by Rob Schmitz
That wasn’t the only change. CK handed me 2nd Floor Your Sandwich’s new menu. He had sold off the touchscreens, and before me was a completely revamped list of options: Boston Lobster, Grilled Sea Bass, 280-Gram Australian Rib Eye Steak. “I guess you’re no longer a sandwich shop,” I said, scanning the new offerings.
“We’ve changed to brunch during the day and high-end French food at night,” he announced. “We’ve never made money at night—nobody wants to eat sandwiches for dinner. I thought we should offer more upscale food.”
I thought about the sign outside. How much tinier could Your Sandwich get?
CK seemed excited about the changes. “We offered these things to foreigners on Valentine’s Day, and they said it was good!”
I pointed to the lobster. “Is this really from Boston?”
“Yes!”
“Fresh or frozen?”
CK gave me a look that seemed to say: Do I look like I can afford a lobster tank?
“What about this?” I asked, pointing to the Australian Rib Eye.
“We actually don’t have that. I tried a few suppliers, but the quality was terrible.”
“So what happens if a customer orders it?” I asked.
CK shrugged. “We just tell them we’re out of it. Then we point them to the Alfredo! It’s a dinner menu! I have to have steak on it. People would think, ‘What the fuck is up with this menu? I thought this was French food!’ It’s got to be on there.”
CK told me the new menu was his last stand. 2nd Floor Your Sandwich had never been profitable, and he and Max had poured hundreds of thousands of their own yuan into the business. If they weren’t making money by the end of the year, they would shut it down. “If we can’t accomplish that, then our dream is over.”
I thought about the dreams of those I had met in Dali, and the dreams for China that Henry had shared with me across the street, high above the city. I thought about Xi Jinping’s politically charged Chinese Dream, a dream the Party hoped all Chinese could share.
It was the era of big dreams in China, and it didn’t seem to matter much if those dreams came true. The husband and wife who dreamed of moving to Dali and had now returned to Beijing weren’t failures, nor did their readers treat them as such. They had gotten a book deal out of the whole affair, and for them, it was time to make money, start a family, and move on to the next dream.
The state’s dreams, however, often stood in the way of individual dreams. I thought about those whom I had met in Maggie Lane—Old Kang, Mayor Chen and his wife—whose simple dreams to live peacefully at home were brutally overpowered by the visions of prosperity from powerful local officials. It would be a while before all 1.3 billion Chinese would feel equal in their pursuit of happiness. But when I considered what China had gone through in the twentieth century, I found it hard to be pessimistic. I thought about the Wang family’s letters of survival in the 1950s and Auntie Fu and Uncle Feng’s stories about building Xinjiang in the 1960s. Who would’ve thought that, fifty years after such violent revolution and catastrophic famine, the Chinese would have enough spirit left in them to be able to dream, much less have the means and freedom to try to pursue them?
When I returned to CK’s a month later, a wet southern wind was blowing through the city; a soft, warm rain cleansed the air of pollutants. It smelled like flowers outside. Pink peach blossom petals covered the surface of the pond in the courtyard at my complex. Inside 2nd Floor Your Sandwich, thousands of small green leaves began to obscure the view of the street, restoring the tree house effect. The place was empty, the lights were off, and the sliding glass windows were wide open, the whoosh! of cars barreling through soaked asphalt punctuated the soothing soundtrack of steady rain. Below, along the Street of Eternal Happiness, dozens of umbrellas scurried by, looking like brightly colored blood cells bouncing off one another on their way to a pulsing heart. CK greeted me with a smile and some good news: after two years, he and Max had finally had a profitable month. The dream was still alive.
A map of the street from the 1940s, brown with age, shows a string of little shops along the block where CK’s sandwich shop now stands. A magnifying glass is needed to make out the intricate strokes of the traditional Chinese characters that fill the tiny squares: “Prosperity Rice Shop,” “Scholar Pen Factory,” “Auspicious Health Soy Sauce Shop.” Their customers lived a block away, inside a labyrinth of alleyways winding around dozens of numbered plots on the map: red-and-gray-brick shikumen homes of the wealthy class. Hardly any of these places—the old shops, the stone-gated homes, the alleyways—have survived. They’re dreams from a forgotten time. Yet a block away from today’s sandwich shops, bars, and cafés, inside an abandoned lot of burned-out homes surrounded by a wall, Mayor Chen remembers.
