Chen’s Watch Repair

Chen’s Watch Repair is at the far end of Old South Street.

Enter through the back of the market, pass the shop selling plastic slippers, then two shuttered storefronts, and you find it between a locksmith and a trouser mender. There is no glass door, only a wooden one that opens inward. The sign is blue with white lettering; a corner has fallen from the final character. A demolition notice is taped beside it, dated last month.

At ten in the morning Master Chen is taking the back off a woman’s watch.

His bench is scarcely wider than a school desk. A white lamp stands on the left, a yellow one on the right; between them is a square of black velvet worn thin at the middle. Tweezers, screwdrivers, oil pens, and a dozen clear boxes are laid across it. Their lids are marked in ballpoint: Switzerland. Japan. Electronic. Don’t Know.

Don’t Know is the largest box.

He lays the back on the velvet and lifts a gear with his tweezers. The customer, a woman of about forty, waits outside the counter gripping her phone.

“It runs fast,” he says.

“Can it be repaired?”

“Of course. It isn’t broken. It’s in a hurry.”

She smiles, as if no one has ever described a watch that way before.

Master Chen is eighty-one. The veins on his hands stand out clearly. He says his hands shake when he is idle, but not when he touches a watch. He does not wear gloves and dislikes people standing too close. “Your breath carries moisture,” he says.

There is no air-conditioning. An old fan turns at the door, its blades brushing the metal cage every few moments. A wall clock has stopped at 3:17. It has been stopped for years; the word Shanghai on its face is yellowed with smoke.

“You won’t fix it?” I ask.

“My father died when it stopped there,” he says. “If I fix it, it won’t be that clock any more.”

Then he puts a screw back into the woman’s watch and says no more about his father.

Chen began apprenticing in town at fifteen. His first job was in a watch shop behind the department store. For a year he swept, polished glass, and poured tea. His master would not let him touch a movement. One day the man handed him an alarm clock and said that if he could not repair it, he would have no dinner. Chen took it apart until dark and put it back together three times. It still would not ring.

The next morning the clock was where he had left it, ticking away. His master looked at it and said, “Not bad.”

“Only later did I learn he repaired it at night,” Chen says. “A person has to think he can do it first. Otherwise he won’t stay.”

At half past eleven a schoolboy comes in for a battery. Chen charges ten yuan and hands the watch back. “Don’t wear it in the shower.”

“It’s waterproof,” the boy says.

“Waterproof doesn’t mean boiling-water-proof.”

The boy pauses, nods, and leaves. The bell at the door rings twice.

“He probably won’t come back,” Chen says.

“Does that matter?”

“As long as the watch doesn’t get wet.”

At noon he takes a stainless-steel lunchbox from a drawer: rice, greens, two pieces of fish. He eats slowly. Halfway through, a woman arrives to collect a watch. Her repair slip is twelve years old and yellow at the edges. Chen takes a man’s mechanical watch from the display case. A faint scratch crosses the rim.

“Is it running?” she asks.

Instead of answering, he puts it to his ear and then holds it out. “Listen.”

It belonged to her father, she says. He used to come home from work at 7:40. After the watch stopped, she brought it in for repair but never came back to collect it. Last month, while moving, she found the repair slip at the bottom of a drawer.

“How long will it run now?”

“Twenty or thirty years if you wear it normally.”

She does not put it on. After a while she folds the repair slip into quarters and puts it and the watch into her bag.

At two, the demolition crew begins drilling the road. The floor trembles. Chen covers several watches against dust, then takes a woman’s watch from the bottom cabinet. The strap is broken and the crystal finely cracked.

“My wife’s,” he says.

On the back is engraved: May you have enough time.

“Why not repair this one?”

“It isn’t broken.”

He puts it back and closes the cabinet.

In a drawer is a grease-stained ledger. In earlier years he recorded every customer, brand, fault, and payment date. As electronic watches became more common, the entries turned to battery changes, strap replacements, and models no one could identify.

The old street will be demolished next year. His son has looked at flats with lifts and wants him to move. Chen does not say yes or no. He points to the boxes of screws. “First I have to sort these.”

Near evening, the woman from the morning returns. Chen places her watch on a clean tissue and tells her not to touch hot water for three months. She pays, walks outside, then comes back.

“Master Chen,” she says, “will it run fast again?”

He is putting away his tools. He thinks for a moment.

“It will.”

“What should I do?”

“Come back.”

She smiles. This time she asks nothing else.

Someone outside calls for the locksmith. The drills have stopped and the street is suddenly quiet. Chen switches off one lamp, leaving the other over the bench. The repaired watch lies on the velvet. Its second hand passes twelve and keeps going.