by Rob Schmitz
At the height of the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards knocked on Grandpa and Grandma’s door at three o’clock each morning to question and threaten him. This happened every night for months. Grandpa lost sleep and the stress drove him mad.
“There was no way to fight against the system,” CK told me. “Either you killed yourself, which a lot of people chose to do at the time, or you just suffered. There was no other way. Everyone was brainwashed, and everyone was afraid.”
By the time CK was born, Grandpa had moved out, choosing to suffer alone in a tiny, smelly room downstairs from his family’s apartment. Grandma would go to his room every day to cook for him. “He couldn’t think straight,” CK told me. “His body was always shaking, and he was always scared of people knocking on his door at night to come and take him away.” Human interaction had made him sick.
This reminded me of something Wang Xuesong had told me when I visited him at the Flushing library. Occasionally while in the throes of Alzheimer’s, his mother would suddenly sit up in the middle of the night, terrorized by what she was certain were Red Guards pounding on the door of their New York apartment. They’re waiting to question me, she’d tell her son.
CK knew never to ask his grandmother about what had happened to his grandfather. It was this same understanding that led him to suffer alone at such a young age, struggling to cut his wrists while his grandmother dozed inches away, oblivious to her grandson’s misery.
But these events were in the past. Opportunities had grown immeasurably for CK’s generation. His parents and grandparents may have been completely tied to the system, simply trying to survive, but he had grown up with options. He had chosen his own career, his own religion, his own home, and his own dreams.
Yet CK hadn’t chosen where he was born. Among the requirements of those who grew up in China were filial duties. And so, for three weeks, CK woke at four o’clock each morning, carried Grandma to the bathroom, and then to the kitchen where he made breakfast for her. He’d go to the market for groceries, then stop by the hospital to see his father before heading home to cook lunch and dinner for Grandma. He would roll her wheelchair outside each day for fresh air. During the night, he would wake twice to carry her to the bathroom. When his father had recuperated enough to return home, CK took care of him, too.
“It wasn’t easy to live with my father again,” CK told me after he returned. Grandma could no longer speak, so his father had become accustomed to living in silence. He filled the void by talking to himself, and had stopped responding to CK when he spoke to him.
This silent treatment was a departure from CK’s childhood, when his father would spend hours patiently listening to his father’s rants about the system. Now his father had become a mumbling, empty shell. CK admitted he didn’t know which was worse.
There was one time CK’s father had become coherent enough to order him to liquidate the sandwich shop. It was losing too much money, he told his son.
“Someday I might take his advice,” CK said with a frown. “But I’ve still got savings. I honestly don’t know how much I’ve got in my bank account, really.”
I took this as a good sign. He lived frugally, and had enough padding from his Polverini work to fatten up a retirement fund. And for years, he’d been able to send two thousand yuan home to each parent to cover their monthly expenses.
ONE AFTERNOON while CK was alone in the apartment with Grandma, she asked him to carry her to bed.
“The way she asked me, something in her face, I felt strange,” CK told me. “I said, ‘Okay Grandma,’ and put her in bed.”
Two minutes later, CK still had a bad feeling about the request. He pushed open the bedroom door.
“She had tied one end of a scarf around the pole of the headboard,” he told me.
The other end of the scarf was tied around her neck. She was trying to roll herself off the bed. CK frantically stepped toward her and lifted her frail body back onto the center of the mattress. He unfurled the scarf from her neck and the two collapsed upon the bed, grandson embracing grandmother, in the quiet bedroom they’d shared long ago.
“BUSY MEANS you’re making money. Once you turn idle? That’s when you start to lose it,” Auntie Fu said, motioning to her husband.
Uncle Feng was tucked under the covers, flat on his back, snoozing through a health program that blared on his television. Auntie had switched hers off when I arrived.
It was the dead of winter. On my bike ride over, the brittle, naked plane trees lining the street allowed a clear view of the buildings above: low, ornate villas built by Europeans a century ago set against a towering backdrop of glass and steel built by the Chinese. Amid the past decade’s flurry of construction, it seemed no one was ever idle in Shanghai.
