monsieur Moustache! Monsieur Moustache!” She tells the story better, complete with pictures, on her blog here.

It was fun to have the beard for a while but it made eating a pretty messy ordeal – I’ve never used so many napkins in my life. Plus, I’m headed back to Thailand in a  couple of days when we have break for Chinese New Year (It totally makes up for only getting two days off for Christmas when you can have five weeks off a couple of weeks later) and I wanted to avoid getting a weird tan.  So the beard had to go but there was still some humor left in it on its way out.