THE CHEN FAMILY’S DREAM was purchased for ten bars of gold.
The shikumen-style brick house was inside a new neighborhood under construction inside the French Concession. It had an exotic-sounding name: Maggie Lane. Tucked away from the bustle of Peaceful Happiness Road down a quiet alley, it was a burgeoning community of three-story homes, each with a courtyard where children could play.
The father had longed to live in a new development a block away on the more affluent Street of Eternal Happiness. But he only had thirteen gold bars weighing four kilograms, worth around $70,000 at the time, barely enough for a small apartment. So in 1933, the elder Chen and his family settled for a spacious house in Maggie Lane, happy he had three gold bars to spare.
Thirty-three years later, there was a loud knock on the door. His twenty-one-year-old son Chen Zhongdao darted upstairs to help his mother hide the three bars. He stuffed one in his pants pocket, and his mother hurriedly hid the others in the back of a wardrobe underneath some clothes. The knocking turned to steady pounding. He rushed downstairs and opened the door.
It was 1966. China’s economy was in tatters and Mao had launched the Cultural Revolution. Red Guards had just raided the home of Chen’s neighbor, who had converted his shikumen into a small sewing machine factory. The group of gangly teens confiscated jewelry, cash, deposit books, any evidence of capitalist activity. When Chen opened the door that summer afternoon, he was surprised to see such a ragtag group of adolescents conducting state-sponsored home raids.
“We’ve come to help you destroy the Four Olds,” one of them announced: Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas.
Young Red Guard regiments across the country seized classical Chinese literature, paintings, jewelry, religious icons, and furniture from residents, declaring them anti-proletarian objects that had poisoned the minds of the people.
Chen Zhongdao suppressed a smirk and let them inside, wondering how these ten youngsters would determine what in their house would fit into these four puzzling categories. The guards, some as young as middle school children, awkwardly rifled through his family’s belongings for hours, a little unsure of what they were looking for. By early morning, they had settled on a few articles of clothing and his mother’s silver jewelry. They had missed the gold bars stuffed inside the wardrobe, and Chen said they were too nervous to ask him to empty his pockets. They clumsily marched to the next home down the lane.
Families who had originally bought homes in Maggie Lane were used to this sort of harassment. Many of them had bought their own homes in pre-Communist times and belonged to the upper class. They had spent almost two decades trying to pad their Communist résumés, carefully dodging labels like “landlord,” “counterrevolutionary,” “capitalist,” “bad element,” or a host of other commonly used names that marked someone an enemy of the state.
Just six years after the Party had “liberated” China in 1949, it owned nearly all the land, becoming the de facto landlord to hundreds of millions. Chen’s father was required to pay the new government rent on a house he had purchased with his life’s savings. In the following years, he was overcome with anxiety. Up to then, he had run a textile plant and made three hundred renminbi a month, a good salary a
t the time. The elder Chen worried that it was a matter of time before he would be labeled a Rightist or a capitalist and sent away to a labor camp. The younger Chen says his father was so convinced of this outcome that when his mill was taken over by the state several years later, he took a 75 percent pay cut and worked as hard as he could, plowing through multiple shifts, refusing to sleep, and skipping meals, ultimately earning a “model worker” award from local Party officials for his efforts. In 1959, while his work unit was melting down metal to make steel to support Mao’s Great Leap Forward campaign, Chen collapsed and died from exhaustion just months short of his fiftieth birthday. He left behind his wife and eight children in his beloved Maggie Lane home that no longer belonged to them—a family’s dream, seized.
