Street of Eternal Happiness

by Rob Schmitz

  It became a Friday night ritual for Lenora and me: dinner with a view of Shanghai’s lights accompanied by live gospel music, filtering in from the apartment across the hall.

  The church next door was called a jiating jiaohui in Chinese—a house church. By 2010, house churches were becoming popular in Shanghai, especially among the city’s young office workers whose careers, education, and upbringing often left them feeling spiritually empty and morally adrift. At a house church, they could seek faith among a small group of peers, forgoing large state-sanctioned churches where sermons had to be preapproved by a Party official.

  China’s leaders had always been suspicious of foreign religions, especially those that had spread as quickly as Christianity had throughout the rest of the world. Theirs was a paranoia that sprung from the bullying and colonization by foreign powers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It helped explain the name the Party bestowed on the country’s only state-sanctioned Protestant church: the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. Originated by nineteeth-century foreign missionaries to China, the name was designed to give an impression of “localizing” Christianity and reassuring the Chinese that they—and not foreign powers—were in control of the spread of faith inside their borders.

  Early Communist leaders retained the title and gave it a twist, emphasizing the word patriotic. Believers should be loyal first to China’s Communist Party, the leadership reasoned. Of the four other religions allowed under Communist rule, only one other was forced to include patriotic in its name: Catholicism.

  Christianity is now China’s fastest-growing religion, a trend that Party officials are keeping their eyes on. In an internal government report leaked in 2014, the religion was singled out for tight regulation. In a central government directive, provincial officials were ordered to remove crosses and “religious activity sites” near national and provincial highways. The secret policy came to light after the forced demolition of a Protestant church in Wenzhou, which was topped with a 180-foot spire and a cross that were visible citywide. It was not an illegal church; in fact, it belonged to the Communist Party’s own Three-Self Patriotic Movement. But tearing it down was an indication of uncertainty in Party ranks about how to treat the religion.

  Auntie Fu’s church was neither a sanctioned church nor a house church. It was an underground church—dixia jiaohui—a well-organized illegal church with money and logistics behind it, and too many congregants to fit inside a house.

  When Auntie and I arrived there, the sun had gone down and she couldn’t immediately locate the right building in the dark. We finally caught sight of a few other people who walked with purpose, and we followed them toward a six-story building under construction. Outside, a group of workers were mixing cement. They stopped to stare at me—the lone foreigner—as the man in the lead used his cellphone to light our way through a mess of piping, stacked drywall, and dangling electrical wires. We climbed a stairway to the second floor, where, through a set of double doors, a bright worship hall awaited us.

  “ZIMEI HAO! Dixiong hao!” Auntie greeted the others when we arrived. Sister, brother, hello! She grabbed my arm and led me past the main hall to a long, narrow dining room filled with more than a dozen cafeteria-style tables. Windows were concealed behind wooden shutters that were padlocked shut.

  The name of the church was “Central Church,” and its objectives were painted in brown Chinese characters on the walls. One must be centered around, the banners proclaimed, Christ, the Bible, Love, Oneness, Discipleship, Preaching, Community, and, finally, Career.

  I paused at the last one. It seemed oddly secular to include career as an objective. It was obviously aimed at young Chinese professionals. Here, through church, they could help one another find work, make new connections, and guide one another up the ladder to financial success. Church was providing an alternative guanxi network to family and friends.

  A glaring absence, I noticed, was a slogan centered on “family.” Chinese society had brought up its older generation to believe the Marxist view of religion as an opiate of the masses, and I sensed that Mom and Dad’s generation was unwelcome here.

  “Is he with you?” a young, bespectacled church leader named Zhang asked Auntie Fu. She nodded.

