Hi everyone, I’m Thien. I’m 62 years old, and I’m a knife sharpener. My main “office” is the corner of a market in Ha Noi, but my hometown is in Xuan Thanh, Xuan Truong, Nam Dinh. I am living alone in Trung Kinh, where I rent a small room for 500,000 dong ($25.00) per month. The room is small, sure, but it works for me.
My family’s still living in my hometown. My ol’ lady and I’ve got three children: two daughters and a son. My daughters are both married, and they’ve started their own families. My son’s 21, and he’s enlisted in the army. Overall, my family is not very poor [laughs]: we’ve got 540 square meters of land, with a main house, which is 50 square meters. The main house has a flat roof, and our other house has a tiled roof with 3 rooms. Also, the bathroom is very modernized [flat roofs and Western toilets are both indicative of affluence]. Sometimes, my ol’ 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 then I realize, “if you want to kiem an (find food), you have to accept whatever life throws at you…even if it means being far from your family! As long as you’re still healthy, you gotta work. Besides, you become attached to it…” I make pretty good money. After costs, I make about 4 million dong (approximately $200) per month. With this, I can live comfortably on my own, without help from my children.
On a typical day, I wake up early, brush my teeth, wash my face, and make some tea before heading out at 6:30. I bike to the market, have breakfast, and begin my day. Depending on how many customers I get I can be done as early as 11:30 or as late as 1:00. Then I have lunch and take a break before getting back to work again. Every other day I switch off between Trung Kinh Market and Nga Tu So Market for my afternoons. On a slow day, my day can end around 5:00 but on a busy day I can work as late as 7:00. When it’s slow, I kick back and relax, drink some tea, and smoke [laughs]. I don’t come home regularly- just a few days every few weeks or so since I work year round. If I’m gone too long I can lose alotta customers. It gets real busy during the three months leading up to Tet [Lunar New Year]. This time of year has alotta weddings and celebrations and people need their knives sharpened. It gets so busy that I can’t always finish… I come home five days before Tet and stay for about half a month before going back to Ha Noi to mo hang [the first working day following the Lunar New Year- the success of your first day sets a precedent for the rest of the year]. Five days later I go back home again for the first full moon of the Lunar Year [an important day for Vietnamese people].
People joke around and say things like, “Everyone’s got stainless steel knives and their own sharpening tools… who needs you?” Even if you have stainless steel knives you still need knife sharpeners like me! Household sharpening tools are useless- electric ones included… they can’t compare to my skills. They dull the knives and wear them out much quicker. People value my work. At first glance it looks easy but it takes alotta skill and know-how. When I first started no one trusted me with their knives, so I had to prove myself by sharpening some knives for free. I had to show off my skills, and eventually word got around that I was really good. After this, the customers came to ME! [laughs].
In the blink of an eye, 12 years have past, and here I am still sharpening knives [laughs]. 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. Wanna know why I changed jobs? People didn’t appreciate quality hand-crafted furniture like they had before… less and less people needed my work as mass-produced furniture flooded the market.
The longer I do this, the more I love my job, and I’ve never thought of quitting before. I’ll only stop when I’m too old to work, but until then, I plan to keep sharpening knives. Living in Hanoi, away from my family can be difficult. Fortunately, I live near some guys from back home, who make me feel less homesick. Back in Nam Dinh, we aren’t really friends, but being far from home brings us together. Sometimes, when I see other knife sharpeners, I’ll drink some tea and smoke some cigarettes with them. We laugh and talk together until we just forget about work altogether. There are no mysteries to sharpening knives. Everything’s laid out on the table. Sharpening knives has become second-nature to me… It’s like playing guitar.. After playing for years, your hands know just where to go and just what to do…
Contributors: Colleen Ngo, Joshua Mayhew, Mai Lan, Mai Quang Huy
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