I have a watch I like. It’s not expensive, at all, just rubber and plastic, but it has multiple functions. It has a digital readout. It has a button I can push to light up the face, so I can tell the time in the dark. It can tell me the date, which is something I use with surprising frequency. It has a timer, which I never seem to be able to remember how to use, but could, if I bothered. Like at a soccer match. And it also will take my pulse if I press two buttons at the same time and hold them down for about five seconds. Good for jogging.

Yes, it’s handy, and when it suddenly was 40 minutes slow a few days ago, I knew 1) it needed a new battery or 2) it was giving up the ghost.

So, I set out on the streets of the Wan Chai neighborhood of Hong Kong, which I have been touting as the most Chinese of all Hong Kong neighborhoods. Meaning, then, that I ought to be able to find someone to fix my watch inside of 100 yards in any direction.

Walking back from the laundry (where eight pounds of clothes can be washed and folded for 40 Hong Kong dollars, or about $5.50) … Leah had noticed a batch of jewelry stores. And sometimes those guys will sell you batteries.

I walked into the second jewelry store I came to, because it was less crowded, and was met by a greeting in English, with almost no accent. “And can I help you, sir?”

I said, well, I’m looking for a battery for my watch. And then I realized the guy behind the counter was one of us (like me, in German) who knows a few phrases and has nice pronunciation but doesn’t actually speak the language he just addressed you in so crisply.

But he did manage, by way of waving and other hand signals, and by repeating the words “other side of restaurant” and “just down there,” to convey to me that someone better suited to this humble job was nearby.

Hmm. Back onto the crowded sidewalk of Johnston Road. Looking down the street as people maneuvered around me.  Did he mean around the corner? I peered around the corner; the businesses petered out almost immediately because one of the hills that forms the spine of Hong Kong Island had stuck its foot out, and the hill there prevented any building.

So, he must have met back down Johnston. So I began looking. I came to a restaurant, yes, but that is nothing remarkable since there must be 100 restaurants in a 2-3 block stretch of Johnston … all the while trying not to bump (or be bumped into) by Hongkongers alternately rushing home from work or dawdling to kill time.

A few feet past the restaurant — and it was a big one, about three store-fronts wide; maybe this is the one the man was talking about? — I saw a few outlets for cheap clothes … but by looking down a little I saw a little man, maybe 50 years old, with a woman’s watch in pieces on a tiny work bench, and a husband and wife watching him work on it … and I figured I had found my man.

His “shop” was set up outside the window of a clothing store that, in itself, couldn’t have been more than 10 feet wide, on the street, and maybe 30 feet deep.

He had unfolded (I assume it folded) and propped up against the window of the store a case of watches that included about 25 rows of glittering time pieces. Many of them with recognizable brand names. All of them extraordinarily inexpensive. Meaning they all had to be fakes.

But I wasn’t interested in a new knockoff. I wanted my old watch fixed.

The little man sat/squatted on a stool, maybe 10 inches off the ground. He had a magnifying glass — a loupe, I suppose it is called — strapped over his head. And when his work got really small, he would slip the eyepiece over his left eye — so he could see what he was doing.

After a time, still working on this woman’s watch, he looked up at me. I said, “I need a battery.” Till now, he had been speaking only Cantonese (I believe it was) with his Chinese customers. And he gestured at some of the watch pieces hanging below the watch display, and the batteries down there, and said “same-same” — which I took to mean he had a battery that would work, though probably not the same as the one I had.

So I waited. In about 10 minutes he took all the pieces of the woman’s watch, slapped them back together, reset the watch to the time on his own watch (a nice one, I bet; probably the only real one on the premises) … and he was done.

Then he turned to me. I handed him my Mio watch which, it turns out, has wording on the back alleging it was made in Hong Kong. Which I never had noticed. My watch had come home.

