The Street Tailor
01 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Thailand Tags: street tailor
It was approximately 6.10 PM Bangkok time on one late December afternoon. The sky was nearly dark, there were clouds everywhere and sunset was nearly complete. The street lights along Thanon Phaholyothin (Phaholyothin Road) have already been put on and the road itself was full of cars, motorcycles and buses heading north. Traffic jam made the vehicles to move very slowly, sometimes they even stopped completely for a couple minutes. Most people are heading home after a hard day work. At the northern corner between Thanon Phaholyothin and Phaholyothin Soi 21 Road, just before the entrance to a large, Office Depot store, one person was still working, very seriously, without paying attention to her surrounding.
The woman is still quite young. She is small built, has long, black hairs and her skin is also a bit dark. She wore red color shirt and was covered by a tailor apron from her chest down. Her face looked tired but she concentrated very hard to sew a woman blouse under a dark sky without direct lighting to help her see the needle and the thread from her sewing machine. Her tired face seems to tell that she has experienced a lot of hardships in life or perhaps she was just really tired that day because she had been working all day.
Her business is located just a little bit off the trotoar, under some small trees. It is without any kind of permanent roof. The roof is in the form of dark brown, thick plastic cover, which is tied to some tree branches. The plastic cover, presumably, is used to protect her from direct sun shine or light rain and it is also used to wrap the sewing machine up once she finishes her work. Apart from a sewing machine, she also has a plastic chair and a box of sewing kit.
Street vendors in Bangkok are pretty much like those in Jakarta, there are lots of them, selling different kind of cheap things on the trotoar and hoping to earn some money for living. They are usually villagers who move to big cities in order to find better opportunities for themselves and usually also for their families. Most of them are hardworkers, often sacrificing their own health, fighting for their survival. Nobody can help them but themselves, therefore either they die or they “fight”. It is good to see that there are many people who “fight” in a good way, working “legally” although their presence is often seen as causing “disorganization” on trotoars and toubles to pedestrians.
The street tailor whom I saw that afternoon impressed me very much because she taught me about courage and perseverance. There are people who have better life but still complain about them being unlucky and always ask why their life is not as good as the others’, but this woman, on the other hand, risks her own health to finish her job that day.
The natural light at around that time, in my opinion, was already not enough for sewing job. I saw her leaning her head toward the needle of her sewing machine, fixing her eyes to her moving fingers and the blouse she was doing. She must have wanted to finish off her sewing as quickly as possible to fulfill her commitment to her client.
She doesn’t wear glasses yet, but the way she works most likely will not help her eyesight in the long run, not to mention that she has to work on trotoar, next to one of the busiest road in northern Bangkok, for five to six days a week. This is life, sometime we face difficulties and hardships, but we can choose to keep moving on with a lot of courage and perseverance, to fight our way out of our problems.
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