Especially Auntie Fu. At the end of the Year of the Horse, I tallied her tangle of investment schemes: the sexual-health-pad pyramid scheme, a Wenzhou firm dealing in gold bars, a company that dubbed itself “China’s largest antique trading platform,” an Inner Mongolia business that sold medicinal tea squeezed from a shrub called sea buckthorn, the mushroom company that had flown Fu to their headquarters, and of course, Gatewang, the e-commerce terminal company.
None appeared to have a real future. The mushroom company had been labeled a scam by a local judge, and the company employees promptly sentenced to prison. Gatewang was the subject of several online forums concluding it was fraudulent, too. And those were the only two I’d looked into.
All told, Fu had dumped the equivalent of fifty thousand dollars into get-rich-quick schemes. It was nearly her entire life’s savings.
The pair’s property investments seemed just as dismally chaotic. Since returning from Xinjiang in 1993 after the birth of their first son, the couple had acquired five properties. I took stock of their real estate portfolio: Two were eventually demolished to make way for Shanghai’s development, one was discovered to be illegally converted, Uncle Feng sold another to buy his mistress a new home, and the last was the run-down ground-level unit the couple shared on the Street of Eternal Happiness. Among these, two were at the center of lawsuits Fu had filed years ago, one of them against her own husband. Neither had been resolved.
How did a life’s work come to this? Auntie Fu and I reviewed the details with cups of sea buckthorn tea, over which she’d occasionally lapse into a sales pitch. “It’s good for your heart! Buy a box and sell them to your friends!”
I glanced over at Uncle Feng under the covers, and yearned to curl up in a fetal position beside him. On the surface, these two appeared to live a life of simplicity—a tiny apartment, modest pensions, children and grandchildren to visit each weekend—yet underneath were chaotic lives filled with deception, heartbreak, and greed.
Uncle Feng snored while we finished our tea. Auntie quietly picked up the remote control beside him and turned his television’s volume down. She walked over to the corner of the room and reached into a box with both hands. She gently pulled out a photo album. She stood, illuminated against the light of the TV for a moment, wiping the album carefully with a single square of toilet paper. She put on her eyeglasses and sat beside me at the table.
“Last time you were here, you said you wanted to see our old photos from Xinjiang,” she said, handing me the album.
It was covered in white silk and displayed a picture of a mother panda eating bamboo with its cub. The photos inside spanned decades. I paged through it slowly, pausing to take a look at the earliest photo of the couple. It was a black-and-white portrait from 1971. Auntie and Uncle were newlyweds in their twenties. Uncle Feng sported a newsboy cap tilted to the side, and a tattered collared shirt with horizontal stripes. The shirt opened to reveal a broad chest and skin darkened from days spent outside in the desert sun. His teeth were white and perfectly straight. He looked confident and handsome and he smiled with his whole face, without a trace of the cynicism that had come to define his personality.
Auntie Fu sat in front of him, leaning backward, nestled into his s
houlder. Her dark cheeks framed a broad, joyous smile. The two looked like a happy young couple in love.
The studio backdrop was a painted landscape of a pine forest along the shores of a still lake reflecting snowcapped mountains above. “That’s an actual place in Xinjiang,” Fu said, gently placing her index finger on the backdrop, ignoring her and her husband’s smiling faces. “It’s not far from where we lived.”
Fu smiled, tapping the photo. “Once Gatewang is listed and I make my fortune, I’m going to buy a house there and move back.”
This was her dream: to return to the untamed frontier, where rivers ran freely and mountains were reflected in crystal-clear alpine lakes, a place of beauty and simplicity.
It would be a long wait for her ticket home. Her shares in Gatewang remained worthless; the company would likely never be listed. Each time I visited, I asked about Gatewang’s progress.
“Not yet,” she would say with a trace of disappointment. But then her face usually lit up again. “Just wait till next month!”
I had heard her repeat this eleven times in the past year.
