Did you have a doll in your childhood that grew up with you?
For many people, dolls accompany themselves like relatives, they have a soul, but they will also grow old as they grow.
In Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province, there is a girl who is using her own needle and thread to give her old doll a new life.
The post-80s girl is as green as blue and is a doll restorer on Taobao. Many people will call her a doctor, she said, and use her Taobao shop as a doll hospital.
After everyone sent the doll over, they also specifically told her that they hoped that when "operating", they would be careful and gentle. And she will also build a detailed file for each doll like a doctor building a medical record card.
When I was a child, my mother often made dolls at home, and I learned to sew with one hand. In 2020, because of the recession of the epidemic company, she decided to open a Taobao shop herself, and with her own craftsmanship, in less than a year, she cured more than 200 doll "patients".
These dolls mainly come from all over the country, most of them are in their twenties and thirties, and have accompanied their owners for twenty or thirty years, and the "oldest" ones are in their 60s.
The sisters around me felt incredible, how could anyone have to repair the doll? Dolls are mostly not expensive, wouldn't it be nice to buy a new one?
Lu Rulan originally did not understand the obsession of some hosts, but in the process of dealing with guests, she could feel that the dolls were very important to them, and behind them was a kind of spiritual force.
"A doll is not just a doll, there are a lot of emotions and memories behind it, and many dolls accompany their owners from childhood to adulthood, being witnesses to their lives."
How much do people cherish dolls? Green As Blue once met a girl, sent over a very old seal, she opened an account for the seal on social media, drew a caricature of the seal, and recorded the "healing" bit by bit. The girl said that the seal was bought for her by her father on a business trip in Shanghai, accompanying her through her childhood and studying abroad alone, countless tense and lonely days and nights before the exam, only seals can give her strength. In the past decade, seals have spent more time with her than her parents.
There was also a boy, worried that the courier had lost his elephant, so he took a special train to send it over, and after the repair was completed, he came to pick it up and take it home. To him, the elephants were like his family.
This is a Taobao shop with only old things: every doll sent over is dirty and old, and everyone's requirements for restoration are surprisingly consistent - "repair the old as old". Green as Blue said that the owner wants to restore the doll to the way he thinks it is, and only likes the old feeling. So she would specifically look for fabrics that looked old, but were actually new to repair.
Generally speaking, the process of "healing" a doll, including cleaning, cotton flushing, modeling repair, first take out the filler, give the doll a "bath", then fill the cotton, repair the damage, and finally, she will also do a plastic surgery on the doll's face, sew eyeliner, and make the eyes more energetic.
In fact, before becoming a "doll doctor", she was a less confident person, and for her, doing doll repair full-time was a risky thing. But over the course of a year, she felt she had made the right choice.
Whenever she repairs a doll, receives the gratitude of strangers on the other end of the Taobao store, or sees full of kindness and happiness from the buyer's show, she also feels the energy of serious life. She said that in the future, she will persevere, continue to repair dolls, and help everyone repair childhood memories. (Text/Wen Yue)