  Confusion flashed across Zhang’s eyes, and I spoke to him in Chinese, which put him at ease. I expected to get looks as the only foreigner inside a secret church tucked inside a half-finished building. But other than Zhang’s initial surprise, no one paid any mind to the squat woman in peasant clothes trailed by a blue-eyed foreigner in the dinner line, filling their stainless steel bowls with mushrooms and rice. People from all walks of life—poor, rich, young, old—were too busy eating and chatting happily. We were among family. All were civil with one another: No pushing, shoving, spitting, or cutting.

  Zhang told me the church had three other branches in Shanghai, and had quietly established churches in twenty-seven other Chinese cities. He also broke the news: Preacher Shen—the illiterate bandit—wasn’t coming.

  Fu’s face dropped. “Aiya! I told the foreigner all about him!”

  “Don’t worry,” said Zhang. “Preacher Jiang will lead the service. He’s a former crime boss.”

  “Did he memorize the Bible in prison, too?” asked Auntie, hopefully.

  “Not quite—Preacher Jiang can read and write. But he also found Jesus while he was in prison—just like Preacher Shen!”

  Auntie Fu sighed in relief. Even if we weren’t going to witness a sermon by an illiterate reformed criminal with a photographic memory, this was clearly in the same genre.

  Dozens of people began streaming into rows of orange chairs in the main hall. Fu and I sat in the front. On a raised stage, a young man with hair hanging into his eyes assembled a drum kit beneath a wooden cross that was nailed to the wall. Flat-screen televisions showed a mountainous landscape, with the photo changing in tune to an upbeat rock song that blared over speakers suspended from the ceiling. As lyrics began to scroll across the foot of the mountains, five women dressed in black miniskirts stepped up to the stage and began to sing. They were young and lithe, and they swayed to the beat:

  JESUS, COME INTO MY HEART…SHOW ME YOUR LOVE!

  The congregation stood in unison and began singing along. Some began clapping; others lifted their hands up in the air. They belted out lyrics in Mandarin with the soul of a Southern gospel choir, their heads bobbing in unison, several clenching their fists and closing their eyes as they sang. Auntie Fu pulled me out of my chair and began to sing, too.

  I mouthed the few lyrics I understood from the television screen, but I soon became distracted by the five singers on stage, who had begun to contort their bodies into hip-hop dance moves. Two men with long black hair suddenly appeared, stepping around the dancing girls. One picked up a guitar and the other a bass. They began tuning them, turning up their amps over the rock music, a jarring cacophony of fantastically off-key noise. It had little effect on the congregation, which only adjusted by singing even louder.

  OPEN THE SKIES…AND THE FIRE OF REJUVENATION WILL BURN…

  RAINING DOWN ON US…PLEASE REVITALIZE US!

  The lyrics rang in my ears. I began to sweat; the room was large, but there was no ventilation. I glanced over at the padlocked windows.

  When hundreds of Chinese come together to sing, it’s usually for a staged, televised performance of a choir singing nationalistic songs. Overly energetic singers would show off their patriotic fervor in state-sponsored hooey that was amusing to watch. It was hard to be cynical, though, when I looked around: a man with his head down, eyes shut tight, arms up in the air, bellowing; a young woman staring at the ceiling, her eyes swollen with tears; a mother across the aisle singing to her baby, who smiled back at her.

  No one was putting on a show—this felt completely personal. They were all lost in the music, undergoing a spiritual release by singing.

  Auntie elbowed me.

  “Come on!” she yelled, taking my hands in hers and pus
hing them together with the beat. “It’s good for your health to clap!” So I did.

  After the young Chinese Christian rock band had finally tuned their instruments, Auntie turned to me.

  “How did you find Yesu?” she shouted to her new Catholic friend. Yesu is Mandarin for Jesus.

  “Um, I’m not sure I remember. I grew up going to church,” I screamed, directing my mouth toward her ear over the sounds of an electric guitar.

  “I found Yesu a long time ago! I was pregnant,” Auntie yelled. “In my eighth month!” She paused to sing along with a stanza floating across the screen:

  LORD, YOU ARE MY GUIDE, THE SHEPHERD OF MY LIFE,

  THROUGH THE HILLS AND VALLEYS YOU’LL ALWAYS BE BY MY SIDE.

