by Rob Schmitz
Five and two, I said, showing her a photo on my phone.
“One boy and one girl?”
“No. Both are boys.”
Auntie smiled. “Boys are good. You are blessed. Girls suffer.”
Uncle stopped shredding carrots and flashed a look of annoyance at his wife.
“What nonsense are you talking about?”
“Boys are the best,” said Auntie, looking away. “I could only hope all my descendants were boys. If you’re a girl, your only hope is to find a good husband so that you might have a chance at a good life. If you don’t, you’ll be miserable forever.”
“If everyone’s like you, they won’t be able to feed themselves,” said Uncle, returning to his cutting board.
I had stopped by his kitchen in the past week when Auntie was gone, and Uncle Feng had told me he was tiring of his wife’s investment “opportunities” and all the time she was spending at that Wenzhou-run church of hers.
“There are few good men in this world and plenty of bad men,” Auntie continued, looking at her husband. “Very few who show real love. I was incredibly unlucky to end up with you.”
Uncle dropped the vegetable peeler, wiping his hands on his apron, irritated. “You’re not doing too badly. You’ve got a home, don’t you? Many people don’t even have a roof. You don’t even work! There’s something wrong with your head.”
“Why do I need to work?” she asked.
Uncle turned to me. “She hasn’t been working for twelve years. And she hasn’t bothered to take care of our children, either.”
“And he nearly killed me,” Auntie said, facing me. “I told you that story, right? I almost lost my life.”
Uncle studied both of us for a moment, realizing his wife had told the foreigner the story of their first pregnancy and going through labor in the middle of the desert. For a moment, he flashed a look of betrayal, but he quickly regained composure. His wife was the type of person who told everything to anyone who would listen. I looked at the floor, uncomfortable to be drawn into the middle of a fight that appeared to have been going on for years. Uncle turned away from us and stared out the window. Outside, it was growing dark. “You nearly died because you don’t have a brain,” he said.
“My body’s never been the same, and the only one there for me was God!” Auntie shouted.
“Then go and live in church!” Uncle shouted back.
He dried his hands on a towel, unplugged the griddle, and stormed out of the kitchen to their bedroom.
Auntie was unfazed. She immediately took advantage of his absence, asking me in a hushed voice what I thought about Gatewang. “They’re listing in January! If you want to invest, now’s the time.”
Her friend Xia, it turned out, had decided against Gatewang. I asked if she had found anyone else to invest.
“I got my neighbor to put in twenty thousand,” she whispered. “She wanted to invest fifty, but she didn’t have enough money. This really is a good opportunity. At the investment conference, the author of the Gatewang book, remember Mr. Pang? He told everyone that if Gatewang couldn’t get listed, he’d kneel down and take out his right eye! Everyone stood up and applauded. I never saw anything that great before!”
“Have you invested more money?” I asked.
“I just got my retirement salary today—two thousand—I’ll go back to their office tomorrow to invest that. If I could borrow a hundred thousand from someone, I’d write a guarantee note saying, ‘If the project loses money, I’ll give you back half! If it makes money, I’ll take just one-third!’,” Auntie Fu said. “I wouldn’t ask for a fifty-fifty split. It doesn’t matter. I’m that confident.”
I hesitated, trying to process the math behind what she had just told me. All her retirement funds were being funneled into Gatewang, but it still wasn’t enough. It was clear she had done a lot of thinking about borrowing even more. I doubted Auntie knew anyone with access to ¥100,000—except for me.
She seemed to be waiting for me to respond. I squirmed in my seat. She was a good person who was making bad choices. It was hard to watch her throw her money away like this, and now she was trying to pull me into this mess, too.
“Auntie, I think you should be careful about putting your savings into this,” I said measuredly. “I searched on the Internet and there were a lot of people who said Gatewang is a scam.”
She shook her head vigorously. “The people who invested ¥100,000 months ago already earned twice that! Just wait until Gatewang lists in London,” she said. “You’ll probably never have another chance to make this much money again!”
