My Beard Story

by Lee Swee Kee M/0073 Oh! My God! You are REAL! Poh Wah exclaimed when I arrived at the Year End Bash and was registering myself at the reception counter. Obviously she was referring to my beard which she saw in my Facebook avatar, and she probably thought that I must have taken the photograph of someone else, or the avatar was a PhotoShop job. Later on at the party, Margaret whispered to me that she had the urge to pull my beard to see if it was real, or I came dressed up as Santa, beard and all. But she was too shy to try. Earlier on that day, while having breakfast with my family at a local coffee shop, I noticed a woman at a table nearby kept staring at me, and I whispered that to my wife. She turned to look and then went over to the table and chatted with her like an old acquaintance. She explained to me later that the woman was one of her friends at her dancing classes, and she was amazed to see me in person after having seen my picture on her (my wifes) hand phone for so long. Just as Poh Wah would be amazed later that day. Let me tell you the story of my beard. In my work, I had to travel and work at other places often. At one time, while working on a road project deep in the jungle in the middle of nowhere, I had to stay at the base camp for the week and go home once a week or a fortnight. To reduce the amount of packing and un-packing, I had three sets of toiletries: one at home, one at the base camp, and one in a travelling bag kept in the 4-wheel-drive for occasions when I needed to put up a night somewhere in-between. (I really enjoyed the time working on the road project in the jungle, and I would tell you about it later when I have the time. Its funny that when I told others about my work in the jungle then, they always threw me looks of pity. They could not have experienced the pitch-dark night sky with millions of twinkling stars, and some fireflies trying to steal the limelight.) The shavers I used were Gillette Contour Plus with replaceable blades. Actually two blades in one concoction for double the smoothness, so they said. Later Gillette models came with three, and then four blades, for triple or quadruple the smoothness, I supposed. Then problem started. Sometime in the year 2005, I was unable to find replacement blades for my three sets of Gillette Contour Plus, simply because they were grossly outdated. By simple mathematical progression, Gillettes should be arriving in the form of twelve blades models by then. It was time to replace my shavers, all THREE of them. But how long could the replacements last? Until the twenty-four blades models come along? Being a Mensan, I did some simple cost analysis, and I made a decision that could very well turn out to be most significant financially in my whole life. I decided to quit shaving. (Quitting smoking would of course be much more financially significant than quitting shaving, but dont you believe when someone tells you he is quitting smoking. As Mark Twain once said, Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times.) Anyway, thats why I started to keep a beard towards the end of 2005 when my last usable Gillette Contour Plus blades were consumed. Actually it was more of an act of stopping to shave rather than consciously wanting to keep a beard. If my beard decided to stop growing then, I would be most happy. Just like any process of growing up, you have to go through a period of growing pain if you want to grow a beard. During this period of growing pain, you will attract questions/comments/insults like: No time to shave? Why work so hard? Are you trying to keep a beard?(Being cynical about my sparse hair density in the growing beard.) However, it started to pay off when a reasonable beard was formed. The comments would turn into something like: I wish I could have a beard like that! Wow, you look very scholastic in that beard! With the beard, I began to understand that most people have preconceived ideas about what beards signify, and I was most thrilled by their ideas about my beard. In Aesops fable The Bat, the Birds, and the Beasts, the bat tries to be accepted by the birds or the beasts as one of them, depending on what the situations warrant. In my case, the reverse happened. People took me to be one of them because of my beard. Due to work, I had to be about Sri Petaling in Kuala Lumpur, practically walking along the streets there quite frequently. There was the famous Markaz Tabligh Sri Petaling in the area which attracted a lot of Islamic scholars from many countries, I think all of them are wearing beards. As I walked along the street, a lot of Muslims would greet me with Assalamualaikum. I would normally just return a nod and a smile rather than returning a greeting of Walaikum Salaam, lest I be accused of impersonating a Muslim in this country where such act could be sensitive and disastrous. Muslim Bangladeshis would greet me in similar manner, and when I told them that I was actually a Chinese, they would insist that I was a Chinese-Muslim. Among the more learned people, I became a professor of some sorts. Possibly, that is the reason why I had never been stopped by the guards at the entrance to a local university when I sent my daughter to her residential college. Among the Chinese, I could either be a Taliban whom they feared, and started calling me Osama, or I could be a Chinese kungfu sifu or Chinese artists such as Zhang Daqian. An old friend now calls me simply Sifu Lee. The worst I had experienced so far was at a promotion counter at a shopping mall. The salespersons promoting sales of eventual homes in Nirvana decided that I was a Chinese Fengshui master, and they gathered around me and asked me lots of questions. I will tell you more about my beard next time.

