Street of Eternal Happiness
Page 1
ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR
STREET OF ETERNAL HAPPINESS
“Rob Schmitz has crafted a deeply empathetic marvel of a book. Alternately poignant and humorous, it has much to offer anyone who has been to Shanghai, thought about going there but not made it yet, or simply wants to get a better feel for the rhythms of life in twenty-first-century China.”
—Jeffrey Wasserstrom, editor of the Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China and author of China in the 21st Century
“For nearly two centuries Shanghai has been a city that offered both Chinese and foreigners the possibility of success, wealth, and status. Rob Schmitz paints a vivid canvas of the city from the perspective of one big city street that neatly encapsulates the myriad aspirations of one country and its people. The Street of Eternal Happiness: a thoroughfare of aspirations and dreams, hard-earned successes and sadly thwarted hopes, where Schmitz encounters the ghosts of China’s troubled past, the hardworking yet wistful dreamers of today, and those whose sights and visions are firmly fixed on China’s, and their own, future.”
—Paul French, author of Midnight in Peking and Fat China
“Rob Schmitz’s stories of friends and neighbors on a single Shanghai street capture a kaleidoscope of Chinese history, from famine and Cultural Revolution to one-child policy. Above all, these tales illustrate the perils and hopes of living the Chinese Dream, written with penetrating insight and charming fluidity. A delight.”
—Mei Fong, Pulitzer Prize winner for International Reporting and author of One Child
“Authentic, boisterous, convincing, dynamic, energizing, the street stretching on, each window a nonfictional tale more fantastic than the fictional in the dramatic, almost unbelievable transformation of the Chinese society in its contemporary history, narrating with an Ezra Pound–like multiple cultural perspectives and linguistic sensibilities, and leading, eventually, to overwhelming questions. The reading of Street of Eternal Happiness cannot but compel a Shanghai-born Shanghainese like me into another trip back to the city in this global age.”
—Qiu Xiaolong, author of Death of a Red Heroine and Shanghai Redemption
Copyright © 2016 by Rob Schmitz
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. crownpublishing.com
CROWN is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Schmitz, Rob.
Title: Street of Eternal Happiness: big city dreams along a Shanghai road / Rob Schmitz.
Description: First edition. | New York: Crown, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015041162 | ISBN 9780553418088 (hardback) | ISBN 9780553418095 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Shanghai (China)—Biography. | Shanghai (China)—Social life and customs. | Shanghai (China)—Economic conditions. | Streets—China—Shanghai. | Neighborhoods—China—Shanghai. | City and town life—China—Shanghai. |Schmitz, Rob—Homes and haunts—China—Shanghai. | Americans—China—Shanghai—Biography. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / Asian American Studies. | HISTORY / Asia / China. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Cultural Heritage.
Classification: LCC DS796.S253 A26 2016 | DDC 951/.132—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041162
ISBN 9780553418088
eBook ISBN 9780553418095
Map and illustrations by Sophie Kittredge
Cover design by Elena Giavaldi
Cover photograph by Sue Anne Tay
v4.1
a
For Lenora, Rainer, and Landon
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
1
/ Street of Eternal Happiness, No. 810
CK and the System
2
/ Maggie Lane
Better City, Better Life
3
/ Street of Eternal Happiness, No. 109
Hot and Noisy
4
/ Street of Eternal Happiness, No. 169
Re-Education
5
/ Street of Eternal Happiness, Lane 682, No. 70
Box of Letters
6
/ Street of Eternal Happiness, No. 169
Auntie Fu’s Get-Rich-Quick Plan
7
/ Street of Eternal Happiness, No. 109
Bride Price
8
/ Street of Eternal Happiness, No. 810
Cultured Youth
9
/ Maggie Lane
Dreams, Seized
10
/ Street of Eternal Happiness, Lane 682, No. 70
Escape
11
/ Street of Eternal Happiness, No. 169
Zero Risk
12
/ Street of Eternal Happiness, No. 109
Country Wedding
13
/ Street of Eternal Happiness, No. 810
CK’s Pilgrimage
14
Home
15
Chinese Dreams
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SOURCES
INDEX
Detail left
Detail right
The Street of Eternal Happiness is two miles long. In the winter when its tangled trees are naked of foliage, you can see past their branches and catch a view of the city’s signature skyline in the distance: the Jin Mao Tower, the Shanghai World Financial Center, and Shanghai Tower. The three giants stand within a block of one another, each of them taller than New York City’s Empire State Building.
Below, people are too busy to take in the scenery. Today will be the first day of life for babies born at the Shanghai No. 1 Maternity Hospital along the street’s midsection. For several souls at Huashan Hospital’s emergency room at the street’s western end, it will be their last. In between there is life, in all its facets: a bearded beggar sits on the sidewalk playing the bamboo flute, lovers pass him hand in hand, cars honk and lurch around two men spitting at each other and thrashing over whose car hit whose, a crowd of uniformed schoolchildren gathers and stares, an old woman with a cane yells at a vendor in disgust over the price of lychees, and the rest of the street pitches forward with a constant flow of people, cutting through bursts of savory-scented steam from pork bun stands and the sweet benzene exhaust of traffic. Life here is loud, dirty, and raw.