“Auntie, don’t invest any more money,” I said. “I don’t think you should trust them.”
“Don’t worry!” she said. “Jack Ma made a bet and he became rich, right?”
“I think this is different,” I said.
I noticed Uncle Feng’s silhouette in the doorway connecting the kitchen to their bedroom, quietly listening to our conversation. It was likely he had heard everything. Auntie noticed him, too.
“There were government officials at the investment conference. This is a sure thing,” Auntie insisted, glancing toward a movement in the darkness.
Finally, Uncle emerged from the shadows. “She doesn’t have any money to invest!” he yelled. “Since we returned from Xinjiang twenty years ago, she hasn’t earned one fen.”
“I’d like to invest more, but I can’t,” she said, ignoring her husband.
“Auntie, these types of scams are everywhere in China. They’re designed to target older people like you,” I said.
Uncle had heard enough. He was already angry about the accusations his wife had been tossing his way earlier, and here was confirmation of his worst fears: his unemployed wife was plotting to pour even more money into yet another flimsy scheme.
“She hasn’t even returned the fifty thousand I lent to her!” Uncle shouted. “And now you want to invest more money? Where’s the house you supposedly bought?”
Auntie didn’t answer. She slowly let her head drop forward, as if it were too heavy for her neck to carry. Outside, a young man and woman walked by the window, hand in hand, the woman giggling at a story her lover was recounting, their voices melding into the subdued din of the city at night as they continued down the block. A car sounded its horn in the distance, then a return honk.
Auntie stared at the floor as she spoke. “Sometimes you meet bad people and you can’t help it. There are a lot of bad people in Shanghai,” she said slowly, quietly.
“Auntie, you’re right,” I said. “There are a lot of people in Shanghai that will cheat you. I think the people at Gatewang might be bad, too.”
“Aiya! Something’s wrong with your brain!” Uncle yelled.
Auntie held her gaze on the floor and repeated what I had said. “Yes, there are a lot of people in Shanghai that will cheat you…”
Uncle propped both of his hands onto the edge of the kitchen sink and stared out onto the street in his usual position. He murmured something angry in Shanghai dialect meant for Auntie’s ears, not mine. She stared hard at the floor, her face cast with total defeat. She picked up the Ecuadorean religious brochure from the chair, mindlessly thumbing through its pages.
“This girl,” Auntie said with a sad smile, “after she reached heaven, she didn’t want to return.”
Uncle turned his head toward her, sneering. “Heaven? What was heaven like? I’d love to hear about it! Ha! Heaven!”
Auntie gently placed the pamphlet back on the chair.
Uncle grinned and shook his head. “China’s sending rockets up to the moon and they haven’t even seen heaven yet!”
That very hour in the city of Xichang, just miles away from Auntie’s hometown in Sichuan, China had launched the country’s first lunar rover into space. Uncle had just caught the launch live on state television in his bedroom. The rover’s name was Yutu, “Jade Rabbit.” It was named after a Chinese folk tale about a woman who stole the pill of immortality from her hus
band. The husband then banished his wife to the moon along with her pet rabbit. As the story goes, the woman became a goddess, and the rabbit’s dark outline was forever etched into the illuminated topography of each full moon.
Tonight above the frigid haze of Shanghai, though, was a new moon. The rabbit was nowhere to be seen. Instead, its tiny namesake was racing toward it, a symbol of China’s global ambitions. Before saying goodbye to Yutu, the director of the Xichang Launch Center declared China’s space dream as “part of the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation.”
But below, in the city of Shanghai, inside a grimy open window overlooking the Street of Eternal Happiness, lavish dreams and visions of immortality were in doubt.
“Don’t leave tonight without a pancake,” said Auntie Fu, fetching one from the bottom of a pile that was still warm. “It’s cold out. This will warm you up for the ride home.”
She placed it in a plastic bag, handing it to me. “Are you sure you don’t want to invest in the company?” she asked one last time, unwilling to let go of her dream. “Zero risk!”
Uncle Feng guffawed at her persistence. I smiled and shook my head.