He took off the rubberized band pieces, and considered the 1-inch-by-1-inch face. He flipped it over and retrieved his tiny screwdriver, and took out the four screws. A moment later, he had peeled off the pieces, arranged to lie atop each other, like pancakes.

He rummaged below him and found a battered box with batteries in them. He took scissors and cut off the package on the end, tore it up, and there was my battery — flat and about the size of a quarter. I always had imagined it to be tiny. The size of a fingernail. Nope. It’s bigger.

Then he went to work. He greased a rubber seal by dragging it through some grease in a tiny white cup. He dropped a piece of clear plastic back in. Some sort of gasket? He fiddled when it didn’t all go in at once. He turned the gasket till it fit correctly. He had trouble getting the rubber seal to fit correctly.  He finally got it.

He pointed at the four tiny screws on his bitsy workplace (maybe 6 inches by 6 inches), noting that one off them was broken. I wondered if he would sell me a new one.

Instead, once he had the other three screws in place, he appeared to apply rubber cement over the fourth. Well, I’ll worry about that next time.

Meanwhile a little crowd had gathered. It became clear that X number of the thousands of people passing by 1) wanted to look at his knockoff watches, which were as cheap as $4 U.S. and 2) some just liked to watch him work.  No question, he was an artisan of a sort.  Fixing time pieces while sitting on a stool in an area about a yard square — with an audience of five or six people.

Finally, he had my watch together and had reset it, according to his official time. It had taken him maybe 15 minutes. I had seen that the earlier customer,  the Chinese woman, had paid him 20 HK for her repairs. I wondered how much he would charge me. Maybe he took me for a rube Westerner who would pay more. And I would have.  And we had not agreed to a price up front.

But I have found that the businessmen here — at least the Mom and Pop variety — appear to be routinely honest. So when he handed my watch to me, and I said “how much?” and he said “20 dollars” … I was pleasantly surprised. But only a little bit. Standard, no frills repair is, apparently, 20 HK dollars.

Twenty HK dollars is less than $3 U.S. To be more precise, it’s about $2.75 cents.

So for $2.75 I had a new battery, and had it installed, had a broken screw dealt with, and had it back on my wrist in 15 minutes.

I would have paid 100 HK (or about $13.50) without batting an eye. I might even have come back the next day to pick it up if he said he couldn’t handle it then and there.

My recollection of how much I was charged to have it changed back in California was something on the order of $18-20. And it took over an hour, during which I wandered down Second Street in Belmont Shore, killing time.

I gave him the 100 HK bill I had been prepared to spend, and he gave me four 20s in return. He looked at me, for the first time, and said, “No good, you come back.” In English, of course. That was his personal warranty, I took it.

And that was that. Amazingly easy.

This part of Hong Kong, Wan Chai, is like that. It’s still quite a bit as I imagine China was for most of the 20th century. Small businesses, small shops, independent craftsmen and tradesmen. Whose labor is stunningly cheap. Perhaps because they know there are others who will do the work for even less, and maybe only a few stools down the street.

Right on this street, Thomson Road, is a very old man who repairs shoes. And he has a competitor in an alley around the corner.

As I was deciding whether to feel guilty about paying $2.75 for a new battery (and its installation), I remembered the corner food stand I was about to walk past, on O’Brien and Thomson. For 10 HK dollars you can buy one skewer of meat — or vegetables. Dinner, basically. Chicken, pork, maybe squid, sausage, some other mystery meats. All of them, far as I can tell (I have not yet been brave enough to buy anything there because the stall is, well, not quite up to U.S. codes) cost 10 HK.

Thus, the 20 HK that I gave the little man on the stool would buy him dinner twice over.

The whole transaction is one of the reasons I find this place fascinating. It was so retro, so personal, so 19th century, even. An artisan, a craftsman, plying his trade on a stool on a narrow, busy street. Just him and his tools.

I will go back and get a picture of the guy, if I think of it, and post it here. And if I don’t, I will hold for quite some time, in my mind’s eye, the vision of the whole fascinating transaction.