"Uncle Juber, please save it!" Zhu Boming of Shanghai once again received such a distress message through the Internet, this time from Beijing, and the object of rescue was a bear doll that had accompanied its owner for more than forty years. Zhu Boming will repair dolls, and the news will first go around the circle of acquaintances of colleagues and friends. After the advent of the Internet age, his skill gained more attention.
More than forty years ago, Zhu Boming was a young engineer in the development department of an integrated circuit research institute. At that time, Europe and the United States were imposing a technical blockade on China, and an integrated circuit component imported by the institute was worn out of the model, and there was no internal circuit diagram, and Zhu Boming stayed up for 6 nights, and he had to figure out the internal structure of the component with professional knowledge. At the same time, China's modern toy industry took off, and Zhu Boming, who was busy with work, bought a white polar bear for his son, who named it "Mingming". In 1997, Mingming became the first doll that Zhu Boming restored.
Restoring old dolls is a complicated task, cleaning, filling, sewing, flocking... Everything is learning.
Zhu Boming often runs several velvet shops for a doll, and even runs to the shops in Suzhou to look for them, "running for a day or two, running for a month or two is also there." The owner of a velvet shop explained in an interview with the media that "dyeing is chemically dyed, and the dye that comes out of each cylinder will not be the same."
Zhu Boming's strength in repair comes from the accumulation of decades of hands-on ability. At the age of 12, he learned to tailor, tailor-made for his younger siblings with limited fabrics; in his spare time, he learned piano tuning, and knew how to "lose a millimeter, the difference is thousands of miles"; he is also an ash-level audiophile for more than 30 years, and 20 years ago he made a half-palm-sized tape recorder with a hand-welded integrated circuit board, which can still be used now.
Toy restoration corresponds to the strong needs of a niche group – the owner is very dependent on the long-term companionship of the doll, and often goes ununderbated. Zhu Boming understands them, he specially purchased surgical forceps, beauty needles, called dolls with "dolls", and issued heart-warming memes when guests were in pain because of dolls in surgery, and he was willing to treat dolls like a life.
Someone will send the doll's video data to Zhu Boming, but meticulous communication is essential. From the repair of broken dolls to the appearance of guests' memories, the repairs are repaired, and the guests become friends and talk about their own stories; Zhu Boming becomes a "heavy" small video worker, reducing misunderstandings in a more direct way.
The guests who came to repair were very sensitive, and the adjustment of the eyes and nose was often carried out millimeter by millimeter, and some people made difficult requests, which made Zhu Boming, who had some obsessive-compulsive disorder, on the verge of collapse. "I'm under a lot of pressure, you know how to cut", he can't sleep, and he is not willing to end the imperfect repair. His wife grabbed his phone and pressed the shutdown button, so he had to sleep.
Most of the time, communication is effective. The repaired finished doll returned to the guest's side, and someone said, Thank you Uncle Juber! You saved us! Others held their dolls and kissed them, and tears flowed quietly. Zhu Boming is often shaken by these reactions, and he feels that this is the most important thing in the restoration work - the sense of value that is recognized.
More and more people want to repair their old dolls, but few know how much labor conservators put into them.