Street of Eternal Happiness

by Rob Schmitz

  The only entrance was a creaky metal gate that was usually locked. One afternoon, I knocked on the door. A skinny security guard poked his head out.

  “What do you want?” he barked, taking in the blond foreigner standing before him.

  “I’d like to come in and take a look around,” I said.

  “I don’t suppose you know any of the residents?” he asked, chuckling at the thought of a foreigner dropping by for tea.

  “No.”

  “Sorry. Foreigners can’t come in here. It’s not allowed. Mei banfa.”

  With that, he slammed the door, waking Rainey from his stroller nap. Chinese people might have better luck, I thought.

  The next time I visited, I brought some, and I didn’t knock.

  After the security guard left for lunch I pushed through the unmanned metal gate with a Chinese colleague and a homeless man named Old Kang. Old Kang’s full name was Kang Chenggang. He’d lived in this neighborhood for twenty years before his home was demolished, leaving him to wander from one friend’s place to another seeking shelter. I’d found Old Kang on an online forum devoted to the neighborhood’s history. He was a big man with a potbelly and a face that rarely smiled. His eyes were shaped like downcast crescent moons, topped with droopy eyelids that encircled a stone-cold stare, the look of someone who sought revenge.

  We walked underneath a gray-brick archway, one of a handful of structures still standing. Once inside the lot, the first thing I noticed was my apartment building towering above us, dozens of living room windows reflecting the sun’s rays onto the field of rubble we tiptoed through. Next door was the glass and steel skyscraper full of office workers that stood across the street from CK’s sandwich shop. We were trespassing, and it felt like everyone was watching.

  We trudged through chest-high weeds and walked for several minutes before finally stopping at a three-story structure on the edge of the lot. Its roof had caved in and all of its windows were now jagged shards of glass. “Welcome to my home,” said Old Kang softly.

  A bright yellow string of plastic police tape was wrapped around the building like a ribbon around a gift box. Old Kang lifted it and motioned us through a gray-brick doorway underneath a concrete stele of carved flowers. The absent door appeared to have been ripped off its three rusted misshapen hinges. We stepped inside what used to be Kang’s dining room. Sunlight shone through a hole in the roof three stories above us, casting a spotlight onto a floor littered with splintered lumber, broken glass, and rotting furniture.

  The sounds of the city poured in from the other side of the wall: a bus braking for a stoplight, the ringing bell of a junk peddler’s cart, a baby crying in the distance. We followed Old Kang up the creaky stairs to his third-floor apartment; he’d once shared the home with two other families. Lime-green wallpaper lined a living room that was missing a ceiling and a floor, leaving only a few crossbeams to tiptoe across. I peered down to the floor of the apartment below, trying not to lose my balance. It was as if a meteorite had crashed through the roof, plummeting through the house, ripping through ceilings and floors in a single instant. I looked out the kitchen window. Across a field of weeds were the blackened, empty shells of three homes that had burned down. The neighborhood looked like it had been firebombed.

  MORE THAN THREE THOUSAND people had once lived here, packed into rows of three-story homes made of gray and red bricks called shikumen, “stone framed gate.” Each one abutted the next, creating narrow alleyways in between called longtang, whose entrances were capped with massive brick arches. Step inside the gateway of each shikumen home, and you’d enter a cramped courtyard with a patch of grass. Beyond that, a single door opened into a hallway and a staircase that led to the various rooms of the house.

  The shikumen was one part traditional Chinese courtyard home and one part Western townhome. Like everything that was to become synonymous with Shanghai, it fused the most popular styles of East and West. Around the turn of the twentieth century, 60 percent of Shanghai’s housing stock—more than 9,000 homes—were built in the shikumen style, tucked away in quiet neighborhoods along narrow alleyways off the city’s main thoroughfares.

  According to municipal records, Maggie Lane, pronounced “My-Chee-Lee” in Chinese, was one of the most orderly, well-kept shikumen neighborhoods in Shanghai. In 1958, officials singled it out with an “excellent community” award, and included it in a national propaganda video. Back then, each house had a terrace teeming with flowers and, on the ground level, two big black wooden doors marking the entrance underneath the stone gate. Hanging on the doors were elaborate bronze rings used as knockers, later removed and melted down for steel during Mao’s Great Leap Forward campaign.