A few days after the Red Guard raid, young Chen Zhongdao pedaled his bicycle to the textile factory where he worked. He hid the gold bars in his dirty corduroy work uniform he left inside a shared dorm room. When he returned home that evening, his older siblings and his mother discussed what to do next. Possessing large quantities of gold was illegal, and with all the Red Guard raids it was a matter of time before they checked Chen’s workplace and he was caught and imprisoned or executed. A gang of clumsy teenagers raiding the family home may have bordered on the comical, but others in the lane who couldn’t hide their connections to the Four Olds were shaken up. A famous Shanghai opera singer who lived in Maggie Lane, a woman named Xiao Aiqin, was relentlessly targeted by the Red Guards and repeatedly humiliated in public. After two years of this, she reportedly drowned herself in the Huangpu River.
Chen’s mother sent him to the State Industrial and Commerce Bank ten blocks away at Jing’an Temple. It was a hot summer afternoon, and he stood in line holding the three gold bars wrapped neatly in newspaper. When it came his turn, Chen nervously handed over the gold, the bank teller weighed them one by one, and he remembers the teller giving him a receipt and telling him he could come back to retrieve the bars anytime.
Three years later, the campaigns of the Cultural Revolution had quieted down and Chen’s family thought it would be a good time to visit the bank again. Chen rode his bike to the State Industrial and Commerce Bank, receipt in hand. He walked up to the counter. “I’m sorry,” he remembers the teller saying, “but we can’t give you your gold back. Possessing gold is against the law.”
The teller gave Chen 2,900 RMB, the bank’s assessment of the gold’s value. It was a sixth of what the gold was worth on global markets. Chen didn’t raise a fuss. It was still a lot of money at the time, he was at a state-owned bank, and he had just been told that he had broken the law. He thought about his neighbors who had been sent away, punished, and died for less. Chen put the cash in his pocket, bit his lip, and walked out the bank’s front door, glumly riding his bicycle back to Maggie Lane.
“I WAS SO NAÏVE,” Mayor Chen told me, thinking about the gold. “I was young and naïve.”
We sat in the reading room of a community center across the street from what was left of Maggie Lane. My first visit had gotten the security guard in trouble and I was now barred from entering the lot. It didn’t matter; I had a clear view of daily goings-on there from my bedroom.
The wall surrounding Maggie Lane had been stripped of dozens of “Better City, Better Life” posters from the Shanghai world’s fair. At the event’s closing ceremony in October of 2010, Vice Premier Wang Qishan told the audience the motto of the event would be carried forward from generation to generation. “I am convinced that the vision of ‘Better City, Better Life’ will become reality,” he announced confidently.
The following morning, Shanghai was engulfed in a toxic cloud of smog. Skyscrapers a kilometer away from our bedroom window at the Summit had suddenly disappeared behind a thick haze. During the fair, construction sites had been closed, farmers upwind from Shanghai were prohibited from burning rice husks, and there were clampdowns on heavy vehicles entering the city. Shanghai’s air quality was recorded as “good” for 90 percent of the duration of the six-month event. Now all of these rules had expired, and the air in Shanghai was back to its gritty, polluted self.
At Maggie Lane, a demolition crew visited Mayor Chen, his wife, Xie Guozhen, and the four other families who remained living in partially destroyed homes—a dozen people in all. It had been five years since their last visit had ended with arson, murder, and prison time. This crew came better prepared. The Xuhui District government had sent them notices, and they carried an official-looking relocation order signed by a local court.
By now, Chen had become an expert on laws pertaining to forced relocations. He was, after all, the lane’s unofficial mayor. He knew that in order for a document like this to be legally enforceable, it had to be issued and sent to individual residents, not through a demolition crew.
The crew—a group of hardened middle-aged men used to dealing with stubborn residents—were not swayed by Mayor Chen’s interpretation. They returned one day with sledgehammers. The Mayor had dealt with this before. He retrieved a propane gas tank from his kitchen and called down to the men from his balcony. “I told them that if they try to take me from my home, I’ll strap the gas canister to myself and we’ll all die together,” Chen told me. “I told them, ‘I’m in my sixties, and you guys are in your forties. You’ve got families, you’ve got kids, and you have your lives ahead of you. I’m not afraid to die.’ ”
The crew didn’t come back.