That spring, the month finally arrived. “Gatewang’s on the London exchange!” Auntie announced. “I should be collecting my money any day now.”
I hurried back to my office to confirm the news, only to shake my head with disappointment. Zhu Jun, Gatewang’s executive director, had acquired an interest in a similar-sounding company based in London named GATE Ventures. It was a shell company that had just listed on the Alternative Investment Market, a submarket of the London Stock Exchange that had fewer regulatory requirements.
Conveniently, the stock code for the company was GATE, and Mr. Zhu announced at Gatewang’s annual meeting, in March 2015: “We’ve listed!” Investors asked for the ticker. “GATE,” he told them, referencing the code for a completely different shell company with a similar name.
“This sort of fraud is remarkable,” exclaimed one investor blog about Gatewang’s maneuver.
Fortunately, Gatewang wasn’t Auntie Fu’s only ticket back to Xinjiang. Her sister lived there, and Auntie could stay with her while she searched for a retirement home. Still grasping her photo album in their dark apartment, I glanced back at Uncle Feng. He was sound asleep. “Would you both move there?” I whispered.
“No,” she said without bothering to lower her voice. “I’ll go alone. And I don’t intend to come back.”
We flipped through the photo album some more. The last picture I saw was from the early 1980s, after they’d had three children. Their youngest son, who looked to be about four years old, sat on Auntie Fu’s lap. Their daughter and their eldest son—about eight years before he was to drown in a river—stood behind their parents.
I looked closely at the older boy. He was tall, he had Uncle’s good looks, and his hand rested on his father’s shoulder. Uncle Feng wore an army uniform and a dark green cap with a red star on it. The three children stared into the camera, stone-faced. Uncle looked angry, as if he had just yelled at his wayward offspring. The backdrop was another beautiful Xinjiang alpine setting, this time a meadow of wildflowers with snowcapped mountains beyond.
The only one smiling was Auntie Fu.
JULY IS LOW SEASON for flower sales. Official functions are on hold, weddings are usually pushed off to the drier, milder spring and autumn months, and there is not a single Chinese holiday.
One Sunday afternoon in July of 2014, I pedaled down the Street of Eternal Happiness toward Zhao’s flower shop. The pavement was wet from a midday thunderstorm, and the sun had just emerged from behind the clouds. I slowed as I passed 2nd Floor Your Sandwich and caught a glimpse of CK serving up pasta to lunch patrons. Farther down, Fu and Feng’s kitchen window was pulled down and padlocked; Feng had given up the congyoubing business for the summer. When I arrived at Zhao’s, I found her lounging with her daughter-in-law Zhang Min on tiny wicker chairs in the shade of the plane trees in the shop’s doorway. They fanned themselves as two-year-old Shuo Shuo raced miniature sports cars inside.
“You’re here! Eat!” shouted Zhao, dropping her fan. She slid a butcher knife into a fat watermelon. I grabbed a chair and sat down between the two women. Zhao handed me a slice. The sun was high in the sky, pushing the temperature past 90 degrees. In the green canopy above, the first cicadas of the year had hatched. The pitch of their loud, mechanical drone wavered in a natural harmony with the breeze blowing down the street. Below, we quietly ate and watched traffic on the street surge then stop, surge and stop—Shanghai’s slow and steady heartbeat.
This was my favorite month in the city. Schools were out and most of the French Concession’s foreign residents had returned home to the United States, Europe, Australia, and other countries for the summer; the absence of locals gave the neighborhood a feeling of tranquillity.
Typhoon season would soon begin in earnest; the winds that normally blew from the polluted north and west would gradually begin shifting, carrying clean air from the East China Sea.
July was Zhao’s month of rest and contemplation. From her perch underneath the lush foliage of the plane trees, her thoughts naturally hovered over matters unsettled.
“Big Sun’s turning twenty-nine after the next New Year. He’s too old!” she groused, tossing her watermelon rind on the sidewalk. “I’ve already got two girls lined up in our hometown. One is twenty-four, born in the Year of the Horse. The other is an older woman—thirty! But she’s educated. She majored in engineering in college.”