  Auntie Fu had gotten pregnant at the Xinjiang camp, and as her belly grew, Uncle Feng decided he wanted her to give birth in Shanghai. They started out for the long journey, but the road was bumpy, and she went into labor in Turpan, in the middle of the desert.

  “A son! Premature!” Auntie yelled. “My body was in so much pain and the baby was suffering, too. But he made us go back to Shanghai without my month of rest. I’ve suffered my whole life because of him!” She took another break to sing.

  CALLING ME BY NAME,

  YOU’VE CHOSEN ME WITH LOVE.

  BLESSING ME ABUNDANTLY,

  YOUR PROMISE WILL NEVER CHANGE.

  A year later they were back in Xinjiang, her body still recovering from the birth. Chinese medicine didn’t ease her pain, and that’s when a doctor told her that Yesu could cure her.

  “She told me all about Yesu! She held masses in her home. The leaders of my work unit found out and told me to stop attending, they said religion was nonsense, but I didn’t listen to them. Thank God for her!” she yelled.

  Auntie Fu closed her eyes, threw her hands up in the air, and let the music of Yesu wash over her.

  AUNTIE FU had grown up hungry.

  She was born in 1949, the year Mao took control of China. Home was a small farming village in the mountains of western Sichuan province, near the border of Tibet. When she was in the third grade, Mao’s Great Leap Forward swept through the country, and the village was split into ten farming collectives. Families were required to eat at communal kitchens. Land was snatched from local families and redistributed to teams of more than five hundred people each. For those accustomed to tilling individual plots of the challenging mountainside terrain, working collectively didn’t come naturally.

  Worse still, the village was required to hand over nearly all its output to government officials. Within a year, the town ran out of food.

  Auntie Fu scrambled for anything to put in her stomach. There was no school, and she’d spend days foraging for wild vegetables in the mountains. When the trees bloomed in the spring, she ate their flowers. In the river valley below, boats docked next to the granaries. She learned to lie in wait for careless tractors that would sometimes cut through bags of wheat while transporting them to the warehouses. Fu and her brothers and sisters would follow the trail with brooms, sweeping up stray kernels of wheat for dinner.

  When she was nine, her father was labeled a counterrevolutionary. They’d attended a town meeting where every farmer was expected to give a speech praising the collective. Instead, her father, a stubborn, no-nonsense farmer, spoke his mind.

  “He told the leaders more food was needed. The people weren’t able to feed themselves properly. They were too weak to work for the collective,” Auntie Fu said.

  Villagers respected Auntie Fu’s father, but they were too afraid to publicly agree with him. Doing so would amount to treason. “He stuck his neck out for the farmers, and they accused him of hating communism.”

  Her father’s name appeared on a list nailed to the communal canteen. His name was among those of other “class enemies, counterrevolutionaries, and rightists.” He was forced to sit among them during village meetings. When work shifts were announced each morning over the crackly village megaphones, he was relegated to the worst of them, with multiple back-to-back shifts and evenings worked alongside former landlords and other “enemies of the people.”

  In the end, it was too much work and too little food. He collapsed in the field. He died at thirty-seven.

  “I blame his death on Chairman Mao,” Auntie told me. “Mao instigated people to fight against each other. He launched one campaign after another, and anyone who had the know-how to come up with a better way to govern was killed.”

  Years later, Auntie Fu heard about work on a farm in Xinjiang. She’d never heard of the place, but she reasoned that anywhere was better than her hometown. She joined her brothers on the long journey north. “The air in Xinjiang was better,” she said. “And there was food. Lots of food. The fruits and vegetables tasted so good and they were cheap. The climate was dry and cool in the mountains. Once I save enough money, I’m going to go back there to retire. Xinjiang is like heaven.”

  It was even better, she added, than Shanghai is today.

