Eric's Beijing Diary

Shoes. There was a guy on one of the "teaching in China" lists who mentioned something about a shop somewhere in Beijing that builds shoes to order. I wrote to him right away and asked for the address, but he somehow never got around to getting it to me.

Well, I have an old pair of military oxfords that I picked up for five bucks years ago at a thrift store in Tempe or Mesa. I have been replacing heels over the years, but a few months ago, the leather uppers split open. The split wasn't very big at first, so I tried to ignore it. But now it's getting to the point where you can see my sock through the hole in my shoe. Not good.

Today, I took my shoe to a local shoe repair guy, and he managed to patch it up pretty good. I was not sure how it was going to look, because he used a brown patch on a black shoe, but the patch is on the inside, and doesn't show through. It is glued and stitched thoroughly. The "battle scar" on the outside doesn't really show up that much if you don't look to close.

When I lived in the States, I used to do somewhat the same kind of thing. I would buy old leather shoes (the kind that are very well made) at thrift stores, and then take them to a shoe repair place to be fixed up. The shoes would cost me five to ten dollars, and the repair would usually be 40 to 50 dollars. These were often shoes you can't buy in a store. Military oxfords are government issue. You have to wait until some retired officer's wife cleans out the closet and brings his shoes down to Goodwill. So for 50 bucks you could basically have a new pair of shoes. But I think they would have laughed at me today. In America, these shoes would have been garbage. I think the best plan would be to buy the shoes in America and have them fixed up by a street-side cobbler here in China. The cost was two yuan. About twenty-five cents.

It takes me back. When I was in college, there was an old German cobbler in the small college town where I lived during my college days. Every time I took a pair of shoes to him to get repaired, his price was the same. The first time I asked him how much he wanted I almost fell over,

"Twenty-five cents."

Now, that was quite a few years ago. I graduated from college in the late seventies. But twenty-five cents was not very much money even at that time. Otto Bedler was an Old World craftsman from the days in Europe when people made things because they needed to be made. Craftsmanship in that world was not a novel luxury. It was the norm.

One of the things I really like about China is that craftsmanship still thrives here. It is taken for granted. Craftsmanship is not totally dead in America, but it is by no means assumed, so the cost is at a premium.