Zhao took her phone from her pocket and showed me a photo of the younger girl puckering her lips toward the camera. “He already told me he’s not interested in this one,” she said with a sigh.
Zhao had good news. Big Sun had quit his job as a hairdresser to accept another as a futures trader in Shanghai. He had landed a job with a company that helped Chinese investors buy shares on the New York Stock Exchange. It was commission-based, and he would have to live with his mother, but Zhao was pleased. It presented an opportunity to submit him to an intensified barrage of blind dates. It was also fitting relief for the guilt she had felt since he was forced back to Zaozhuang for school.
Although Big Sun had always been driven to learn, the poor results in school meant he had wandered from one dead-end job to another without fulfilling his intellectual needs. Yet the menial work gave him the free time to teach himself. He had shown a passion for investment strategies, and he spent many hours over the last couple of years sitting in an empty barber chair poring through books on the subject. This was a career path that would bring out the best in him, Zhao believed. Most important, her boy would be back home with her in Shanghai.
Where one son would return, the other would leave. Little Sun and his wife faced the decision Zhao had more than twenty years ago when she arrived in Shanghai: a son’s education. Little Shuo Shuo’s fate was connected to his hometown. Would Shuo Shuo attend kindergarten in Shanghai, an outsider among Shanghainese, or would he go back home to Zaozhuang, where his hukou, or household registration, allowed him to eventually attend middle and high school?
“It’s not just about his studies,” his mother said, fanning herself. “It’s about his socialization.”
Zhang sighed loudly. “If you don’t have enough money, nothing is easy.”
She continued. “Other kids’ fathers are engineers or managers. Yesterday someone in the park asked him what his father did for a living. He said he didn’t know, and he asked me. I said, ‘He works in a kitchen.’ He said, ‘Oh, my daddy works in a kitchen.’ ”
Zhao nodded her head. “When Big Sun studied here, the other kids called him ‘farmer.’ I don’t want my grandson to have to deal with that.”
“If you’re not from Shanghai,” said Zhang, “no matter how good of a student you are, it’s useless. Teachers won’t cultivate you.”
There were many reasons for this. Migrant children didn’t have parents inside their teachers’ social network like Shanghainese children did, they didn’t speak the same nati
ve dialect, and their parents generally weren’t as involved as Shanghainese parents in their educational progress.
Back in Zaozhuang, Zhao believed, teachers would help him along. It was simply a matter of pride. “Teachers will say, ‘There’s talent from Shandong.’ But in Shanghai, teachers wouldn’t bother. They just see us as waidi ren—outsiders.”
Zhao had dealt with this discrimination for years. She was a good neighbor, always buying fruit and snacks for the shop owners on her block. She took care of her neighbors’ children when parents had errands to run, and her neighbors—nearly all of them migrants, too—took care of her in return. When she had broken her ankle, the entire block came to her aid. But her Shanghainese neighbors seemed to lack this community spirit.
“Local Shanghainese don’t like us,” Zhao said. “They’re jealous of us if we make more money than them, and if we don’t, they see us as impoverished thieves. The truth is, the Shanghainese are generally lazy. They don’t want to eat bitter.”
“At least back in our hometown, nobody’s going to call him ‘farmer,’ ” said Zhang.
Both of them giggled. “Stop being so polite! Eat more watermelon!” Zhao urged me.
I took a piece, and so did Zhao’s daughter in-law.
We ate together, three outsiders sharing thoughts on the insiders.
Little Sun and his wife would likely send Shuo Shuo back home, that much was clear. But would they go, too? Little Sun worked as a chef at a Greek restaurant, earning at least twice as much as he would make back home. His wife, Zhang, was now a manager of a small French restaurant, earning more than her husband. They had considered asking Zhang’s mother to take care of the boy, but the woman was barely literate, and she couldn’t help with homework. One of them would have to give up his or her job and head home with their son.
