The wit and resourcefulness of the Chinese people never cease to amaze me. Yesterday, one of the small pouch zippers on my expensive but well-used backpack broke as I opened it to retrieve my sunglasses and wallet. Immediately, I began wondering where to go and how much it would cost to buy a new one. I needed this backpack for my daily sojourns and for grocery shopping.

"Don't buy a new one," my buddy said. "Just take it to the shoe repair lady, she can probably fix it in a few minutes." Dave gave me directions.

I biked down the street and found Yuan Fang. A short, dark cheerful lady of indiscriminate age, she took one look at the broken zipper and announced, "Sure, no problem, I'll mend that tiny rip as well, the one on the other pouch."

I watched, fascinated, as she deftly rethreaded my zipper, attached a new zipper toggle and then tied off the open ends-all in less than two minutes.

"Got anything else?" she asked cheerfully. I dug into my bag and came up with, surprisingly, a pair of old kid gloves lined with silk that I'd been carrying around for weeks. They were actually my grandmother's opera gloves; she'd mailed them to me because I'd lost my good pair.

"Can you shorten these?" I asked.

"Of course," she replied, taking the gloves, turning them inside out and examining them. Yuan measured my hands, measured the gloves, whipped out a pair of scissors and snipped, glued and hemmed. After a few minutes she handed me back an elegant pair of calfskin short gloves.

"How much in all?" I asked.

"Ten yuan ($1.5)," she said.

Handing her the money, I thanked her profusely and rode away happy as a clam. During the next few weeks, I started to bring this woman my inventory of boots and shoes to resole. Her work always remained top-of-the-line and her prices amazingly low, about one 10th of what I'd pay for the same work done in the United States.

Other women and men have also revived many more of my personal items. My loquacious neighbor, Mrs. Chen, has nimble fingers. When she saw a hole in my lace vest, she at first admonished me to sew it up. Embarrassed, I admitted that I didn't have the skill. She then ordered me to take it off, pulled me into her flat and sat me down with a plate of fruit.

"You eat while I repair!" she commanded.

Her fingers flew over the fabric and before I'd finished an orange, she had patched up the hole so perfectly that you'd never have known it existed. And, of course, she refused money and asked me to bring all my future mending, including socks with holes, to her and her alone.