Street of Eternal Happiness

by Rob Schmitz

  “Yes, that’s right.” Preacher Jiang grinned. “Everyone has a heart, but nobody can control it,” he said slowly. “Repeat after me! ‘I have everything, yet I can’t control anything!’ ”

  “I have everything, yet I can’t control anything!”

  In a society where parents controlled the decision-making process for their children through adulthood, where students were taught never to question their teachers, and where leaders often ruled with an iron fist, this message of powerlessness was, well, powerful.

  “Our parents can’t even control their own lives!” Preacher Jiang shouted. “My father was a member of the Communist Party! What a joke! Even he had no power over me!”

  The congregants laughed. Preacher Jiang took a deep breath, and plunged in.

  “But then God took control of my tongue! Amen!”

  “Amen!”

  “And He gave me wisdom and eloquence! Amen!”

  “Amen!”

  “And then I realized the Bible surpasses all kinds of knowledge! Amen!”

  “Amen!”

  The pronouncements came out like a rapid-fire cheer, and he pumped his fist with each one. Each Amen fed his energy, and he met the audience’s responses by turning up the volume.

  “It was written by the Holy Spirit! Amen!”

  “Amen!”

  “You are all shaped by God, revealed by God, blessed by God! Amen!”

  “Amen!”

  “And we must be grateful for God! Amen!”

  “Amen!”

  Preacher Jiang stood motionless with his fist up in the air, his head bobbing with each breath. He abruptly broke his stance to take a sip of water. I looked around the hall. People were pushed up against the edge of their seats. Fu elbowed me in the ribs. “Isn’t he great?” she asked, gripping her knees, her eyes fixed on him.

  Preacher Jiang had likely delivered this sermon dozens—perhaps hundreds—of times before. He’d been able to refine his oratory and the timing of his jokes. His dark, rebellious past captivated people. The Chinese spoke often of hei shehui—“black society,” known popularly as the Triads—and these criminals were popular because they offered an alternative source of power to the Communist Party. But few had ever met a real-life boss. Jiang’s jokes about Communists were a hit, too, as they gave permission to make fun of corrupt officials and a government that looked down on their beliefs. His delivery had a distinct rhythm with a call-and-response cadence, which made it irresistible. Rote repetition followed by plainspoken lecturing was a feature of Chinese classrooms all over the country. For Auntie Fu and others old enough to remember, this style also conjured up political rallies in the 1960s where thousands of Red Guards would scream slogans like “Long live Chairman Mao!” Repeating phrases like this induced a kind of hypnosis. If anyone—mortal or immortal—had control over the congregation at Central Church this evening, it was Preacher Jiang.

  “The establishment of a church is a gift from God! Amen!”

  “Amen!”

  “The establishment of a church means lost souls are being saved! Amen!”

  “Amen!”

  “Then the establishment of a church needs capital!” Preacher Jiang shouted, inflecting the last word with a descending tone of finality.

  He paused to let this sink in. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief.

  Aha, there it was, I thought. I looked over at Auntie Fu. She was fixated on Jiang.

  “Where does this money come from?” he asked, looking around the room for an answer.

  For the first time that night, the hall fell silent.

  “It comes from God!” he barked. “Don’t think that it’s your money. You might think the money you earn is yours, but it isn’t. It’s a blessing from God! God created you, so everything you have belongs to Him.”

  I looked around, scanning the faces of the congregants. Were they still in step with Preacher Jiang’s logic? Most of the people here were among the first generation of Chinese allowed to make their own money. Telling them what they had earned wasn’t theirs seemed to me a risky test of their faith. It had worked for Mao, but he had an army behind him. If anyone tonight questioned Preacher Jiang’s reasoning, it didn’t show—everyone’s gaze remained locked on him. I quietly withdrew my phone from my pocket to check the time. It had taken Preacher Jiang exactly one hour to get to this point. It was an hour filled with subtle hints carefully dropped after he had landed a good joke or had made a point that resonated with people. These moments were followed by readings from the Bible supporting his points. He had masked the message with terms like “gratitude,” “receiving additional grace,” and “the meaning of being grateful to God.” After an hour he had an audience happy to repeat or laugh at anything he said. Mission accomplished. Time to switch gears and allow the polish to begin to chip from the euphemisms. In the end, like most things in China, this sermon boiled down to ren-min-bi.