My Beard Story 2
by Lee Swee Kee M/0073 Let me continue my beard story by telling you about my personal hairdresser. I supposed if someone had been dressing (cutting) your hair for the last several years, that would make him your personal hairdresser. And I further supposed that barbers and hairdressers are the same, although barbers scope of work is of course much more restricted. My personal hairdresser does not even provide washing and shampooing services. My personal hairdresser is actually a typical Indian barber at a typical barber shop situated not far from my home along the route back from the office, so when I need a haircut, I just stop by on my way home from work on a Saturday afternoon, or I just hop over on a Sunday when I feel like it. He is a very hardworking man. Recently I noticed that his shop was open on Thaipusam, a very important festival for Indians. When I paid him a visit later just before the Chinese New Year, I asked him why he was working on Thaipusam, and he explained that it was close to CNY when business was very good and he was not prepared to lose out to his competitors. He didnt even charge higher fees during the pre-CNY period like all the hair saloons did. He is also my advisor on the keeping of my beard, for advice such as whether I should shave off or keep the hair directly below my lower lip. I had wanted to get his advice on the type of shampoo to use on my beard, but since he doesnt even provide shampooing service, I guessed he may not be the authority on such matter. Anyway, I searched the internet for tips on beard shampoo but couldnt find any. Not even on http://www.beards.org which I imagined is the authority on beards. So I concluded that there is no special shampoo for beards, just like we dont find in the market any shampoo specifically manufactured for hairs on the other parts of our body. Let me digress a little. Remember I told you about my wifes friends amusement in seeing me in person because she had been seeing my picture on my wifes hand phone? It all started this way (the picture, I mean). Back in 2006 or thereabout when I had a full-grown beard, my daughter got her first digital camera, and she had my picture taken. I was quite pleased with the outcome of her shot, and I edited the picture to use as wallpaper for my hand phone. Later, my wife complained that instead of my own picture, I should be using her picture on my phone instead to demonstrate my love for her. Fine! I said. That was how she ended up with MY picture on HER hand phone. I was so pleased with that portrait of me that I began playing around with it. I used my favourite image editing program IrfanView which has many features you can use to modify pictures. By the way, IrfanView is a freeware and I strongly suggest you download and have a go with it. Again, I was so pleased with the result from IrfanView, a portrait of a bearded me in the form of caricature you see at the top of this article, that I started printing the caricature on stickers. One thing led to another, and before you knew it, almost all my gadgets and belonging had the stickers on them. And that also included my wifes hand phone. In that process, I had perfected the technique of printing caricatures on stickers using laser printer. I will share the technique with you if you are willing to buy me a drink. By now, I believe most of you would know that I also use the same caricature as my avatars in my emails, Facebook, and what have you. I also used it to make personalized stationery. I used the avatar as background wallpaper on my tablet PC as well: black background with my avatar on the bottom-right corner. For this I used IrfanView to emboss the picture to make it more artistic looking. But theres one problem: tablet PC works in both landscape and portrait modes, and the picture will be distorted if you use the stretch mode to fit the wallpaper to the screen. I got around this by having a wallpaper of 1024x1024 pixels with two embossed avatars pasted at the bottom-right positions for the landscape mode of 1024x768, and the portrait mode of 768x1024, exclusive to each other, and the display mode set as tile. Whichever mode I use, the avatar will always be at the bottom-right corner. After keeping my beard for slightly more than a year, I decided to shave it off. Dont ask me why. According to another website on beards (I cant remember which site), you must forewarn your spouse and those near you if you are going to shave off your beard after keeping it for a while, or be prepared to face some dire consequences. I reckoned the worst that could happen is when you get home after the shave, your spouse may raise the alarm for intruder. Lets get back to my personal hairdresser. Remember Lats cartoon about some Indian waiters in Mamak stores who came directly from the airport to start working, and did not know a word of Malay? The same may be true for some Indian barbers. A colleague of mine came in to work one day with a bald head. When asked what had happened, he lamented that he went to an Indian barber shop and told the barber that he wanted a very short haircut. Before he knew it, a fair portion of his head had the hair shaven right down to the scalp. Since he was not prepared to have a hairstyle that might look weirder than the Mohican hairstyle (remember Misbun Sidek?), he had no other choice but to accept the offer of a Kojak haircut. That barber must have just landed at KLIA minutes ago. I did not have such communication problem with my personal hairdresser. When I told him about my intention to shave off my beard, he asked me whether I really meant it. He asked me the same question again three more times before he was convinced that I was really serious about the request. He cringed and squirmed as he put his tools to my beard. Obviously he was very pleased with my beard as well. When I got home that day after shaving off my beard, my wife was at home and she behaved just normally as usual. She didnt notice I was again clean-shaven. It was after several hours, with me talking to her, walking in front of her, standing between her and the TV, bringing up topics of conversation that I normally dont, plus a slew of other odd

behaviour before she noticed that I had shaven off my beard. So you see, couples who had been together long enough do not see each other at all but just feel the presence of each other. I dont blame her because I too could not notice her new hairdo no matter how different it was from the previous one until she complained or I smelled the chemicals used for the perm. Towards the end of 2008, I attended a class reunion of sort. It was actually the wedding dinner of the daughter of one of our classmates. During the dinner, some of my classmates did not believe that my Facebook avatar was actually me and issued me a challenge to grow a beard again to show them the proof. As a result, I started the ordeal of keeping a beard all over again, and waited for the next class reunion. But there wasnt any more class reunion simply because none of us had sons or daughters who wanted to get married just yet. Let me also end this episode of my beard story with my personal hairdresser.

On my last visit to his shop for my monthly haircut, I told him I wanted to keep my beard longer this time around. To show how long a beard I wanted, I showed him Confucius beard in the Confucius movie I ripped from DVD to fit the 480x320 screen resolution of my BlackBerry (favourite freeware: Any Video Converter), and which I played in the car with the audio piped to the car audio system through an FM transmitter and watched repeatedly whenever convenient. I was paying particular attention to the famous Confucius sayings, such as the one quoted by Anwar Ibrahim (in Mandarin!) when he was asked to comment on the PKR defectors: Without hesitation, my barber said, Oh! Chow Yun-Fat! You see, although the TV in his barber shop had Hindi or Tamil movies playing every time when I visited him, he must be watching Chinese movies behind closed doors after working hours!