I’m still hesitant about getting a professional cut, even though my hair unfurls as extravagantly as Rapunzel’s. My hair is as thick as when I was a girl, but shot through with much more gray in the past year. They’ve now reopened as the state emerges slowly from a brutal winter surge. Last spring, when the world went into retreat, salons and barber shops here in California closed, then opened, then closed - just how many times, I’ve lost track. We strangers are alike, come the new year. People have been following these customs for millenniums, and getting a haircut before the holiday would connect me to that accountant in Shanghai, that little girl in Ho Chi Minh City, that granny in Busan and that cabby in Singapore. For Vietnamese, the Lunar New Year is known as Tet, and among Koreans as Seollal.

The coronavirus has interfered with so many of these practices, which relieve the darkness of winter and remind us that spring and its renewal are coming. By tradition, you live this day as you would the rest of the year: with a new haircut and a new outfit, a clean abode, debts paid off and feasts with loved ones. I grew up in the suburbs east of San Francisco, but this scene from my childhood could have played out in the homes of more than a billion people around the world who celebrate the most important holiday in China and the Chinese diaspora. Dusting the tickly stray strands off my neck, I felt lighter, ready for the Lunar New Year. With a few swipes of his clippers, my father trimmed an inch, then three, from my hair, which heaped onto the newspaper spread on the floor.

Missing haircuts this lunar year