Street of Eternal Happiness

This book was reviewed on two separate occasions in World magazine.  With two reviews, and the China connections of our son, it looked like a book of interest.  And it was.

"Street of Eternal Happiness" is the actual name of a street in Shanghai.  (I found during my short trip there, three years ago, that over-the-top names are common.  I remember construction on new apartment complexes with names like "Heaven on Earth" and "Wonderful Bliss.")  The author, Rob Schmitz, subtitles the book "Big City Dreams Along a Shanghaii Road."  He then chronicles the lives of several people, moving from one story to another one, throughout the 311 pages.  He is well equipped to do so:  the street has been home to him and his family for several years, during his journalistic stint in China.

I read the book this summer - nonfiction books like this are my favorite genre - and Schmitz does this format very well.  For example, he tells the story of Auntie Fu and Uncle Feng - an older couple who run a pancake shop.  They argue endlessly.  She is caught up with "prosperity gospel" advocates and he is angered by that.  

Page 79: "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."

That helps to explain why the "prosperity gospel" was attractive to Auntie Fu.  It also shows insight into Chinese thinking that we in the West have no understanding of.

Schmitz talks about Mayor Chen - whose home was ripped away for redevelopment.  And Zhao, who thought nothing of leaving her family in a western province to come run a flower shop on the Street of Eternal Happiness in Shanghai.  She wanted a better life.  And CK, who sells accordions from his second-floor sandwich shop, whose fortunes vary from day to day.

The book is good.  I recommend it to anyone interested in nonfiction accounts, told in story style, with insight into Chinese thinking and culture.