Jackie's Saloon has rose-tinted sliding doors and the same poster of the stylish girl-who-looks-like-a-boy sporting a pixie haircut that was there 10 years ago.

Jackie's Saloon is actually an old-fashioned hair salon that demands you don't pay special attention to it. Almost In the same way the cafes along Yong Siak Street styled to look old demand that you do.

Jackie's salon is the only the place I've cut my hair since I was 7. But the first time I dyed my hair I went to a salon in Clementi. One that is part of a franchise of affordable neighbourhood salons. It seems like an unconscious act of rebellion now, (the choice of salon that is).



Rebellion is worse when it is not vindictive:because then I'm not if I should feel guilty--and with that comes its own guilt.

But I was half-hearted even in the heat of that moment and I only coloured the ends of my hair.

I went back Jackie's salon the afternoon of my Prom to get my hair done in a fishtail braid.

I washed my hair at Jackie's salon when I had surgery on my arm and couldn't wash my hair by myself.

I went to Jackie's salon once after a conversation with you. You told me about how you'd had your hair cut recently at a salon in Orchard. One of those places inside a giant mall -that's blanketed in LED lights on the outside at night- and where the hairdressers are "stylists" who wear dress shirts to wash your hair.

I looked around at the women in T shirts and their marketing trolleys, regulars who gathered to perm their hair and gossip about their children in dialects at Jackie's salon.

I thought about my $7-hair cut and I thought about the one you had. That's when I understood the difference between looking expensive and buying expensive things.

That's also when I understood why Jackie's Salo(on) didn't need to correct its signboard.

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