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It's not just bodies but also bikes that require service here. You can't just park your bike anywhere the way we do in America. In the college staff housing complex, there are two bike parking sheds. For no particular reason except Hesao's recommendation, we use the one that Xiao Wang runs. It's about the size of a three-car garage and holds dozens and dozens of bikes, motorbikes, motorcycles, and a few baby strollers jammed together in four orderly rows. Since we have very ordinary-looking bikes and they are so tightly packed together, it's not always easy to find our own bikes, but Xiao Wang never fails to know their precise location.
His impressive memory makes me wonder what else he could have been besides the sole employee in a bike parking shed. The shed is open from 7 AM until 11:30 PM, and except for a half hour just before lunchtime, Xiao Wang is there. He spends a lot of time reading out loud. Sometimes he reads political propaganda and other times he chants Mandarin words from the dictionary to correct his notoriously heavy local accent. My friends tell me this self-cultivation is an effort to attract a wife from among the teachers who are his clients.
Marrying a teacher would lift Xiao Wang several rungs higher. This is a middle-aged man who lives in a bike shed. Within the shed, he has one private room that is smaller than my walk-in closet in Cambridge, just big enough for a less-than-standard sized bed. There is no toilet, no running water, and nothing that you could fairly call a kitchen although he does have a rice cooker on his desk in the shed. On sunny afternoons, he takes a basin, a stool, and a bucket of water just outside the door to wash his hair or his clothes. During his half hour break in late morning, he goes to the market to buy his ready-made food for the day. I presume he gets his water very early, before the bike shed officially opens, though I don't really know from where.
John and I each pay Xiao Wang three yuan (36 cents) a month. The owners of more sophisticated vehicles, including bikes with gears, pay a little more. He also gets one jiao, about a penny, each time he inflates tires. It's not clear to me whether he also gets a small salary from the college or if he lives on this income. In his case, it's not his income that startles me, but rather the confinement of his job. It's a life only an agoraphobic could love.
Maybe because our bikes are regularly wedged among others and extracting them requires forceful yanking, maybe because they are crappy bikes, or maybe because we are fussy about just how badly functioning a bike we are willing to ride, but they need repairs so often they we consider the bike repair man just outside our gate our friend. Since our very first bike repair in China ended up costing us at least three times what it should have, we are loyal to this guy. He seems to know what he's doing and he never charges us foreigner prices. In fact, when I stop by for a small adjustment, he doesn't charge me at all. Interestingly, there seems to be no charge at all for labor. A new basket or tire costs exactly the same whether he installs it or John does.
This guy's environment is even worse than Xiao Wang's, but he managed to get himself a wife and a young son, both of whom also work in the repair business. They work outdoors in an alley, without the benefit of even a roof. Of course he often needs parts and equipment for bike repair; these are jammed in the small, windowless room nearby in which the family lives. Since they also lack running water, it is not surprising that all three of them are uniformly grimy. When I think of their faces, I can't imagine them without smudges.
Just a few meters away from the bike repair man are the sister seamstresses. It would be easy to miss the shop since it occupies the back quarter of an appliance repair business. However, on sunny days, they move the treadle sewing machine outside to the broken concrete in front of the shop and Little Sister sits there, her foot going up and down and the seams flying through the old black enamel machine.
It would be impossible to miss Little Sister. She is clearly a woman who equates fashion with fantasy, and the clothing she makes for herself is an eye-catching combination of styles. For example, sometimes she's Fairy Princess on Acid, other days the Empress of Punk, and when she wears one particular outfit, I think of her as the Leopard Dominatrix. Believe me, no one else in our neighborhood dreams of these styles, and you would be hard pressed to find them in America, even on Halloween. She also wears as much make-up as all the rest of the women in the neighborhood combined. This is not to say she overdoes it, since I, with lipstick and occasional blush, am the second most made-up woman in the neighborhood. She's 29 and pretty, warm and sassy. If this description makes you imagine Kunming's own version of the Material Girl, let add another dimension: one morning when I was poking through their button collection, Little Sister invited me to worship Buddha with her at some temple an hour outside the city! Needless to say, she was not dressed like a nun for the occasion, and while I was unable to go along, I half imagine the stone Buddha blinking at the sight of her!
Big Sister, on the other hand, favors snug-fitting suits in peculiar brocade fabrics. At 32, she is still a little pudgy from her pregnancy three years ago, and has always been less vivacious than her younger sister. She provides the skill, rather than the personality in that partnership.
Although tact is a highly prized virtue among the Chinese, what I really like about the sister seamstresses is their brutal frankness. When I brought in my new qipao, a tight traditional-style dress, for alternations, I heard Big Sister say to Little Sister, "This color doesn't suit her at all. Really ugly." I assumed she thought I couldn't understand her, but then she looked up from her pinning and said the same thing directly to me, slowly and clearly, adding that I was much better in blue.
One of the hard-to-figure things about China is that custom clothing is often cheaper than ready-made. Aside from getting clothing that fits correctly, custom clothing also means I don't have to wear things studded with rhinestones, appliquéd with teddy bears, or featuring seriously misspelled English words. However, dealing with the tempermental sister seamstresses means they have to be willing to make what I want. If Big Sister doesn't like the fabric or thinks the color is too drab, no deal. In order to get her to agree to copy my favorite suit in fabric she failed to approve of, I had to drop to my knees and beg. I told her she was the only seamstress in China I trusted not to charge me absurd foreigner prices. I said she understood my taste, even if she hated it, and was completely reliable. All these things are true. Big Sister responded well to flattery and charged me 50 yuan (US$6.25) to sew an unstructured suit.
This doesn't seem like a price that would make anyone rich, but the shop is open 13 hours a day, 7 days a week. At 10 PM, the sisters ride home together on a motorbike which tells me they're a lot wealthier than guys who deal with bikes.
Things go wrong a lot in China. Zippers invariably fail, bike pedals fall off, and my shoulder still acts up from time to time. However, all these things seem easier to bear with a fleet of people who can solve the problem. Unlike when I call a repair person in America or drag my body to a regular doctor, I can expect to be warmly greeted with my (Chinese) name and charged a reasonable, even bargain, price. What's more, I'll have a lively and probably leisurely conversation as well. The whole process will be so pleasant that I can't even get annoyed about the problem!
Epilogue:
Since I wrote this six weeks ago, there have been major changes. During winter vacation, Xiao Wang bought about a dozen slightly used tandem bicycles to rent out by the hour. He has them wedged in the aisles between the rows of jammed-together bikes, thus making it even more difficult to extricate one's bicycle. I can't feel too grumpy about this because it has also changed the character of our housing complex in a way I find quite charming. Now, every afternoon and evening there are children, most of whom do not have their own bikes, gleefully careening around the bends of our complex, shrieking as they wobble away on bicycles-built-for-two. Xiao Wang's enterprise has brought a lot of joy to the neighborhood and I hope it brings him profit as well.
When we returned from Myanmar, we found the bike repair business had moved into a newly constructed concrete shop on the other side of the alley. However, before we had a chance to congratulate them on their new space or bring our bikes in for repair, the family and all their belongings completely disappeared! Both the new shop and their former room were suddenly empty. It's still a mystery, and probably a sad one.
The sister seamstresses have also moved--out of the appliance repair shop and into their own shop next door. John has suggested that my business alone enabled them to finance this move. When I returned from Myanmar with all kinds of fabric not to be found in China, the sisters unexpectedly reacted with approval, even excitement. It seems I'm finally doing something right.
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