On a map, Eternal Happiness is a tiny squiggle to the southwest of People’s Square, the center point of Shanghai. My home is at the western end of that squiggle. It looks out over a canopy of leaves that, most of the year, appears to hover two stories above the ground. Below, these plane trees are the only living things standing still. I spend mornings zigzagging around their trunks from sidewalk to road and then back again among pedestrians vying for space in their shade.
Few streets in China are lined with trees like these, and on the weekends the bustle of local workers is replaced by groups of tourists from other parts of China, pointing telephoto lenses down the street at rows of limbs, admiring their exotic beauty. The French had planted them in the mid-nineteenth century when Europeans and Americans carved up the city into foreign concessions. Nearly a century later, the French were gone, but the trees remained. The Japanese bombed Shanghai and took the city for a time, but they eventually retreated, too, leaving the French plantings unharmed. Then came the Communists under Mao with revolution, class warfare, and the untimely deaths of millions. The trees endured. The street is now a capitalist one, lined with restauran
ts and shops. When I stroll along its sidewalk, I sometimes catch glimpses of run-down European-style homes through the cracks of closed gates, and I think about the relentless churn of history this street has witnessed. Here, an empire rose, fell, and now rises again. Only the trees were constant.
I HAD LIVED ON THE STREET for nearly three years before I noticed Chen Kai’s sandwich shop. It was less than a block away from my apartment, above a tiny boutique, but during the warm summer months, the leafy plane trees obstructed it entirely. A narrow spiral staircase led upstairs to the café’s floor-to-ceiling windows. On the other side of the glass, a wall of leaves swayed in the wind, shielding the shop from the bustle of Shanghai below.
Inside, Chen—who goes by the nickname “CK”—often stood hunched over a counter, his black mop of hair obscuring his eyes, skinny fingers putting the finishing touches on a sandwich or a dessert before he flipped his mane back and mechanically swiped a cup of piping hot coffee from the espresso machine for a customer. Usually, though, the shop was empty. That’s okay, CK told himself, it’s going to take time before business takes off. That’s how dreams work. During those times, he’d slouch atop a barstool, his boyish, acne-covered face turned away from the glass wall of trees. He’d quickly switch from one Chinese dialect to another over the phone, making deals for his side business: selling accordions.
The idea for the sandwich shop came to him after he visited one in Chicago, during his only trip to the United States. There would have been nothing extraordinary about the shop to American eyes, but CK was impressed and wanted to replicate the experience for Chinese diners. It was like an American returning from China inspired by a noodle stand. Such a seemingly reckless approach was typical of many small-business owners I met along the street. In a city as big and rich as Shanghai, you could sell anything if you put your mind to it.
CK dreamed that one day this artisan second-floor sandwich shop would become his main livelihood. He had invested years’ worth of earnings from selling accordions into this place, pooling his savings with a friend’s to create a space they hoped would attract young musicians and artists like them.
“One day I had an idea: maybe I can get all these people together and unite them,” CK told me. “I want to find people who want to free themselves from the overall system. I want friends like me; entrepreneurs who have independent ideas in art, fashion design, lots of different industries.”
Ambitions like CK’s make the Street of Eternal Happiness a fascinating stroll: tiny shops and cafés like his lined the narrow thoroughfare, the dreams of bright-eyed outsiders stacked up against each other, all looking to make it in the big city.
It wasn’t easy. Neither CK nor his friend Max had any experience working at—much less owning—a restaurant. The two had met in 2011 at an antique-camera shop in the former French Concession where CK had taken a part-time job to learn more about photography. Like CK, Max had an entrepreneurial background; through long conversations during their shifts at the camera shop, each had come to appreciate the other’s savvy approach to making and selling product. Eventually, CK convinced Max to team up with him to open a sandwich shop.
They named it Your Sandwich. It was two blocks from a busy subway station, in the shadow of a forty-five-story skyscraper that spit out hundreds of office workers each day at noon, all searching for a quick lunch. But nobody could see Your Sandwich. It was obscured by the plane trees. No one ever looked up through the canopy as they rushed along the Street of Eternal Happiness.
So they changed the name to 2nd Floor—a hint to passersby that they should elevate their gaze as they passed. Below the new name, in diminutive typeface, were the words: Your Sandwich. They also hired a new chef, constructed a bar with mixed drinks and imported beer, and obsessively fiddled with the menu. One day I dropped by CK’s apartment and noticed a pile of electronic tablets stacked in the corner. “Touchscreen menus!” CK told me with a smile. Certainly, he figured, their drab, noninteractive menus had to be the reason 2nd Floor wasn’t attracting the iGeneration.
Although he had built a profitable accordion business quickly, CK was a naïve restaurateur. Lunch crowds—typically office workers struggling to pay rent—tended to opt for meals that were cheap and local, and they preferred eating cooked food aided by the distance of chopsticks. In the coming months, CK would adjust to these realities. He introduced affordable lunch specials, and tweaked the sandwiches on offer. Through it all, CK didn’t worry about his deli. Selling accordions was still a reliable source of revenue, and he felt fortunate to manage both businesses from his own place, like a resourceful squirrel stashing nuts for the winter inside his cozy tree house.
