Million Bucks

Tiffany Hsieh

The Vietnamese lady on Queen East gave me a 
haircut for $8. In 1999, the end was coming and 
you couldn’t get a chocolate bar with fat almonds 
for $8. I looked up for things to fall out of the sky: 
a goose, a rock, a spaceship. I could get a junior 
stylist haircut but you’d have to be type A not to 
try an $8 one, tell your ma about it, and watch her 
squint with pride and envy and, later, profound 
distress. Why so cheap? Why you not pay more for 
better hair? How she make money? How you not 
scared? Then somebody said I looked like 
Cameron Diaz in There’s Something About Mary. 
A complete stranger looked at my $8 hair and saw 
a Chinese Cameron. That’s worth a million bucks. 
I went out for a walk. A bird spat shit on my head. 
It was a seagull and I never saw it coming.

Tiffany Hsieh lives in southern Ontario. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Malahat Review, Poet Lore, Room, Salamander, The Shanghai Literary Review, and others. She has been nominated for Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net.