  The lane was named after Maggie Road, a French Concession thoroughfare that Shanghai’s Communist leaders later renamed Wulumuqi Road after Urumqi, the capital of the newly incorporated region of Xinjiang. Construction on Maggie Lane’s 178 buildings was finished in 1937, but it turned out to be a terrible year for Shanghai real estate. That August, the Japanese began striking the city from the air, the sea, and the ground, marking the beginning of the second Sino-Japanese War. The three-month assault was known as the Battle of Shanghai. By December, the Japanese had killed a quarter of a million people in the city, destroying entire neighborhoods.

  Maggie Lane was brutally wiped off the map, but the perpetrators weren’t Japanese. They were local officials. And they did so sixty-four years after the Battle of Shanghai. In 2001, the city was developing faster than it ever had. Construction cranes crowded the horizon, and news of violent showdowns between local residents and demolition dominated headlines. That year, Beijing had been selected to host the Summer Olympics of 2008, and now Shanghai was locked against Yeosu, South Korea, in a neck-and-neck bid to host the 2010 world’s fair. Members of the Bureau International des Expositions, the Paris-based organization that would choose the winning city, were concerned with Shanghai’s human rights record. How would the proposed theme of “Better City, Better Life” fit with the frequent news of enraged Shanghai residents being thrown out of their homes to make way for the city’s development?

  Responding to that criticism, municipal officials tried a kinder, gentler development path that year called “Urban Renewal.” Should an old neighborhood be designated an appropriate project, the developer was required to set aside homes for former residents on the same lot. In return, the developer was exempt from paying land use fees, a savings of millions of dollars.

  Maggie Lane was designated as one of Shanghai’s first Urban Renewal projects. By the new decree, residents were supposed to be given the right to live on the land following demolition and rebuilding. In February of 2002, Xuhui District officials auctioned the land to a developer named Chengkai Group. In the summer of that year, Chengkai slipped paper notices under the doorways of Maggie Lane residents: they were to be permanently relocated to an outer district of Shanghai—banished to the boonies.

  Residents protested. They had a right to return, they said. The Urban Renewal project promised this. But they’d been hoodwinked. Chengkai had saved millions of dollars by developing Maggie Lane as an Urban Renewal project, but district officials had quietly changed its designation to reserved land. It was December 2002. A group of city politicians—including Shanghai’s own mayor—was accepting bribes and making shady land deals that would eventually send them all to prison. Party officials had tricked thousands of Maggie Lane residents out of their homes. And Shanghai had won its bid to host the 2010 world’s fair. The winning theme was “Better City, Better Life.”

  The Xuhui government’s maneuver reminded me of an etiquette rule I had read in How to Be a Lovely Shanghainese. In a section named “Talking and Conversing,” government authors educated Shanghai residents about the finer points of gaining trust:

  You should truthfully reflect the truth. Some people like to boast of themselves and make unrealistic promises. That usually ruins things later.

  IN MANY RESPECTS, turn-of-t
he-twenty-first-century Shanghai reminded me of turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York City. The rapid economic growth and the rise of a wealthy class in New York during America’s Gilded Age was now repeating itself on the other side of the planet. So, too, were shady land grabs. Seizures like that of Maggie Lane were reminiscent of the New York neighborhoods destroyed in the wake of urban planner Robert Moses, who also helped plan two world’s fairs for the city, in 1939 and 1964.

  Yet it was the sudden mix of people that struck me as one of the most obvious similarities. The dialects of Chinese spoken by migrants along the Street of Eternal Happiness from provinces like Sichuan, Hunan, and Fujian were just as unintelligible from one another as Italian, French, and German among the European immigrants who flocked to nineteenth-century New York. Both melting pots of new arrivals had been driven to the big city by poverty and a risk-taking ambition that propelled them to drop everything, leave home, and try and make it anew. The immigrants who had arrived on Ellis Island—like their Chinese waidi ren counterparts a century later—came straight from the farm, where their ancestors had lived for as long as they could remember.