  “Why should we sacrifice?” Preacher Jiang asked. “Maybe you’ve been talking about the one-tenth rule, maybe not. It’s a sensitive topic. But it’s the best rule. It’s a sacred rule, and it opens the door to heaven.”

  I turned to Auntie Fu. Before she could whisper back, Preacher Jiang cut in.

  “Today’s churches often deviate from God’s rules, but not ours. Which rule?”

  “The one-tenth rule!” echoed the congregation.

  Since the 1990s I’d lived and worked in rural and urban parts of the country. In all that time, I’d never witnessed a group of Chinese agreeing to part so willingly with their money.

  “Whether you’re a boss or a worker, if you’ve got ten yuan, you can only take nine yuan from your pocket. That one yuan must be given to our God. Amen!”

  “Amen!”

  Growing up Catholic, I was familiar with the custom of tithing, but it was a subtle, unspoken pact to the church and community. I’d never heard giving described in such precise terms, nor had I ever heard an entire sermon devoted to it. In my childhood church, baskets were quietly passed around to collect donations at the end of mass, but no priest would dare specify an amount. You simply gave what you could. Clearly, Preacher Jiang felt Chinese Christians needed a defined directive, and for good measure, he sealed it with a threat.

  “Repeat after me: tou qie!”

  “Tou qie!” responded the congregation in unison. The word meant “to steal.”

  “The original meaning of the word tou qie is to withhold—to steal—your one-tenth offering. Did you know this?” Preacher Jiang asked, with a wave of his arm.

  “The Bible says that if you tou qie, where will the curse fall upon?” He paused dramatically.

  “On you! The curse will fall on you! Repeat after me: ‘On you!’ ”

  “On you!”

  “What kind of curse?”

  The audience murmured, unsure of how to answer. Preacher Jiang had led his flock into uncharted territory. Auntie Fu looked to me for help, but I had nothing to offer.

  “You will suffer from disease!” he spat. “I once met a sister in the city of Luoyang who loves God very much. She was very sick. I took her to many curing sessions and doctors, but she did not get better. I began to wonder whether she had given her one-tenth. Her colleagues confirmed my hunch.” Jiang paused, scanning the faces assembled before him.

  “I went back and told her, ‘God cursed you with disease!’ ” Jiang screamed.

  The congregation erupted in whispers again. He continued. “I told her what I told you tonight! ‘If you turn to God, God will turn to you!’ She started giving one-tenth. The last time I met her, she was cured! Amen!”

  “Amen! Amen! Amen!”

  Auntie Fu nodded her head in approval for the sick sister from Luoyang. I slouched in my chair. Preacher Jiang was a crime boss, a former prisoner, the prodigal son of a Party official, and now a healer who miraculously cured the sick. This church had expanded to twenty-seven cities. How many Preacher Jiangs were out there, delivering the exact same pitch?

&nb
sp; Jiang again wiped his forehead. The Rolex gleamed as he moved, and the vinyl of his jacket was luminescent on stage. He sensed fertile ground.

  “Repeat after me: People who are saved and given a new life must give one-tenth of their income.”

  The audience chanted the phrase back to him.

  “How can you prove you are Christian if you don’t give? How can you prove you love God?”

  The men and women repeated his words.

  “If you don’t give God one-tenth of your income, you are stealing from God!” he screeched, waving both arms over the congregation. The accusation hung in the cavernous hall.

  No one said a word.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, I stopped by Uncle’s shop and ordered a scallion pancake. It was four thirty in the afternoon, and the thick smog of winter obscured the glowing red ball setting over the plane trees. I asked Auntie Fu about Preacher Jiang’s sermon.

  “I was really moved,” she said.

  I pulled a stool into the shop and sat down. She continued. “Wenzhou churches always find the top preachers from across the country. Preacher Jiang gave all of us a spiritual shock!”

