The Man Who Shines
43. 빛나리 아저씨
43. The Man Who Shines
A shackled man stepped out of the patrol car. At one time, Cha Eun-taek had been the crown prince of Korea’s cultural world, thanks to his connection with Choi Sun-sil, who enjoyed significant power due to her position as close friend and alleged advisor to then Korean president Park Geun-hye.
As he stood there in his handcuffs and prisoner’s garb, what drew the most attention was his bald head. The newspapers had a field day mocking him with their headlines: “Cha Eun-taek doffs his toupee for investigation; will the truth also be uncovered?”
Such is the disdain that people have toward bald heads that we see this kind of mean-spirited article, which had nothing to do with the substance of the issue.
Cha had merely taken off his toupee in accordance with the detention center’s rules; he had come to the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office building to undergo questioning from prosecutors.
I am similarly challenged when it comes to a hair. As young man, I felt wounded by this and harbored resentment about it toward my father. The signs were there as early as high school. Even as I still had quite a bit of hair on my head, one day I was getting a haircut from the barber at the local bathhouse, and as he was trimming, he stopped and said, “Looks like you’re going to be bald.”
Born of experience, his words sounded to me like a curse, and I stopped visiting him.
I’d forgotten all about it by the time I was doing my military service. But as I was growing my hair back after being discharged, the patches of hairlessness became increasingly apparent.
Like the footballer Zinedine Zidane, I began losing my hair from the back. I was in my mid-20s at the time, and I was terrified; the reassurances that I “must be quite virile” were no consolation. I couldn’t even get set up on any blind dates.
“They don’t want someone bald. Get a wig and I’ll fix you up,” a friend told me.
As I got older, I got more and more cowed by the notion of how bad it looked. I started wearing hats more often, and I’d sit at the very back of every classroom.
It was the early 2000s, and the latest Internet trend was posting pictures of attractive regular people—many even gained popularity and followings online. My mother commiserated, telling me it was because I took after my father. But my father was not to blame.
Crisis struck again when hiring season came around. I needed to look good for potential employers, so I visited a salon to prepare for an interview. The hairdresser seemed quite flustered, but she put her skills to work, straightening and sweeping my half-kinked hair into something that looked relatively lush.
She combed it out, stirring up static electricity, and sprinkled in a bit of black powder to make my hair seem thicker, locking it all in with hair spray. It looked perfect.
But because my interview was not until the next morning, I had to go through the hassle of sleeping on my stomach with my nose in my pillow. The scientist Hwang Woo-suk was still considered a national hero at the time, and so I thought of him and I hoped that he would give up cloning and go to work developing a stem cell treatment to regenerate hair.
On my way to join the order at Mandeoksan Mountain, I shaved my head. There is nothing strange about a seeker of truth shaving their head, and so my “baldness complex” vanished without a struggle.
The moment that I shifted my standard for beauty away from my body, I could finally recognize the feelings of inferiority that had oppressed me for over a decade and see them crumble away. This is true for most of the yardsticks we humans have devised for beauty.
What difference is there between the phenomenon of me losing more hair than I had grown due to the DNA-dictated secretions of male hormones and light piercing water droplets to form a beautiful rainbow? The more we learn to accept the providence of nature, the more peace we will have in our mind.
Once, when I was talking to students about the five aggregates and the fundamental emptiness of phenomena, I showed them an old photo of myself with long hair. The students burst into laughter and applause. Perhaps they realized that it was merely transformation. I smiled too.
