马二发
我是一九七零年来英国的。不知不觉转眼间已经三十三年了。 我的家乡在广东番禺，广州市的郊区， 现属广州市辖。五十年代我到香港，那时从大陆去香港谋生的人很多。我初到香港时，当地的经济并不那么好，但主要你肯买力，每天两顿饭还是可以解决的。由于那时年轻，吃得苦，不大计较小节，所以我在港打工的时期生活还算可以的。过了一段时日，我觉得作为年轻人还是要学一门手艺好，这样才能四海为家。学什么呢？当然只能是一些常见的玩意了。那时香港的科技并没有现在那么发达，你总不能学电脑什么的吧； 我选择了学理发，从此这门手艺便奠定了我一生所走的道路。 六十年代末期，香港的政局并不太稳定，上街游行的也有，罢工罢课的也有。虽说这些事并未对香港经济发展造成太大的影响，但毕竟是令人担心的。当时我刚好搞了一间理发铺，作为职业也好，事业也好，总算是有个起头，正待树静风息。起初我并没有离开香港到外国去的打算，但我的岳父那时已在英国谋生，他建议我们到英国来。经过几番考虑，我便弄了一张劳工签证，老远地从香港跑到这里来，从此就这样糊里糊涂地在这儿 扎了根。
开头的几年我在饭馆里打工。那时的中式餐馆并没有现在那么多，外卖店就更少了，伦敦的唐人街亦没有现在那么规模。我们一家住在唐人街后边不远处的小菜市附近，每天上下班都在这个华人店铺比较聚集的巴掌之地进进出出，所以对所谓唐人街还算了解。经过观察，我渐渐发觉我在香港学的手艺可能还有用武之地，于是便决定‘重操故业’- 搞理发。当时一间理发铺的老板提议我加入股份，做半个老板。但我谢绝了，没有接受这位同行的好意；我认为还是当打工仔比较踏实。就这样，我又在新的国度里挥动起我熟悉的剪刀，当起一名跨国理发师来。
英国的华人大部分在餐馆做工，而伦敦的华人又聚集在唐人街的为多。他们普遍每周工作六天，每天十二个小时，时间长得可谓起早摸黑，空闲的光景实在不多。不少人因而只好争取时间在上班前或下午休息的暂短时间剃头理发，甚至购物什么的。这样一来，唐人街内的理发店的顾客便自然多起来。说是在，那时理发店的生意并不太冷淡的；毕竟干我们这一行的人不太多，年轻一代的人愿意以理发职业的人也很少。（当然现在的情况就不同了；现在的理发师傅已发展成美容师，不少人在这行当中赚大钱，甚至因为曾经替某位电影明星洗头剪发而摇身一变成为时尚界的名人。所以近年来年轻的小伙姑娘都愿意干这一行）。话又说回来，平时我们的工作本来就不算太少，逢年遇节就更加红火；许多时候甚至应接不暇。理发这行当看起来很简单，其实干起来不容易，费神又费力。但由于客源较足，成本没有搞餐馆那么大，也没有什么大风险，姑且混两餐总不算太难。你看，这几十年我不正是靠这把剪刀混饭吃、养活一家四口的吗？
几十年的辛劳，尽管并没有在我的手头上留下了很多东西，我们一家人还是活得挺有意思的。 最值得我安慰、也是我最大的收获的是，我的两个儿子都上了大学。大儿子是剑桥大学经济学的毕业生，现在伦敦金融城的一家美国跨国大公司工作。小时候由于我们住在唐人街附近，他经常在唐人街进进出出，接触中国文化的机会便很多，加上我们还送他到周末华文学校学中文，所以他三年级时就会用中文给外公写信，在中文学校读书里更是年年考第一。而我小儿子拿的是电脑课程的文凭，目前正在寻找适合的工作。他们俩总算有出息，没有白费我们的一番心血。若果当年我们并不到英国来，他们很难得到这么样好的学习环境，更不用说我们根本付不起这么庞大的学费和各类生活杂用费等；说不定还得接过我的剪刀替人量头剪发什么的。应该说，英国的教育制度虽并说不上是十全十美，但还比较是来还算很优越的。
An Ordinary Life; Excellent Education
I came to England in 1970. It has been 33 years ever since.
