Tourist’s Report - San Diego 11/25/25 - Jialiang
non-fiction ☆
non-fiction ☆
It is the end of November, the weather is crisp and socal-perfect, and I am sinking into one of the big black leather seats at Sunny Day People Salon in Convoy, waiting for my turn under the clippers.
Sunny Day does away with the standard neat little row of rickety chairs one usually expects at these joints - instead, we longhaired petitioners are placed in the very center of the salon, right in the eye of the storm. The checkerboard tiles are, as always, gleaming and spotless in spite of the endless snipping and buzzing, and from wall to wall I faced down vampiric legions of 90’s k-pop/k-drama heartthrobs, lily-white and cloistered in their peeling plastic portraits. They belted out hit records from decades past through speakers in each corner.
Sunny is a tight ship, run by an efficient crew, who were without exception: women, japanese or korean, mainlanders, in their 40s or 50s, and effortlessly beautiful. I am entranced by how graceful they are, spinning briskly from station to station, juggling bright metal shears and armfuls of curlers and big plastic tubs sloshing with liquid product. The women of the salon would put any North Park hipster to shame, bedecked in the offerings of Issey, Zara, Lulu, and CDG, tempered with an eclectic splash of vintage and the cleansing ring of expensive jewelry. In any other setting I would sneer at the folly of the old trying to capture lost youth - here they are elegance itself whereas I am shlubby and frumpy.
I had my first haircut at this salon two years ago, when I walked in asking for the cheapest cut and walked out sporting my first perm, a look I fell in love with and have kept to this day. Back then, I was still living in SD. Now, I return as the merest tourist. On some level, I resent that I am made to feel a tourist in my own home city only after 3 months away.
I’m up. I get seated for my appointment, and the enjoy my two hours of being cooed over, and coddled.
My hairstylist exclaims at how soft and silky my hair is, she asks for all of my life updates, and is magnitudes prouder than my own mother to hear about my new job and recent milestones. It is theater, and she is excellent at it, and I eat it all up. I look around and notice how many male patrons are here today, every customer in the salon except for one lone grandmother tucked neatly away in one corner, swaddled in her thick quilted jacket.
When I voice this, my stylist shrugs. “It’s all boys now.”
“When I first came here, it was all girls.”
“Yes. But during pandemic, it was more and more boys. And now it’s all boys.”
I chew on this for the rest of my appointment. It makes a lot of sense, I do think that my generation of young men have become way more beauty conscious, as a side effect of the general increase in navel-gazing. The shears snip-snip-snip away the bangs from my eyes. The displaced air of the blades as they snap brushes against my eyelash and causes me to blink uncontrollably.
After the cut, my hair is rinsed and washed in big basin, by a junior hairdresser, a blushing youth of 43. Another piece clicks into place for me. I can’t believe how wonderful it feels to get my hair washed by another person. If I were a recluse, I’d likely pay solid gold to have a nice salon day, to experience that I am worthy, cared for.
My hair is clean, and I’m invited to examine myself in the mirror. They have transformed me, and I feel a glow arise from my skin, attributing it more to how I feel more than how I look. They prefer payment in cash, and offer a steep discount for doing so.
I count each folded cotton bill out. It is too low a price to charge for gift of both outer and inner beauty, however temporary, with the sheer physical and emotional labor involved.
$150, 4.8/5 stars.
Outside, I call a car then walk fifteen feet and grab three bao buns from Bonchon and wolf them down while I wait. The buns are perfect juicy morsels of braised pork belly, nestled inside of fluffy breading, sharing a mattress with rectangular slips of cold cucumber and sliced green onion. Bonchon on Convoy St in San Diego “Americas Finest City” offers $1 wings + $4 beers all day every Monday and Tuesday - do with that information what you will. $16, 3.6/5 stars. The car pulls up to the curb, a blue chevy sedan. The inside smells faintly of cloves. My driver is balding, and middle-aged, and a dad, and he launches us immediately into a conversation about the declining state of the neighborhood, the city, the country. It has become the favorite new pastime of the American public to discuss the collapse of America. I am replying on polite autopilot, until he lets slip something that catches my ear:
“Yeah, and after that I’ll get my credentials and start my construction company.. but I’ll register it under my wife’s name, which is the real killer move.”
“Huh? What? Why is that the real killer move?”
“The military loves hiring female contractors. All the best contracts are military, they’ll pay you like, 13-14K just to repaint some walls at the navy base.”