  Uncle Feng was fiddling with his griddle. He snickered loud enough for Fu to hear.

  “Aiya!” Auntie snapped. “You don’t understand! What do you know, old man?”

  “I don’t understand? And you do?” he asked her, still laughing.

  “Preacher Jiang talked a lot about giving one-tenth of your income,” I said slowly.

  Uncle stopped what he was doing and listened.

  “Did you feel compelled to give money?” I asked her.

  “No! Who can afford that?” Auntie Fu replied loud enough for Uncle to hear. She shot a nervous glance at her husband. “Some older senile people might be persuaded to do that, but not me. It’s based on everyone’s capabilities. Actually there is no such rule, but I guess it’s written in the Bible somewhere. Usually people don’t give very much.”

  A neighbor arrived at the window, distracting Uncle Feng. They began to chat. Auntie bent over and whispered to me: “I was very moved by the sermon. I gave fifty yuan!”

  Uncle reached for a spatula and removed a pancake. He gingerly placed it into a thin plastic bag and handed it to me. I waited for him to turn back to his neighbor, and then quietly placed three silver yuan coins into his plastic container bank. Auntie saw this and put the money back into my pocket. I waited until she left the room, and then returned the coins to the container. It was a game of money tag I often played with friends along the street.

  It was getting dark. Uncle switched on a solitary lightbulb dangling from a black wire, projecting a perfect square of light onto the sidewalk in front of his shop. Auntie returned with an Advent calendar and a teacup with a cross.

  “Free gifts from the church,” she announced, brandishing the items.

  Uncle laughed. “Nothing’s free,” he said.

  “You don’t have faith now,” Auntie told him, “but after you get old and idle, I’ll drag you to church.”

  “I won’t go even when I get old.”

  “You’ll suffer later if you don’t go,” warned Auntie.

  “Once people die, they’re gone. You could grind them up into meat, and they wouldn’t even know,” Uncle muttered slowly, his face lit by the bulb.

  Auntie turned to me. “I’ll get another Advent calendar for you, too.”

  “I’ve escaped death once,” Uncle interrupted, ignoring his wife.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I fell through the ice once in a frozen river in Xinjiang,” he responded, staring out into the darkness. “I pulled myself out, walked a few steps, and fell down again. I crawled to the banks of the river and up onto a road. My clothes were all frozen, turned to ice. I couldn’t feel anything. It was one of the coldest days of the year.

  “Nobody helped me,” he said. “Nobody. It took me a long time to walk back to the village. When a friend saw me, he thought I was a ghost. I made it home and changed my clothes by the fire and drank sorghum liquor. That was December 19, 1989. I’ll always remember that date.”

  Auntie listened, clutching her Advent calendar, silent.

  “I don’t believe in the things she believes in,” Uncle said. “You’ve got to have a sober mind. That’s the only way you can survive. That’s why I don’t believe in God.”

  Uncle looked out and saw no customers. He began to clean up his workspace, wiping down the counter and griddle in a mechanical fashion.

  Outside, the Street of Eternal Happiness was growing quiet. I looked at Uncle Feng. He had survived in Xinjiang on next to nothing, turning desert into farmland. It taught him to never trust any authority.

  Auntie stood up. To Uncle Feng, she must have seemed frustratingly gullible. “The only reason you didn’t die that day was because of God,” she proclaimed. “He gave you the strength to pull yourself out of that river. Think about it! Nobody could have survived falling into that frozen river!”

  “Nonsense,” said Uncle, turning to look at his wife for the first time that evening. “After I fell into that frozen river in Xinjiang, I didn’t believe in anything except myself.”

  There were just three hours left in the Year of the Dragon when I saw the letters. It was Chinese New Year’s Eve, 2013, and my friends Lei Lei and Rich had invited me to their apartment to usher in the Year of the Snake. The previous two New Years, Lenora and I had downed dumplings with her Chinese relatives and lit fireworks on the street at midnight alongside millions of others in the city. They erupted around us with a deafening pop, and ash fell from the sky in what felt like a sustained missile strike. This year Lenora had found a reason to escape. Our second son was a year old, and she took both boys to the U.S. for a couple of weeks.