THE SANDWICH SHOP was a sanctuary within a sanctuary. The neighborhood was established as a refuge for outsiders. After losing the first Opium War in 1842, the Qing dynasty court handed over parts of Shanghai and other Chinese port cities to Western colonial powers. The French occupied this section of the city and transformed what was once an expanse of rice paddies into an exclusive neighborhood, establishing the French Concession in 1849. Since then, one marginalized group after another had sought shelter there. In 1860, the French offered residence to tens of thousands of local Chinese looking to escape the Taiping Rebellion, a violent peasant uprising against the dynasty. Later on, theaters, cinemas, and dance halls—frowned upon by the ever-changing Chinese leadership of the city—were allowed to flourish under French protection. Churches, temples, and mosques soon followed.
When the Communist Party took over in 1949, it vilified the foreign concessions, considering them to be humiliating symbols of outside aggression. Missing from Party propaganda, though, was that in 1921, the twenty-eight-year-old Mao Zedong secretly met with other young radical thinkers at a girls’ boarding school deep within the French Concession, convening the first congress of the Chinese Communist Party there. Mao and his comrades chose the site precisely for the type of refuge it provided others. It was less likely that authorities controlling the Chinese-run part of the city would find them, arrest them, and put them on trial, a fate that would have prevented the Communists from gaining ground, forever altering the course of China’s history.
The French had built their neighborhood with a layout typical of a Parisian arrondissement: narrow, winding boulevards lined with trees that locals still call Faguo Wutong, “French Phoenix Trees,” though they are neither French nor phoenix trees. Like the muddled history of Shanghai, they were much more cosmopolitan: London plane trees, a hybrid of the Oriental plane—native to Central Asia—and the American sycamore. The first London plane tree was discovered in Spain.
Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann made the London plane famous. The urban planner loved the leafy look of the tree, and he had them planted throughout Paris in the nineteenth century when he transformed the city from a chaotic mess of tiny streets into neighborhoods connected by wide, tree-lined avenues. Soon after, London planes appeared across the globe. They still dominate the streets of world-class cities like Rome, Sydney, and New York City. Its leaf, similar to a maple, is the official symbol of New York City’s Parks Department.
Two out of every three trees in Shanghai is a London plane. City planners call it the “Supertree” because of its shallow root systems and its high tolerance to smog, extreme temperatures, and pests. They’re planted between eighteen and twenty-four feet apart and pruned with a technique known as pollarding, which stunts their growth and forces the branches to grow toward the trees on the opposite side of the street, where they intertwine to form dark green tunnels between two and three stories high. The resulting arched canopy offers pedestrians shade from the sweltering summer sun and cover from the fierce storms that frequently come rumbling off the East China Sea.
By 2010, when I moved to the neighborhood, the Parisian layout and its plane trees remained, but the Chinese had reclaimed the street names. Rue Chevalier and Route Garnier had become Jianguo Lu and Dongping Lu—Build the Nation and Eastern Peace Roads. Other streets once com
memorating notable dead Frenchmen had transformed into Rich People Road, Famous People Road, and Lucky Gold Road. On walks through my new neighborhood, I practiced my Chinese by reading their auspicious-sounding names. There was (Peaceful Happiness Road), (Eternally Fortunate Road), and (Winding Peace Road). I lived on what was perhaps the most auspiciously named one of all:—literally “Long Happiness Road,” which I took to calling the more eloquent-sounding “Street of Eternal Happiness.”
When locals read the names of these streets, eloquence and auspiciousness aren’t the first things that come to mind. The street south of my apartment, Anfu (Peaceful Happiness), is a small city in Jiangxi province famous for processing pig parts for ham. Maoming, Famous People Road, is a thriving Cantonese port city. And Changle, my own Street of Eternal Happiness, is the name of a coastal town in Fujian province from which Ming dynasty explorer Zheng He had set sail to explore much of Asia. When the Chinese renamed these French streets, those running south to north had been named after Chinese provinces or provincial capitals, while streets running east to west were named after prominent Chinese cities of the time, which themselves had been auspiciously named so many dynasties ago.
Whenever I pedal my bike along the Street of Eternal Happiness, I need all the luck I can get. The narrow street is one of the neighborhood’s few two-way thoroughfares. Taxis often use it to escape the traffic of the nearby expressway, but they must contend with droves of electric motor scooters that seem to pour into every open space. Scooters often barrel down the wrong side of the road in packs against oncoming traffic, dispersing just in time to make way for the cars cutting through the hordes, horns blaring, headlights flashing. Survival is the rule of the road, and the right-of-way cedes to the biggest, most aggressive vehicles. City buses top the food chain. Their sheer size commands respect from the scooter and car drivers who pull over to make way for the behemoths, a survival instinct akin to diving out of the way of a rampaging elephant. All this activity leaves bicyclists to fend for themselves near the curbs or on the sidewalks, where riders often take out their frustrations by plowing through pedestrian traffic.