Black Hair Care

Black Hair Care is the beauty-supply store run by Daniel Jae Ho Bae’s parents in Harlem, where an ordinary family business becomes a meeting point for questions of hair, race, immigration, and belonging. The store is at once a workplace shared by generations, a site of unease for Daniel, and part of a wider industry whose history complicates the idea that its ownership is simply a matter of individual opportunity.

Location and Appearance

Black Hair Care stands along Martin Luther King Boulevard in Harlem, about a twenty-five-minute subway ride from where Daniel and Natasha Kingsley had been. Natasha notices the neighborhood’s change in scale and character: Midtown’s skyscrapers give way to closely packed storefronts with bright awnings, and the street feels more like a neighborhood than the city center. Daniel grows quiet as they approach his parents’ business, passing an empty storefront and a pawnshop before stopping outside the beauty-supply store.

From the street, the store’s windows are obscured by old, sun-faded posters showing smiling Black women with chemically treated hairstyles. Inside, a bell chimes as customers enter. The small shop is crowded with rows of metal shelves and plastic bottles advertising products for hair and skin. The cash register sits just across from the entrance, where Daniel’s father, Dae Hyun Bae, is ringing up a customer when Daniel and Natasha arrive. The compact layout makes the family’s work immediately visible: this is not an abstract business but a place where its owners serve customers face to face.

A Family Workplace

Black Hair Care belongs to Daniel’s parents, Dae Hyun Bae and Min Soo Bae. Daniel works at the store with his father, and the business is part of the daily pressure of family life. His parents criticize him, while Natasha imagines how difficult it must be to spend the day working alongside a father who may berate him even as he smiles at customers and answers questions about extensions, tea tree oils, and chemically damaged hair. The store’s service work, its family obligations, and the conflicts at home are interwoven rather than separate.

When Daniel brings Natasha to meet his family, his nervousness is apparent before they enter. Outside, he tugs his tie from side to side and struggles to begin explaining what his father and brother are really like. Inside, Dae Hyun briefly glances at him but does not acknowledge him while finishing a sale to a young Black customer with purple hair and multiple piercings. Daniel stops as he starts to approach his father, then sighs. The restrained exchange leaves Natasha unsure what has passed between them, but it makes the store a setting for Daniel’s apprehension about his family as well as their business.

After the visit, Daniel is ashamed of what Natasha has seen in his parents’ store and grateful that she has not rejected him for it. Her response matters because he fears being reduced to his father and his family history. The business therefore carries an emotional weight that its shelves and transactions alone do not explain: it is both the place where Daniel works and a public expression of a family identity he cannot simply set aside.

Hair, Identity, and Choice

The shop’s products sit within a long history in which Black hair has carried meanings beyond fashion. In fifteenth-century African civilizations, hairstyles could mark family or tribal background, religion, social status, power, or mourning; hair could also hold spiritual significance as a connection between the head and the soul. Enslavers forcibly shaved newly captured Africans, violently severing hair from those cultural meanings. After slavery, standards that treated straight hair as good and textured hair as bad recast European beauty ideals as a measure of value.

That history helps explain why the products sold at Black Hair Care are not culturally neutral. In the early twentieth century, Madam C. J. Walker built a business selling hair-care products to Black women and became a millionaire; her best-known contribution was an improved hot comb for straightening hair. In the 1960s, George E. Johnson marketed chemical relaxers for straightening naturally curly hair. The industry grew to an estimated annual value of more than one billion dollars, while arguments continued over whether straightening natural hair expressed self-rejection, conformity, personal preference, or political identity. Hair choices could be intensely personal without being only personal.

Natasha’s own experience makes that tension concrete. Her mother, Patricia Kingsley, had her hair relaxed from the time Natasha was ten and objected when Natasha chose to wear an Afro, calling it unprofessional and associating it with a militant appearance. Natasha likes her Afro, but she also liked her hair straight; she sees the decision as hers and does not adopt the style to make a political statement. Her natural hair takes three years to grow in fully, and she may straighten it again. The posters on Black Hair Care’s windows, with their repeated image of chemically treated hair as suitable for professional life, echo the pressures Natasha has encountered at home and in the wider culture. The store’s presence in Harlem thus exposes the difference between offering products and confronting the standards that shape demand for them.

Korean Immigrant Ownership and the Market

The Bae family’s entry into the business follows a network of Korean immigrant support. When Dae Hyun and Min Soo moved to New York City, Dae Hyun’s cousin lent them money and advised them to open a Black hair-care store. The cousin already owned a similar business, as did other members of the community, and the stores were thriving. Dae Hyun understands the venture as an opportunity: America, in his view, offers his children more than he had himself.

The wider dominance of South Korean businesses in Black hair care also has a history. In the 1960s, South Korean wigs became popular among African American consumers. The South Korean government banned exports of raw hair, while the United States banned imports of wigs made with Chinese hair; together, these actions helped consolidate South Korea’s position in the wig market. The wig trade expanded into the broader hair-care business. Estimates in the novel put South Korean businesses’ share of the market at between sixty and eighty percent across distribution, retail, and increasingly manufacturing. Because South Korean distributors primarily supply South Korean retailers, that distribution structure can make it difficult for other groups to establish a foothold.

Natasha recognizes the tension when she sees Daniel’s family’s shop: Black hair-care stores are often Korean-owned, a pattern widely understood in the Black community as an injustice. The novel places that judgment beside the family’s own account of migration, kinship, and economic opportunity. Black Hair Care is neither detached from the unequal structure of the industry nor reducible to the choices of one family; its everyday operation reveals how individual livelihoods can be formed within a market shaped by racial history and restricted access to distribution. As a location, it makes those larger forces tangible in a small room of shelves, products, customers, and family obligations.