Knife Sharpener

I always know when the knife sharpener is in the neighborhood because I hear the clang of his metal noise maker and the sing-song chant he bellows out. But until today I didn't understand what he was saying.

After lunch I heard him calling from the street below, so I bagged up three of my dull knives, grabbed a wad of small bills and ran downstairs to find him. It wasn't difficult. His bike was parked on the sidewalk outside of our complex, and he stood next to a small wooden sawhorse, all bundled up against the cold.

When I asked him how much it would be, he pointed at the different kinds of knives I had and rattled off a bunch of numbers. I think I heard ten kuai for one, but twenty for the two other ones because balabalabala… “Okay!” I said, and he got to work.

I watched him for a while, first grinding each blade on a wheel he spun by hand, next he honed the edges carefully by bracing each knife against his bench using a long rubber loop, one end wrapped around the handle of the knife and the other around his right shoe. Thin metal shavings were removed with each scrape of his blade. At this point, I thought he was done, but then he turned around on his bench and ground each side of the knives, first on a coarse grained whetstone and then on a fine grained one. The whole process took about a half an hour, and my knives are now dangerously sharp!

About halfway through his work I struck up a conversation. When I first addressed him, I called him “Shifu.” You know in Kung Fu Panda, the Kung Fu master, Shifu? In the movie it’s pronounced “SheeFoo,” but with the Beijing accent we say “ShurFoo,”and it is a title that can be used for any person who has a specialized skill. I also call taxi drivers Shifu.

“Excuse me, shifu,” I said, “May I ask what are the words of your song? I can hear it, but I don’t understand the meaning.”

He had to repeat the words for me a few times, and I repeated the words out loud so I could look them up when I got home. Now I know he’s calling, “The knife sharpener has arrived!” He also taught me the word for “sharp.” It is kuai. The same exact word as the word for “fast.” Also pronounced the same as the word for “dollar” and “to amputate,” and… (Chinese is so great that way. There are only a few words you have to learn!)

He asked me if there are knife sharpeners in my home country. He wondered how expensive it was to get a knife sharpened there. When I said I didn't know, he guessed it would cost about $120, so wasn't I getting a good deal? He thought I was from Russia.

I asked him if he was a Beijing person. He said no, he is from Anhui Province to the south. I asked him how many people are in his family and he held up his index finger and thumb. In China this is the hand sign for the number eight. I commented, “Wow, big family!” He nodded and said that not all of them live in Beijing now.

When my knives were sharp he held several pages of newspaper in the air in one of his hands and sliced through them with each of my knives to demonstrate how sharp they are. 

I carried them home and  asked my husband to go down and take a few photos of him for me. I thought he would stand at a distance and get a few shots, but he walked right up and told him, “My wife asked me to come down and take your picture.” So here his is--our friendly neighborhood knife sharpener!

Here is his using the whetstone. On the ground to his left is his noise maker.

Christmas gifts from our students and their parents. :)