My homeland town is in Fanyu, Guangdong Province, now under the jurisdiction of Guangzhou City. From Fanyu I arrived in Hong Kong in the 1950s, a period when many Mainlanders left the country for places abroad. When I first came to Hong Kong, the situation there was not particularly good, as the economy was really in bad shape. Nonetheless as long as you worked hard, feeding your month was not too difficult anyway. Since I was then young and willing to do whatever job on offer, I didn’t feel it particularly hard to make a living during my time in Hong Kong. However, after sometime I did feel that as young as I then was, I should learn something useful to prepare for the future. What should I learn then? Perhaps I should at least acquire some basic skills that were needed to make a living, I decided. Hong Kong then wasn’t as high-tech as it is nowadays, so you couldn’t actually learn things like computer skills, for example, let alone I had had very little schooling. So I chose to be a hairdresser. And this, as it later turned out, determined the path I was to take thereafter. During the late 1960s, for some reason Hong Kong experienced some political turbulence. Demonstrations, industrial strikes took place quite often in the city. Although these did not cripple the economy entirely, they were a cause for serious concern. Moreover, I had just started a barbershop then so that what I needed most was stability, for the sake of either my career or business. So the idea of migrating abroad didn’t appeal to me at the beginning. But then my father-in-law had already settled in the UK and he suggested that I should move over here too. After some thoughtful consideration, I decided to apply for a work-permit to come over here to find work. And that subsequently became the turning point of my life in a new environment.
For the first few years I worked in a restaurant. In those days there weren’t so many Chinese restaurants here, there were even fewer takeaway shops. London’s Chinatown wasn’t as big as it is today. We lived near the small market in Soho, for this reason we got to know the place quite well, as we spent most of our time in this small but rather crowded quarter of London. After some a while, I began to realize that the skills that I had acquired in Hong Kong might land me a career in hairdressing in this country, too. This would be much better than working in the kitchen, I thought. The owner of a barbershop then suggested to me that I should join her business as a partner. I declined the offer since I was quite happy just being an employee. In any case I was once again in the profession that I was familiar with, but this time in a new country.
Most Chinese people in the UK work in catering, which is concentrated mainly in Chinatown. They normally work six days a week, 12 hours a day. That’s why people say that those who work in Chinatown hardly see the sun in winter. For this reason whenever they have some free time between the shifts they would spend it on things like shopping, having a haircut and so on. This means Chinatown’s barbers are often kept busy. At any rate barbershops in those days were not particularly oversupplied. Nor did hairdressing as a lifelong career appeal to young people (of course hair-dressing has become a fashionable profession nowadays; that’s why there are so many beauty salons). Unlike some other trades, barbershops did not face lots of competition. Customers simply came and kept the barbers busy, especially before the annual festive seasons such as Christmas and the New Year. Hairdressing may not look too complicated a job, it nonetheless demands lots of concentration as well as physical energy. Since the market for such work is there, and since no huge investment is needed, being a barber has its advantages. As you can see, it is my little pair of scissors that has been with me all those years and kept us reasonably comfortable with our lives.
After decades of hard work, even though we are far from being wealthy in any sense, as a family we have so far lived a meaningful life. My greatest pride and also biggest achievement is perhaps that we have been able to support the two children of ours through the years so that they have been able to receive good education. My oldest son got a degree in economics from Cambridge some years ago. He is now working for a well-known US financial company based in the City of London. Since we lived near Chinatown when he was a little kid, he spent lots of time there and was therefore able to grasp quite a bit of the Chinese culture. We sent him to a Chinese school there and he did quite well all those years. When he was still a Level Three student he was already able to write letters in Chinese to his granddad in Hong Kong and that really fascinated the old man. My youngest son has a degree in computer studies and he is now looking for a suitable job in the field. Well, they seem to have made it, more or less. It appears that after all we have not wasted the efforts made over the years. Had we not come to the UK, I think, they wouldn’t have had that sort of environment for a good education. Presumably even if they had been lucky enough to go to university in Hong Kong, say, if we had chosen to stay there, it would have been a huge burden for us to pay for all the costs incurred anyway. God knows if they might have to follow my steps to become a barber as well. So you see, although the education system here is far from perfect, it has not lost its charm entirely.
By Ma Er Fa Translated by Cao Yuan
