The Life of Scissorhands

A pair of scissors cuts through the folds of the times, and a hundred thousand hairs weave the warp and weft of destiny. In a state-run barber shop in 1985, six-year-old Chen Xiaoman huddled under a faded paint bench, counting the hair strands his mother had cut off. The boy learned his first lesson in the cold light of the funeral parlor: the hair of the dead is ice, but the hair of the living is warm. From a hair shampooer at Shenzhen Neon Hair Salon to the founder of a beauty empire in an urban village, Chen Xiaoman used his burned palms to support the ups and downs of the entire industry. He hid the bruises of domestic violence for the waitress, gave the cancer-fighting customer his last haircut, and protected the craftsman's last dignity in the blue light of the smart barber cabin. When the shadow of pneumoconiosis crept into his lungs, he still held the old-fashioned clipper left by his mother and trimmed the final chapters of his life in the hospice ward. The industry has undergone drastic changes in the past thirty years. Perm bars have evolved from iron rolls to 3D printing, and hair salons have changed from state-owned numbers to capital chessboards. But the boy who always counted his hair late at night never realized that he had already become a white hair on the scalp of the times - painful, stubborn, and with innate dignity. This novel and its characters are purely fictitious. Any similarity is purely coincidental and should not be imitated.