It’s a Living: Work & Life in Vietnam Today

Chapter 10: Repairing

REPAIRING & RECYCLING 212 REPAIRING & RECYCLING 214 knife sharpener Hi everyone, I’m Thiền. I’m 62 years old, and I’m a knife sharpener. My main “office” is the corner of a market in Hanoi, but my hometown is in Xuân Thành, in Nam Định province. These days I live by myself in Trung Kính. I rent a small room for 500,000 đồng [$25] a month. The room is small, sure, but it works for me. My family’s still living in my hometown. My old lady and I have got three children: two daughters and a son. My daughters are both married and have started their own families. My son’s 21 and he’s enlisted in the army. Overall, my family isn’t doing too badly [laughs]. We’ve got 540 square meters of land, and the main house is 50 square meters, with a flat roof and a modern bathroom [both signs of affluence in the countryside]. Sometimes, my old lady tells me “You’re old now, and our family’s doing fine, why do you need to go so far to make money? It’s not good for your health.” I often think about moving a bit closer to home, but if you want to make a buck, you’ve got to accept whatever life throws at you even if it means REPAIRING & RECYCLING 215 being far from your family. As long as you’re still healthy, you’ve got to work. And besides, you become attached to the work. And let’s not forget, I make pretty good money. After expenses, I clear about 4 million đồng [$200] a month. With this, I can live comfortably on my own and don’t need any help from my kids. On a typical day, I wake up early, brush my teeth, wash my face, make some tea, and head out at 6:30 a.m. I ride my bike to the market, have breakfast, and begin my day. Depending on how many customers I get in the morning, I can be done as early as 11:30 a.m. or as late as 1 p.m. Then I have lunch and take a break before getting back to work again. Every other afternoon, I switch between Trung Kính Market and Ngã Tư Sở Market. On a slow day, my day can end around five but when it gets busy I can work till as late as seven at night. And when it’s slow, I kick back and relax, drink some tea and have a smoke [laughs]. I don’t go home very often; I work year-round, so I only go back to my hometown for a few days every couple of weeks or so. I can lose a lot of customers if I’m gone too long. It gets really busy during the three months leading up to Tết. That’s when there are a lot of weddings and parties and people need their knives sharpened. Sometimes, it gets so busy I can’t always finish my work. Then I go home five days before Tết and stay there for about two weeks before I go back to Hanoi to start the new working year [mở hàng, the first day back at work is considered to set a precedent for the rest of the year]. And then, five days later, I go back home again for the first full moon of the Lunar Year. People joke around and say things like, “Everyone’s got stainless steel knives and their own sharpening tools … who needs you?” But let me tell you: even if you have stainless steel knives, you still need knife sharpeners like me. Household sharpening tools, electric ones included, are all useless: they just can’t compare to my skills. They dull the knives and wear them out much REPAIRING & RECYCLING 216 quicker. People who know this value my work. Even before I was doing this, I had experience sharpening things. I was a carpenter for 30 years, so changing jobs wasn’t really a problem. Why did I change jobs? Nowadays, people don’t appreciate quality hand-crafted furniture like before; now they just go out and buy some mass-produced junk. So I had to change jobs. At first...