bettercitybetterlife

My girlfriend recently unearthed her old fish tank, deciding as she did that it was time to revive its former glory. She put it in the middle of the living room. We stood over it, pondering the possibilities.

Less than thirty seconds into our gazing at the “fish tank,” and we both knew filling it with fish would be a bad idea.

First, this wasn’t so much a “tank.” It would probably be better described as a very, very small indoor “pond.” Or perhaps a very, very big porcelain bowl.  In fact, that’s exactly what it is. A very, very large porcelain bowl that sits on a stubby little wooden stand. The fish are meant to be viewed from above, looked down upon as you enter a room or walk past.

And second, while having an open-topped, opaque fish bowl with one black and one orange goldfish circling each other in some sort of living embodiment of yin and yang in the living room would in fact be quite tranquil;  it would perhaps be better described as a very fresh sushi dinner to our two feline roommates. (One of which had already climbed into the bowl to take a nap at this point.)

No matter how you approach it, at the very best, it’s an invitation for the cats to make a serious mess. At its worse it’s a death sentence for two unsuspecting goldfish.

But, since we live in the manufacturing center of the universe, I figured this was an easy problem to solve. All we needed to do was buy a piece of round glass slightly larger than the opening of the bowl, and fit it on top with some rubber stoppers, turning the whole thing into a sort of fish-bowl coffee table.

With a glass force field on top, the swimming fish–deliciously tempting as an afternoon snack—would instead provide hours of evening entertainment for Curtis and Max.

So this afternoon, we went out in search of a place to make us a piece of round glass.

One thing you can be sure of in Shanghai, if there is one person selling something, then  there is probably a market or street where a dozen or more people are also selling the same thing. Flowers. Tea. Seafood. Plastic restaurant displays. Reading glasses. You name it. There’s even an entire street dedicated to trophy engraving.

Sure enough, a store owner at the flower and gold fish market right beside our apartment confirmed that there was a glass market just a few blocks away.

Unfortunately for us, the shop owner’s directions weren’t very good.

Fortunately for us, after talking to several locals in the neighborhood just west of our apartment, we managed to locate a singular glass shop, just one block away from Suzhou Creek.

Now, in the US, I would just go to some super home-fix-it store and expect that they would have at least a limited selection of round glass table tops for me to pick from. Likely, those table tops would be manufactured in China. So, my thinking was that a glass shop or market in Shanghai would also have round glass.

I was wrong.

This singular glass shop, situated part way down a dead-end alley, looked more like a large storage unit than a shop of any sort. The floor was made of bare, rough concrete. The front door was made of metal bands, hinged together so that they would roll up around a bar in the ceiling. And a small hand-welded ladder in the back led up to a short loft with a pair of makeshift frosted windows that did little to conceal the fact that the shop owner lived above his workspace.

The shop owner was a friendly man with a somewhat darker complexion , and if I had to guess, I would say he was in his mid-to-late fifties.

We explained to him what we wanted, and he cheerfully told us that he didn’t have any round glass on hand, but that he could make a piece of round glass for us.

We were led further down the dead-end alley to his stockpile of glass—a large, rather precariously perched stack of rain-stained glass panes that bowed and bent dangerously as they leaned against the outside brick wall of the shop.

He pulled one off of the stack and asked us if it would be suitable. As far as we could tell, all of his panes were of the same size and thickness. Perhaps a glass expert would have been able to inspect them all and tell which, if any, was the most desirable.

But to me, glass is glass, so we agreed to that piece, and negotiated a price.

To buy the glass, cut it, and polish the edge the man wanted 53 kuai (less than 10 USD).

Generally, when someone quotes you an odd price like 53 kuai, what they really want is 50 kuai. The extra 3 is sort of tacked on as a courtesy—to make it easy for you to negotiate the price down. You feel like you did your due diligence in haggling. He gets the price he wants, and everyone is happy. It’s a common thing here.

So, 50 kuai it was.

And it would have been a bargain at four times the price.

Not because the end product was anything special. On the contrary, what we ended up with was what you would sort of expect for that price—a functional, slightly uneven, sort of unsightly piece of mostly round glass.

No, it was worth it because this man, this glass cutter, was captivating to watch work.

After he dragged the pane of glass back inside his workshop, he laid it down on top of a fold-out wood and metal card table. Then he bent over, picked up a burlap sack, and dumped the contents on the dusty, rough concrete floor. A pile of assorted drill bits and supposedly useful items clanked to the ground. The glass cutter pushed the now-emptied contents around and came away with a strange-looking tool.

On one end was a glass-cutting bit of some sort, which I assume was a very small chip of diamond. He drew this end across the pane, making a terrible screeching sound, like fingers down a blackboard.

On the other end was a heavy metal ball bearing, which the glass cutter then used to tap the underside of the glass. The resulting concussion caused the glass to crack—right along the scored line he’s made with the cutting end.

I was skeptical at this point but deeply engaged by the conflict unfolding before my eyes. I kept thinking that at any moment he would push aside some of the clutter in his shop and reveal some sort of precision glass cutting machine. He’d clamp the pane into it, turn it on, and the well-used but finely tuned apparatus would whirl, smoke, and cough out a smooth, circular cut piece of glass.

But that moment never came.

Instead, the man took a long plastic ruler, drilled a hole in one end, and cut a U-shaped notch in the other. He then drove a screw into the hole, and used the entire device like a protractor—placing the screw at the center of the glass, and a felt pen in the notch and rotating the ruler around the point of the screw to draw a circle.

Then, like a sculptor with a piece of marble, he bent down over his work and slowly began to draw over the black marker circle, by hand, with his glass-cutting tool, scoring the glass the same way he had before.

I couldn’t tear my eyes away. I was amazed at the man’s skillful makeshift physics, and the cocksure manner in which he attacked the problem. He moved with a purpose, a seasoned veteran who looked every bit a man who knew exactly what he was doing because he had done it so, so many times before.

But the odds were stacked against him. Did he really think he could just draw a circle on the pane of glass, and cut out a perfect circle by hand?

The answer, of course, was yes.

He was, in a way, the perfect protagonist. The underdog. He was the McGuyver of modern China, and the fact that he didn’t have the right tools wasn’t going to stop him from overcoming all odds to triumph in the end.

It didn’t matter that the final product was not a “perfect” circle. What mattered was that he took on the challenge and believed in himself when nobody else (okay, really only me) did not.

Over the course of a half an hour, He scratched and cracked the glass pane, and I looked on, a patron of his one-man show, rooting for him to come out on top.

It was the  feel good movie of the year, and I didn’t even have to buy a pirated DVD.