  ON OUR WAY to church that evening, Auntie had described her Xinjiang retirement plan. A friend from church had invited her to an investment seminar. She paid one hundred yuan to attend.

  “It was worth it,” she reasoned. “It was a company that’ll sell you shares before they go public; a joint venture between a British and a Chinese company. My friend spent tens of thousands of yuan, so I bought some shares, too.”

  In all, she bought shares worth ¥30,000, or around $5,000. “It’s already worth double that! I can check it all online. The company will be listed on the London stock exchange in January! When it does, I’ll make half a million,” she said, before putting her hand on my shoulder. “You should invest, too!”

  I thought about this for a moment. How did Fu have $5,000? That was a lot of scallion pancakes. How could she check her shares “online”? She was too poor to afford a computer, and she didn’t have a smartphone. And why was she asking me to invest? In my reporting on China’s economy, I’d heard of investment schemes like this. They often targeted the elderly. I weighed my response carefully.

  “Are you worried this could be a scam?” I asked.

  Fu laughed. “Definitely not! They told me there was zero risk. Come to our investment meeting next week.” She bowed her head to peer at me over the top of her glasses, looking me in the eye. “You should never give up opportunities to make money.”

  She then climbed up the stairs to Central Church.

  PREACHER JIANG SMILED with his entire face. It was the sort of grin that pressed his cheeks so far upward that his eyes closed, leaving a pair of eyebrows shaped in an inverted V. “Today we will explore what it means to be grateful,” Preacher Jiang announced in a booming voice.

  We’d been singing for an hour, and the congregation of Central Church finally lowered themselves into plastic orange chairs for the evening’s sermon. They leaned forward, straining their necks to catch a full glimpse of the former crime boss.

  Preacher Jiang certainly looked the part. A black vinyl jacket reflected the lights overhead as it clung to his thick, muscular torso. He tucked his left sleeve underneath a Rolex watch, and he waved this display of prosperity as often as he could. His hair was closely cropped around a football-sized head that swiveled back and forth to address the congregation. He was in his fifties.

  “Your gratefulness is proof that you’ve experienced God’s life,” he began, dramatically raising his arms. His Rolex glinted. “Let us pray: Dear Father, we praise You. We thank You for establishing this Central Church…”

  The congregants raised their hands, shouting “Amen” after each pause, allowing Preacher Jiang to find his stride.

  “Gratitude is important! Gratitude allows us to sacrifice for God!” he shouted.

  Preacher Jiang told us he had much to be grateful for. He said he was a sinner born to a sinner—the criminal son of a local Communist Party official.

  People laughed, nodding along. Many in the audience considered city officials worse than c
riminals, because the Party often shielded their crimes. Preacher Jiang said his father had used guanxi to spring him from prison, but when his crimes became too serious, even the Party couldn’t protect him. He was sentenced to ten years in prison for robbery and assault.

  “And that’s when Daddy severed his relationship with me!” he shouted. “And where did he end up? In a mental ward!”

  “Aiya!” shouted Fu, shaking her head at the thought of this.

  Preacher Jiang tilted his head back, lifting the microphone to his mouth. “My only God was ren-min-bi!” he shouted, slowing down to linger over the pronunciation of China’s currency.

  The audience roared with laughter. Preacher Jiang laughed with them, his eyebrows arching upward to form an M. His sermon unraveled like a Chinese blockbuster action film: it had a big-shot criminal, a corrupt but powerful father figure, prison time, and a mental ward. The audience was rapt.

  “What do the two characters of grateful share in common?” Preacher Jiang asked the congregation, tracing the Chinese characters on his hand: .

  Both characters included the radical for the word heart——and everyone shouted the word in unison. “Heart!! Heart!! Heart!!”

  “Now—raise your hand if you can control your heart!”

  Four hands shot up.

  “Really? There are people here who can do that?” Preacher Jiang asked, making eye contact with the four brave souls. They lowered their hands sheepishly.