“Oh. That’s pretty crazy.” “Yeah, and I’m gonna hire all girls on my crew too. Ex-cons. Ex-cons work hard, you pay em less, they never cheat, never slack off. I’m gonna get them right out of the prison. The only thing is, if you’re a contractor working out of the Coronado base, they’ll check your background. I’m trying to find out if they only check me and my wife, or if they check all of the girls too, because then I’d have to get people with no background.” He clicks his tongue.
“Which would suck.”
“Yeah! Would fucking suck, man. You know how hard it is to find girls down to do construction work with no background?”
I think that there are New Yorkers everywhere, if you have the eyes to see them.
From here, I learn about my driver’s plan to pass his construction LLC on to his kids, but maintain a 40% cut on the proceeds, with an eventual end goal of retirement in a 1 euro home in Italy. I accuse him of being a parasitic geriatric and share what I know about how those cheap Italian homes are often maintenance traps. We get into a row about it, and sadly it all comes to an end when we arrive at my next stop. I wish him and his schemes the best of luck.
$32, 4.3/5 stars.
I am now at Geeky Lounge, a PC bang in Pacific Beach, and I came here because I am currently addicted to a videogame. The outside of the PC cafe looks like an office, and in fact the first floor of the building belongs to some boring HVAC company, who I am sure resent the hell out of the gaming bordello that rents the floor above them. One would not be able to tell, as they enter through big glass doors, that one is ascending the carpeted steps into hell.
There is no door that marks the entry point into the lounge, at some point halfway up the flight of stairs, I have been transported. Suddenly, I am met with banks of computers, customers hunched their terminals like fat spiders in stately meditation. I am here to join them.
I’m greeted by one of the workers and led to check in. In keeping with the theme, there is no distinct reception space, or even a real desk where they work. In one corner, a plastic table is set up next to an eggshell white shelf full of chips, chocolates, and instant ramen. It is $12/hr to use on any open computer, an extra $2 lands you your choice of snack and soda. Behind this setup lays the fridge and the lone bathroom, the alpha and omega of the PC bang environment.
I pay for my two hours and grab a seat in the main space. The cafe functions as one long hallway, where on both ends lay small dark rooms (no doors) of 5-10 terminals each. I dare not enter. Instead, I’ve grabbed one of the computers in the center of the hall, where two rows of machines sit back to back, and there is still natural light streaming in from the windows, which adds some modicum of normality.
Before you sit down at one of these establishments, you first go to one of the big plastic wet wipe dispenser that hangs from each room’s doorframe. Headphones, keyboard, mouse, and seat should be sanitized heavily before usage. The screens run ads while the PCs sleep, but once I wake mine up it asks for a login. There are menus of games to browse through, and menus of snack food and microwaveable meals on offer.
It is a busy afternoon for the lounge, and nearly every seat is filled with patrons. It is eerily silent, just people jacked into their rented terminals. A good number are simply surfing the web, watching movies or browsing YouTube. There is at least one man who appears to be here long term, with all of his belongings piled high behind him in two plastic green rucksacks. They offer a $400 monthly pass to use a setup at the PC bang from open to close, 12hrs a day.
I sink into a fugue state. I wonder a bit about video game addiction as I engage with mine. I’ve been fixated on gaming since I was a young kid, and my relationship to it has changed over time. It was and is always escapism, being able to drown out the noise of this world by exiting into a different one. Nowadays, it has also become a provider of clarity. To grow and to change and even more horrid, to succeed in the outside world has become very puzzling. A lot of times, hours spent just means hours lost. Nothing really happens. In a terminal, gear scores, exp, rankings and levels are clear-cut and defined. Time in always gives you something. Not always good, but something.
A high school boy takes the seat next to mine, and after booting up his computer, logs into a discord channel and begins excitedly chattering with some online friends. Immediately, the air shifts, and while no-one moves, speaks, or changes at all, I can feel the collective presence of the cafe sour. As if summoned, a worker comes by and asks the boy to be quiet.
A PC bang is a refuge from the outer world, and to use one of the machines to connect with other people is unseemly. The interesting part is that while this is the case, all the computers were networked to a central server, so in truth we were all using the same machine.
Stanley Zhao is an adjunct professor, bartender, and indie theater producer, which are night jobs he works to support his real passion: using unstructured business data to generate shareholder value. He is a SoCal native who was recently exiled to New York City, and has been finding solace in pursuing amateur writing. You can find them on Substack @jiaory.