  Many lacked education and refined manners, too. In film footage from the early 1900s taken by a trolley car passenger, New Yorkers scramble around one another to cross the street. They step in front of cars, duck between horse-drawn carriages, and fail to acknowledge those they’re cutting off. In another scene, pedestrians jab each other with elbows in a rush to get going. The film was shot at Broadway and Union Square, but swap the trolleys and carriages for honking cars and speeding scooters, and it could have been any intersection along the Street of Eternal Happiness.

  I didn’t have to dig through too much of my home country’s history to find a similar period of economic upheaval that demanded a civilization campaign for the masses, either. Hundreds of etiquette books were published in America at the turn of the twentieth century that bore a striking resemblance to How to Be a Lovely Shanghainese:

  “It may seem a very simple thing to eat your meals, yet there is no occasion upon which the gentleman, and the low-bred, vulgar man are more strongly contrasted, than when at the table,” began the chapter on Table Etiquette in The Gentlemen’s Book of Etiquette, published in 1879 in Boston by Cecil B. Hartley. “I have seen men who eat soup, or chewed their food, in so noisy a manner as to be heard from one end of the table to the other; fill their mouths so full of food, as to threaten suffocation or choking; use their own knife for the butter, and salt; put their fingers in the sugar bowl, and commit other faults quite as monstrous, yet seem perfectly unconscious that they were doing anything to attract attention.”

  The Chinese authors of How to Be a Lovely Shanghainese appear equally aghast at such boorish behavior, managing to sound like a nagging parent in a section titled “Civilized Eating”: “Sit up straight, don’t put your elbows on the table, and avoid sticking your feet out at will or kicking others. Don’t take too much food at once; if you don’t have enough you can take more later. Close your mouth when you chew your food and don’t make any licking or smacking sounds. If the food is too hot, wait until it’s cooled off. It’s not polite to blow your nose or belch during a meal.”

  “Never put a knife into your mouth, not even with cheese, which should be eaten with a fork,” lectures Hartley. “Never use a spoon for anything but liquids. Never touch anything edible with your fingers. Forks were, undoubtedly, a later invention than fingers, but, as we are not cannibals, I am inclined to think they were a good one.”

  “Pay attention to your chopsticks,” How to Be a Lovely Shanghainese continues. “Don’t use them to bang on cups, and don’t throw them up in the air. You shouldn’t throw chopsticks at someone before a meal…You shouldn’t fumble with your chopsticks while picking up food or ‘fight’ with other people’s chopsticks.”

  “Do not be persuaded to touch another drop of wine after your own prudence warns you that you have taken enough,” cautions Hartley to nineteenth-century Americans.

  It is acceptable, though, explains How to Be a Lovely Shanghainese, to secretly spill alcohol on the floor if excessive toasting is making you drunk. “Don’t drain the glass in one swallow,” it cautions. “Don’t get carried away at the sight of alcohol and avoid losing control and speaking nonsense, making a scene out of yourself.”

  A government-issued publication, How to Be a Lovely Shanghainese lacked the charm of Hartley’s Gentlemen’s Book of Etiquette. Its chapters were sprinkled with laundry lists of behavior modification, steeped in the Chinese obsession with numerology: “Five kinds of consciousness,” “four kinds of spirit,” “five dares,” and “four forevers.” There were also the Seven Don’ts: “Don’t spit; don’t litter; don’t damage public property; don’t damage greenery; don’t jaywalk; don’t smoke in public areas; don’t utter vulgar words.”

  Still, Shanghai’s government failed to realize its ambitious goals by the time the world’s fair came around. Public property remained largely undamaged, but other than that lone abided restriction, I commonly saw locals do these don’ts within minutes of walking down the Street of Eternal Happiness.

  “YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED in here! Hey you! Get out of here!”

  It was one o’clock. Lunch was over, and Maggie Lane’s security guard had reported back to work, right on schedule.