Xuhui District officials had rezoned Maggie Lane as “public” land. The designation meant it could be used later as a park, school, hospital, or government building—anything serving the public—but not for commercial or residential purposes.
Nobody in the neighborhood put much stock in this designation, though. Maggie Lane was likely the most valuable piece of undeveloped land in Shanghai. As one developer told me, there was just too much money to be made to allow the land to become a park or a school. And the district could afford to wait: between 2003 and 2013, property prices in the city had climbed an average of 14 percent a year, with the most luxurious condominiums in the neighborhood selling for the equivalent of millions of U.S. dollars each.
All Mayor Chen cared about was that officials either made good on their original promise to return him to the land or to compensate him with enough money to be able to afford to live somewhere else in the neighborhood. “Allowing the land to be resold is technically illegal,” the Mayor told me, showing me copies of the legal code governing his rights. “This policy states we have the right to move back, but that’s obviously nonexistent now. These officials are sitting back and watching the housing prices soar, so they’re reluctant to do anything for the time being.”
I looked through Chen’s files spread across a knee-high table in the community center’s reading room. Most of the police reports were ten years old: “Resident complains of rocks being thrown through windows,” “Resident complains of electricity being cut off to building,” and so on.
It was a well-documented history of harassment by demolition crews. Then it dawned on me: the Summit was built ten years ago. When I visited Maggie Lane, I had told Mayor Chen and Old Kang I lived across the street and had a clear view of their homes from my window. “You can thank us for such a nice view!” Old Kang had said, laughing.
“What was on the land of the Summit before it was built?” I asked Chen.
“There were just lanes of ordinary homes. They weren’t part of Maggie Lane and the houses weren’t as nice as ours,” Mayor Chen told me. “One of the residents was killed during the relocation there, too.”
“What happened?”
“I heard the guy had a house next to the street where he ran a small business. When the demolition crew came to take his house, he poured gasoline over himself, held himself tightly to a guy from the crew, and then lit a match.”
Mayor Chen told me it was the same crew that had harassed him and had set his neighbors on fire.
“I forget the dead man’s name, but I’ve got the number
of his widow at home. I’ll find it for you. She’s still trying to petition the government now,” Chen told me. “Our neighborhood is full of stories like this.”
THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT still owns all the land in China. Since the death of Mao, the Party has gradually given individual Chinese more rights to its property. Today, they can “buy” seventy-year leases to homes. The Party officially designates them as “owners,” even though the state is the ultimate landlord.
With this ownership come legal rights that are becoming stronger each year. In 2011, China’s State Council issued a ruling stating that local governments could no longer force people out of their homes unless the land was going to be used to serve the public interest. The same government body later laid out clear rules regarding compensation in the event of a forced demolition, requiring the government to pay property owners the market value for whatever was seized by the state.
The ruling came after decades of violent standoffs between property owners and local governments. China’s economy was growing at a historic pace, and local officials had become de facto land brokers, seizing property from residents and selling it to developers to turn a profit. By 2013, local governments in China made, on average, more than a third of their operating revenue from these types of land sales.
“In a normal system, the government is not supposed to be benefiting from the land transaction process,” Wang Cailiang, a prominent Shanghai property rights lawyer, once told me. “The government should only be responsible for managing the land. They are not businessmen.”
Over the years, though, local officials had become some of China’s shrewdest capitalists. When they weren’t taking residents’ land and selling it to the highest-bidding developer, they were commonly seen driving around in black Audi sedans and shopping at luxury outlets like Coach or Louis Vuitton to buy handbags for their spouses or mistresses. It was a spectacle of greed and corruption, and whenever I covered land seizure stories, residents blamed their predicaments on these local officials while, on the other hand, maintaining their belief that China’s central government remained a benevolent one. “If Party leaders in Beijing only knew what was really going on down here,” I was often told, “they’d put a stop to this whole mess.”
