"The narrative potential of such businesses, where customers pay for a particular service and expect to receive other kinds of care, has been explored in films and novels set in taxis, hairdressers and, in Katja Oskamp's Marzahn, Mon Amour, a chiropody clinic. Such settings open rich questions: who has the power, the one who pays or the one who shapes the customer's body, often with alarmingly sharp implements? How human can such exchanges of cash for care or beauty be?"
"Narrated by Ning, the salon owner and a retired boxer, the prelude ends, Looking at the two of us, them sitting on a chair above me, and me down low, you'd think I am not in charge. But I am. I know everything about them, whether or not they tell me. All first-person narrators are unreliable, and we are implicitly invited to question this assertion."
Pick a Colour unfolds over a single summer day inside a nail bar, presented as a microcosm of the service economy. The salon setting interrogates power: clients pay, but workers physically shape bodies with potentially hazardous tools. Ning, the salon owner and retired boxer, narrates with asserted omniscience that becomes less certain, revealing judgement and mockery among staff. Workers adopt identical names, appearance, and uniforms to emphasize interchangeability and system constraints. Language differences and salon rules amplify transactional interactions, exposing limited space for genuine humanity amid exchanges of cash for care and beauty.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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