Worst Kept Secrets

I woke up Thursday morning and reached for my glasses, which crumpled in my hands and I heard the almost inaudible sound of a screw bouncing onto the floor and onward into an unknowable eternity of unfindable objects. I acted fast - stumbled to the office and started frantically applying Scotch tape while weighing in my mind how absurd it would be for me to call in to work. After about twenty minutes of panicked sweat, my frames looked like a gradeschool craft disaster of tape and string. So I woke Chris up and with his perfect vision, he managed to tie them together in a remarkably passable manner, and I made it to work on time after all.

This is, of course, why you always have a spare pair of glasses, especially if you’re like me and quite seriously can’t function without them. I DID have a spare pair when I came to China. They were an older prescription that had been severely chewed upon by my parents’ dog, and I always wore them to Castle Bar to avoid my good pair getting jostled or broken in a spasm of dance fever (they were my quite literal beer goggles). I also wore them for snorkeling in the Philippines - the idea was to wear them under my goggles, which worked fine on Borocay last year, but not so much on Bohol this January. I was floating around with the starfish and sea urchins, and my mask kept filling up with water, so I tucked the glasses in my swimsuit, and they are now a little piece of Anne Treasure buried in the depths of the Cebu Strait.

I have BAD eyes. I’m entirely helpless without corrective lenses - without them, I’m drifting in a sea of gently undulating blobs of color. This won’t cut it for crossing the street here, let alone sidestepping the blood splatters from the chicken slaughter carts, the potholes and detritus in the sidewalks, and everything else that makes walking around in Nanjing an incredibly active experience requiring fast reflexes and concentration. So something had to be done, and Leif had the answer - Danyang, a town about thirty minutes away by a CRH train.

Danyang is famous for eyeglasses. I keep hearing that 70% of the world’s glasses come to Danyang, and while I’m skeptical of that claim, it’s definitely a big player.  It’s not unique in its massively scaled industrial specialization - Danyang has glasses, Suzhou has wedding dresses, and Datang has socks. Here’s another really good article (long, but worth reading) by Peter Hessler about from National Geographic:

In Wuyi, I asked some bystanders what the local product was. A man reached into his pocket and pulled out three playing cards—queens, all of them. The city manufactures more than one billion decks a year. Datang township makes one-third of the world’s socks. Songxia produces 350 million umbrellas every year. Table tennis paddles come from Shangguan; Fenshui turns out pens; Xiaxie does jungle gyms. Forty percent of the world’s neckties are made in Shengzhou.

I’ve dealt with one intensely focused product district before in Suzhou - their wedding district on Huqiu Lu is a site to behold. When I first saw the dress district, my heart faltered - I was completely overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stores. But still, within a couple of hours, I was shaking hands with the lady who was going to make a dress almost from scratch for me within one week (and she delivered, too. No joke. Custom dress. Seven days. 1.5 hours to find it.).

To get glasses in Danyang, you leave the train station and cross the street, where you’ll see the giant sign that says GLASSES CITY. I came out of that with my old pair repaired, two new pairs, and some prescription sunglasses. I’ve never had sunglasses in my life because I’ve never been able to wear them. Turns out, they’re awesome! I couldn’t believe that they’d be able to get my prescription right through the language barrier, but they had me look into a machine where a little picture of a farm house came in and out of focus with some beeping and tapping, and then they asked me to wait for ten minutes while they put the glasses together. And ten minutes later, they were finished and I was on my way. The prescription’s fine, too - if anything, it’s better than my old pair. As a bonus, I got to skip the glaucoma puff test, which I hate more than I hate strep throat cultures, pap smears, and dental cleaning combined. I could have gotten presription goggles there, too, but I’d had enough for one day.