MCLC: Shanghai's 'Street of Eternal Happiness'

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Shanghai’s ‘Street of Eternal Happiness’
Source: Sinosphere, NYT (5/11/16)
Q. and A.: Rob Schmitz on Shanghai’s ‘Street of Eternal Happiness’
点击查看本文中文版 Read in Chinese
By EDWARD WONG
Rob Schmitz first came to China in 1996 as a Peace Corps volunteer assigned to Sichuan Province. In 2010, he settled in Shanghai as a correspondent for Marketplace, the American Public Media program. When he decided to write a book on China, it was to his daily surroundings in that city that he looked rather than to some of the more exotic locales where he has reported. “Street of Eternal Happiness: Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road” is about the people he came to know in the corner of the old French Concession where he and his family live.
Q. What were your first impressions of this street?
A. I moved to the street in 2010 when I arrived to Shanghai as a correspondent, settling into a condominium complex covered in white bathroom tiles named the Summit — easily the least interesting place along the street.
The rest of the thoroughfare was filled with life: crowds streaming in and out of the local wet market, customers lining up for steamed pork buns, grannies dancing in unison to the latest pop songs in the adjacent public square and ambulances screaming past to one of the three hospitals along the street.
Overlooking all this chaos were lines of majestic plane trees that had been planted every 15 feet or so by the French in the 19th century, pruned to form a green tunnel that offers protection from the oppressive heat in the summer. I pedaled my bike every day inside that leafy tunnel, dodging cars, scooters and the rest of the commotion that filled the street. Over the years, I got to know several shopkeepers, most of whom hailed from throughout rural China. They’d dragged their families across the country with little more than their meager savings and a dream to make it in China’s biggest city.
Q. How are their lives emblematic of Shanghai and its history?
A. Shanghai has always attracted capitalists from near and far, and it was the first place in mainland China where foreign and Chinese ideas competed for space. A century ago, the city was divided into foreign concessions and settled by businesspeople from all over the world. Today, 40 percent of the city hails from other parts of China. Their linguistic and cultural differences remind me of turn-of-the-20th-century New York City, with its influx of immigrants.
For better or worse, being surrounded by Shanghai’s wealth impacts the lives of all the characters in my book. Auntie Fu dumps her pension into one get-rich-quick scheme after another, dragging me along as her concerned companion to weekly meetings for a variety of pyramid investment schemes. Mayor Chen loses his home to the unchecked greed of local officials, who couldn’t keep their hands off one of the city’s most valuable plots of land. Shanghai has always been a place where fortunes rise and fall.
Q. How do the lives differ from the ones you might find in, say, a neighborhood across the Huangpu River?
A. I don’t think they’re very different. What these individuals all share is that they live in a country where economic change is speeding ahead — while political change is not. How individuals handle this paradox intrigues me.
For example, Xi Guozhen has spent the past two decades in and out of prison for petitioning the government to investigate the death of her husband, who was burned to death when the local government cleared her neighborhood to build the high-rise I now live in. The couple’s son, on the other hand — also a victim of that land grab — is finishing his doctorate at an Ivy League university and works as a high-paid derivatives trader at one of the largest banks in Hong Kong.
How these characters navigate the system ultimately helps determine their fates. I compare their efforts to swimming in waters with a strong rip current. If you swim against the current, you’ll likely drown. If you submit, it’ll drag you out to sea. The key is to swim with the current at an angle, carving your own path without directly challenging it or, conversely, succumbing to its power.
Q. You begin the book with Chen Kai, a sandwich shop owner who got the idea for his business after a visit to Chicago.
A. Of my five main characters, C. K. undergoes the most dramatic change. He had a miserable boyhood — at just 11 years old, he attempted suicide after his parents divorced. Afterwards, he threw himself into his studies and secured a coveted managerial job at a state-owned enterprise before turning his back on the “iron rice bowl” [secure employment] to chase a dream in Shanghai.
When I met him four years ago, he was a rather rakish, restless and insecure entrepreneur in his 20s, selling sandwiches at a shop on the street, and accordions over the phone — where else but Shanghai can you make a living with that odd sales combination? Now C. K.’s confident and successful, and he’s on a new quest for spirituality. He’s discovered the tools to navigate a system he spent much of his life struggling against, and he’s searching for deeper meaning. I see him as a symbol of China’s future.
Q. What was the most surprising thing you discovered?
A. Friends lent me a shoe box of letters dating back to the 1950s that they’d discovered at an old junk shop in our neighborhood. The letters were written between a man who had been arrested for “practicing capitalism” and exiled to a labor camp on the edge of Tibet, and his wife, who took care of the couple’s seven children in a crowded lane home along my street.
I’d spent years reading historical accounts of the Mao years, and it was invigorating to suddenly have my hands on untainted specimens of raw history from that era.
Opening the brittle envelopes made me think about the conditions under which they had been written and the sights, sounds and smells that surrounded them before they were folded up and mailed across the country. They told a heartbreaking story of hardship and loss through the worst of the Mao years, and perhaps their most surprising element was that the letters led me to a living, breathing descendant.
I tracked down the only son of the couple and got to know him personally after reading so much about him as a child in those letters. He not only gave me much-needed historical context about his family, but also had an inspiring story of redemption of his own.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on May 12, 2016
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