  “Old Kang! Is that you? Who’s with you?” the guard demanded, yelling up toward the hollowed third floor.

  I peered outside the third-story window of Old Kang’s abandoned house to see the skinny guard standing obediently behind the police line. His blue jacket hung loose on his bony shoulders, his hat tilted to the side; the entire uniform was too big for him. He looked like a boy ready to go trick-or-treating.

  “They’re my friends!” hollered Old Kang from inside.

  “He’s a foreigner!” yelled the security guard, pointing at my face in the broken window.

  “That doesn’t make him any less of a friend!” quipped Old Kang.

  We gingerly descended the stairs and came outside to face the guard, who seemed nervous at having to deal with a foreign intruder in what was usually as quiet a beat as a guard could get.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I’m a foreign journalist. I’m interviewing him,” I said, indicating Old Kang.

  This was the last thing a security guard wanted to hear from an intruder. His anxiety level ticked up a notch, and he shifted from one foot to another.

  The guard searched for words. “Well, you can’t interview him here,” he declared.

  “Of course he can! This is my home. I’ve invited him here to interview me!” said Old Kang.

  I carried a copy of the Chinese government’s “Regulations on Foreign Journalists” for moments like this. I took the yellowed paper out of my bag, unfolded it, and handed it to the guard. “It says here I can interview anyone in China as long as they give me permission,” I said, pointing to Item 17 of the regulations.

  “I give him permission,” announced Old Kang, smiling at the clarity of this particular Chinese law.

  The guard ignored him, scanning the document. “It also says here you have to show police your press card,” he said, pointing.

  I pulled out my press card and gave it to him. He inspected both sides, holding it at an angle in the sunlight as if he were checking for a watermark on a hundred-yuan bill. He returned it to me.

  “You’re trespassing,” he announced decisively.

  “No, he’s not,” said Old Kang. “Is this not my home?”

  The guard thought for a second, lifting his white-gloved fingers to scratch the back of his head. “Yes, it’s your home,” he finally admitted.

  “And did I not give him permission to interview me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then this is all perfectly legal,” concluded Old Kang, turning back to me. “Don’t mind him.”

  The guard kept quiet and followed us as we walked around the partially demolished house, lifting
his oversized policeman’s hat above his ears to hear Old Kang tell the story of what happened the night they destroyed his home.

  It was a clear October evening in 2004. Most of the lane’s residents had negotiated relocation packages with Chengkai Group and had moved to tiny apartments on the edge of Shanghai. But dozens of people remained in Maggie Lane, refusing to budge on the principle that the Xuhui government had auctioned the land illegally. But after two years, district officials grew impatient. They put Chengkai Group’s demolition crew in charge of getting rid of the holdouts.

  “At least twenty thugs surrounded my house,” recalled Old Kang. “They cut my water and gas, and then they pulled my front door off the hinges. I refused to leave. Then they threw rocks through my windows and poured buckets of raw sewage into the house. It was disgusting and the smell was horrible, but I mopped it all up. I still didn’t leave.”

  Ever patient, the crew waited for a change in the weather. One night it began to rain, and Old Kang was relaxing in his living room when he heard the noise of a loud engine outside. An excavator slowly pulled up to his house and lifted its arm high above Old Kang’s roof.

  “Peng! Peng! Peng!” Old Kang shouted, remembering the smashing noise he heard from above. The roof collapsed, sending lumber and plaster everywhere and nearly crushing him. Debris, along with a torrent of rain, began to soak his furniture. “Everything got wet,” said Kang, “so I left.”

  Old Kang has been homeless ever since, bouncing around friends’ apartments, living on social welfare checks, and petitioning the government to compensate him for his demolished home. “You can’t leave me roaming around outside on the streets like this,” he told me. The skinny security guard leaned in as Old Kang grew more impassioned. “You’ve got to give me a shelter to live or rent a place for me. Why not repair the house so that I can move back?” he asked.

  The security guard let out a loud guffaw, bending over to laugh at the absurdity of such an idea before shouting “Bu keneng!”—No way!