Throwback Thursday is when we trawl through the That's archives for a work of dazzling genius written at some point in our past. We then republish it. On a Thursday.
By Leslie Jones, Jack Zhang
One man’s barbershop trimmings are another man’s industrial protein. And it’s 31-year-old Jiangsu native Wang Wei’s job to get the hair off the floor and to the factory.
When he first began collecting, Wang used to scratch a lot, but he’s been at it for more than 14 years now and a few stray strands no longer make him itchy. Which is good - he works from home, and rivulets of black hair run through every crack in the concrete.
Wang lives with his wife and son in a ramshackle migrant village in Zhabei District. Their rent is RMB350, and they pay an extra 20 kuai for the shed where they store 25kg sacks of hair. Wang reckons there are more than 100 collectors in his village, while Pudong and Qingpu District have their own hair collecting villages.
“Competition isn’t too bad,” Wang says. The industry isn’t very well known. With his wife’s help, he can usually make about RMB7,000 per month.
In the afternoon Wang returns home and he and his wife set about fishing all the paper, q-tips, cigarette butts and trash out of the tangles.
Wang sets off around 8am every day, unless it’s raining (you can’t sort wet hair). Some of the bigger collectors have cars or vans, but Wang rides his motorcycle on his rounds of Shanghai’s salons, looking to buy hair swept off the floor for about 6 kuai per kilo. On a good day he’ll return with 100kg, on a bad one he’ll get half that. His biggest hauls are just before Spring Festival, since everyone gets their hair cut before the new year.
In the afternoon he returns home and he and his wife set about fishing all the paper, q-tips, cigarette butts and trash out of the tangles. They also separate long hairs from short. Wang says he can work through about 50kg of hair per hour.
Long hair sells for more since it’s made into wigs and exported, mainly to Africa and the United States. The short hairs go to a factory where they’re distilled to make amino acids for industrial use, including manufacture of cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and food additives (the government banned soy sauce made from human hair several years ago after unsanitary distilleries were uncovered in Hubei Province).
Wang and his neighbors wait until they’ve collected several tons of hair, then a factory in Nantong sends a truck for it. Fan Guohua, the 43-year-old factory owner, is from the same part of Jiangsu as Wang. He too began as a collector and now has more than 20 employees and can make up to RMB500,000 per year processing hair, he says, although business was better at the height of the Global Financial Crisis when everything was cheap.
Wang doesn’t have any designs on following in Fan’s footsteps, not yet at least. “If someone comes along that wants to promote me that would be good,” he says, “but for now I’m just concentrating on the job I have.”
This article first appeared in the November 2011 issue of That's Shanghai. To see more Throwback Thursday posts, click here.
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