“Okay,” she said, accompanying me to the door. “Let’s wait after I make my money, and maybe you can invest later on.”
“And if you make anything more than a fen,” Uncle said with a chuckle, “then you should return all the money I lent you.”
Auntie turned around and gave her husband a long, cold stare. “Just wait until January,” she replied.
There were few places in China where the price of a bride was higher than it was in Shanghai. In 2013, Sina, China’s largest Web portal, and Vanke, the country’s largest real estate developer, combined their data to construct a map of bride prices around China. To make a match in Shanghai, a man typically offered the family of his intended the equivalent of $16,000 and a certificate of home ownership. In Inner Mongolia, the damage was about a tenth that: an auspicious ¥8,888—1,500 USD—plus 9 head of livestock and 3 pieces of gold jewelry. The coastal province of Fujian notched somewhere in the middle: $7,000, a set of gold headpieces, and a gold tiara.
In comparison, rural Shandong seemed like a bargain. Zhao, the owner of my favorite flower shop, spent the equivalent of $3,000 for her younger son’s wife there. As insurance, she dipped into her earnings to buy apartments back in her hometown for both sons. Little Sun—the younger one—seemed set after he married Zhang Min, the daughter of a farm family from Zhao’s hometown. In typical Chinese fashion, though, Zhao thought he could have done better.
“If my son were as tall as you are,” Zhao told me once, “he wouldn’t have settled for her. She’s not that pretty.”
I stopped by Zhao’s shop on a freezing Sunday afternoon in January to find her wearing a down jacket zipped over two sweaters and three pairs of thermal underwear. The puffy layers matched her round cheeks, turned rosy from the chill. Zhao didn’t heat her shop; in fact, she was one of the few whose electricity bills crept downward in the wintertime. Shanghai’s damp, freezing air created ideal conditions for her merchandise.
“Perfect timing!” she said when she hobbled over to her door. “I could use some help.”
I looked down at her right foot. It was encased in a brace that looked like a black ski boot. She hopped back to her stool, gently resting the foot atop a plush brown teddy bear pillow on her foldout table. The remnants of hours’ worth of sunflower seed eating were scattered on the floor. A dating show blared on television.
She’d broken her ankle while carrying her grandson down the stairs. Luckily, the boy—the family’s prized jewel—was undamaged.
“I slipped, and I held him up in the air so that he wouldn’t get hurt. But I’m a mess. I’m so clumsy! Thank the heavens he’s fine.”
The boy’s name was Shuo Shuo. He was the son of Little Sun, Zhao’s younger boy who had come to Shanghai straight from the county seat’s school for autistic children. Ever since Little Sun’s wife had given birth a year and a half ago, Zhao had taken charge of feeding and caring for her grandson at night, waking up to tend the flower shop by day. Shuo Shuo was the same age as my younger son, Landon, who was now learning to walk, though Shuo Shuo still hadn’t achieved that milestone. Zhao, like many Chinese grandparents, insisted on carrying him everywhere, fussing over the boy’s every move. His grandmother temporarily crippled, Shuo Shuo would finally be given the freedom to take his first steps.
“Things aren’t going well for me this year,” Zhao told me. “There’s a saying in my hometown: ‘After your parents die, you’ll have bad luck for three years.’ Now I have to wear this brace. It looks awful. Whenever I go outside, I lose face.”
Her father had died from esophageal cancer a few months ago. Her daughter-in-law’s grandmother had also just passed. Her son, daughter-in-law, and little Shuo Shuo were out of town for the weekend to attend the funeral, leaving her alone in her shop. I told Zhao my father had just died of cancer, too.
“How old was he?”
“Sixty-eight,” I said.
“Wah! Too young! What a shame. My father was eighty-two, so we were expecting it. Did you see him before he died?”
I told her that my family and I had taken care of him at his lake home in northern Minnesota, where he chose to spend his last days.
“What did you do with his body after he died?” she asked.
It seemed like an insensitive question, but Zhao knew my father lived in the country, far from any city, and she had a business owner’s mind. She was curious about logistics.