  Lei Lei handed me a stack of yellowed letters. “Take a look at the return address,” she said.

  I glanced at one of the frayed envelopes in my hand: Lane 682, number 70, Street of Eternal Happiness.

  They had heard my radio series about the street and thought I’d be interested. As we drank scotch, fireworks began to explode outside. We rifled through the letters.

  There were more than a hundred of them, neatly tucked into a shoebox. Rich and Lei Lei had a side business refurbishing old lane homes in the former French Concession, and they’d come across the collection in an old antiques shop two blocks south of the Street of Eternal Happiness.

  The earliest ones were written in the 1950s, between a wife and her husband, who was serving time in a labor camp near Tibet as a political prisoner. Others were addressed to the same prisoner, but written by different hands. The last letters were from the 1990s. All were stamped with the same return address on the Street of Eternal Happiness.

  In the space of fifty-odd years, the letters had traveled from Shanghai to a labor camp two thousand miles away, only to end up at an antiques shop just two blocks from where they’d been written.

  We flipped through the pile, and I gently unfolded one. It was written in Chinese cursive, and I had a hard time making out the characters.

  Lei Lei read it out loud: “ ‘I’ve been busy with housework, so I haven’t had time to write. Please forgive me. Our current living conditions are very tough. We can barely get by.’ ”

  “The wife’s letters are always updates on their children,” Lei Lei paused to say, “but the letters from the husband are more interesting.”

  We spent the next hour unfolding, discussing, and refolding various letters, fascinating artifacts of a bygone era. Finally, a folded paper without an envelope caught my eye. It appeared to be a handwritten chart.

  “What’s this?” Rich asked Lei Lei.

  “It’s a lunar calendar from, let’s see, 1958. See here?” she said, pointing to the top. “New Year’s Day. That’s today.”

  I looked at the clock: one in the morning. The first hour of the Year of the Snake had slid right by.

  LANE 682, STREET OF ETERNAL HAPPINESS. I was familiar with the road’s
many lane communities by now, and I realized I had been across the street from that very alley earlier in the day, back when it was still the Year of the Dragon.

  Because of the holiday, everything was quiet and the waidi ren—outsiders—had left for their hometowns. Nearly half the city hailed from somewhere else, and the holiday was a rare moment when Shanghai returned to the Shanghainese. Whether out of guilt from escaping my parenting duties or out of boredom, that afternoon I found myself sitting on a curb with the only other soul in sight: an elderly beggar named Zhang Naisun.

  His usual spot was as auspiciously named as you might find in Shanghai: the intersection of the Street of Eternal Happiness and Fumin Lu, literally “Rich People Road.”

  “Happy New Year,” I said to Zhang, placing a hundred-yuan note in his cup.

  “Happy New Year and I wish prosperity for you and your family,” he dutifully replied.

  Zhang had inhabited this corner for years. I’d seen him so often that I had come to ignore him. On the few occasions when pedestrian traffic had thrust me into his domain, I had dug into my pockets and placed coins in his cup. He was always gracious, bowing his head in thanks. He usually wore a green People’s Liberation Army coat with a purple scarf furled around his neck, and boots over navy blue trousers. He typically sat atop a black garbage bag of recyclables with a white plastic container placed at his knees for donations. His hair cascaded like a silver waterfall down the middle of his back, wispy strands dancing in the rush of air left behind by passing cars. From a distance, he looked like an old woman until you got close enough to see his sparse snowy beard. He had the calm, patient eyes of a man with all the time in the world—one of the few souls in Shanghai who wasn’t in a rush to get somewhere. For Zhang, time was other people’s money.

  He had carefully chosen this spot. The Street of Eternal Happiness forms the border between two separate districts in Shanghai. The south side of the street is the district of Xuhui; the north side, the district of Jing’an. This no-man’s-land designation meant it was littered with unpatched potholes—both districts left repair to the other, so it was almost never done. Zhang used this lack of oversight to his advantage. Whenever urban management officers from Xuhui threatened to haul him off for panhandling, Zhang would simply walk across the street to resume begging in Jing’an, outside their jurisdiction.