“We called a mortuary to come and take his body to town,” I explained.
“Did you bury him?”
“No, we had him cremated.”
She beamed. “That’s how we do it in China!”
Knowing death rites were the same on the opposite side of the planet seemed to cheer her up. Zhao shifted her body and leaned forward, gingerly moving her leg. “When my father died, it cost five thousand yuan for the wooden coffin and five thousand for the tombstone and cemetery plot. My dad’s work unit paid for it all, though, so it was okay. Did you have to pay for all of that?”
My father’s union benefits covered much of the cost of his funeral. I thought for a moment about how to phrase it in a way she would understand. “My father’s work unit also paid for these things,” I finally said.
Zhao smiled. “You see? America and China are so much alike! Who would’ve thought?”
She opened a thermos to take a sip of tea. Steam gushed forth, swirling in the freezing room. Winter was my least favorite season in Shanghai. The wet, frosty air penetrated clothes, gradually dampening each layer until your skin was clammy and frigid. It felt like being trapped inside an icy sponge. Retreating indoors didn’t improve things much. Nearly all buildings lacked insulation and only the swankiest residences in town had central air. Our apartment’s heat came from air conditioner units in each room. Their location—mounted high up on the wall—meant the hot air pumping out of them flowed straight up into the ceiling. By our second winter in Shanghai, we had purchased space heaters that traveled like rolling IV stands to whichever room we happened to be freezing in.
Air pollution was at its worst in winter. Hundreds of millions of people heating their homes at once meant coal-fired power plants worked overtime to provide electricity. Their emissions hovered over much of the eastern half of the country for weeks, pushing smog to dangerous levels. Those who could afford air filtration systems stayed inside and cranked them to high, which used more electricity, requiring the burning of even more coal.
I wasn’t one to sit inside, hiding from the elements, and I often went biking wearing a helmet and an air mask to keep warm. My typical route took me through the tiny alleyways in the southern part of the Concession. Then I usually traveled north, turning right onto the Street of Eternal Happiness. I would stop in to see CK at his sandwich shop, pause again three blocks east at Auntie Fu and Uncle Feng’s kitchen, and typically finish a block fart
her at Zhao’s flower shop.
Today, I had worked up an appetite. Zhao reached for a pear, sliced it, and offered me the bigger half.
“I need some advice,” Zhao said while I ate. “It’s about my cousin back home, the one who is a year younger than me. I think I told you about the problems with her husband, the official from the Tax Bureau, right?”
Zhao’s gossip about relatives back in her village was the stuff of legend. There were family feuds settled with knife fights, cousins losing control of multiple mistresses, and tragic suicides over unrequited love. Life in her hometown was like a telenovela she watched from her perch in civilized Shanghai. Occasionally she was pulled back into the drama when someone pleaded for help. I couldn’t recall the story about the government official, but if there was one place in the world where a bureaucrat from the Tax Bureau could be immortalized, it was Zhao’s village.
“Well, he had a mistress and he divorced my cousin, but he still beats her. She just called me this afternoon after he beat her up again. What do you think she should do?” she asked me. “Are you allowed to continue to beat your wife even after divorce?”
This was a question that I had never considered before. I was trying to figure out how to respond when I was saved by a knock on the door. A neighbor appeared with a box of lunch. “Ah, thank you! I’ll eat this for dinner,” Zhao said, placing the box on top of a pile of produce donated by other neighbors. When a shop owner on the Street of Eternal Happiness was injured, the entire block helped with meals and small chores.
“I didn’t have any advice for her either,” Zhao continued. “It was terrible. He pushed her head into the ground and whipped her with a belt. They have three kids, all grown up. They all know. They allow it because their dad’s the one who makes all the money. He’s bribed them all.”
I told her that he sounded a lot like other government officials I had reported on in China.
“Even his mistress came over to beat her! Nobody can help her now. She told me today, ‘If you can become independent, I can, too.’ I said, ‘No, you can’t. Your husband works for the taxation bureau!’ ”
