Street of Eternal Happiness

Zusatztext 44261195 Informationen zum Autor Rob Schmitz Klappentext An unforgettable portrait of individuals who hope! struggle! and grow along a single street cutting through the heart of Shanghai! from one of the most acclaimed broadcast journalists reporting on China. Modern Shanghai: a global city in the midst of a renaissance! where dreamers arrive each day to partake in a mad torrent of capital! ideas! and opportunity. Marketplace's Rob Schmitz is one of them. He immerses himself in his neighborhood! forging deep relationships with ordinary people who see in the city's sleek skyline a brighter future! and a chance to rewrite their destinies. There's Zhao! whose path from factory floor to shopkeeper is sidetracked by her desperate measures to ensure a better future for her sons. Down the street lives Auntie Fu! a fervent capitalist forever trying to improve herself with religion and get-rich-quick schemes while keeping her skeptical husband at bay. Up a flight of stairs! musician and café owner CK sets up shop to attract young dreamers like himself! but learns he's searching for something more. As Schmitz becomes more involved in their lives! he makes surprising discoveries which untangle the complexities of modern China: A mysterious box of letters that serve as a portal to a family's-and country's-dark past! and an abandoned neighborhood where fates have been violently altered by unchecked power and greed. A tale of 21st-century China! Street of Eternal Happiness profiles China's distinct generations through multifaceted characters who illuminate an enlightening! humorous! and at times heartrending journey along the winding road to the Chinese Dream. Each story adds another layer of humanity and texture to modern China! a tapestry also woven with Schmitz's insight as a foreign correspondent. The result is an intimate and surprising portrait that dispenses with the tired stereotypes of a country we think we know! immersing us instead in the vivid stories of the people who make up one of the world's most captivating cities. This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof Copyright © 2016 Rob Schmitz CHAPTER 1 ???810? STREET OF ETERNAL HAPPINESS, No. 810 CK AND THE SYSTEM THE STREET OF ETERNAL HAPPINESS is two miles long. In the winter when its tangled trees are naked of foliage, you can see past their branches and catch a view of the city's signature skyline in the distance: The Jin Mao Tower, the Shanghai World Financial Center, and Shanghai Tower. The three giants stand within blocks of one another, each of them taller than New York City's Empire State Building. Below, people are too busy to take in the scenery. Today will be the first day of life for babies born at the Shanghai No. 1 Maternity Hospital along the street's midsection. For several souls at Huashan Hospital's emergency room at the street's western end, it will be their last. In between there is life, in all its facets: a bearded beggar sits on the sidewalk and plays the bamboo flute, lovers step around him hand in hand, cars honk and lurch around two men spitting and thrashing over whose car hit whose, a crowd of uniformed school children gathers and stares, an old woman with a cane yells at a vendor in disgust over the price of lychees, and the rest of the street pitches forward with a constant flow of people. Life here is loud, dirty, and raw. Every inch of the street pulses with it. On a map, the street is a tiny squiggle to the southwest of People's Square, the center point of Shanghai. My home is at the western end of that squiggle. It looks out over a canopy of leaves that appears to hover two stories above the ground most of the year. Below, the trees are the only living beings standing still. I spend mornings zigzagging around their trunks from sidewalk to pavement and then back again among pedestrians vying for space ...

**Praise for *Street of Eternal Happiness

A *World Magazine Best Book of the Year

A Telegraph Best Travel Book of the Year

“Poignant [and] enjoyable… Schmitz’s eye for scenes and ear for dialogue give an immediacy to his stories that more expository works often lack.”
—*New York Times Book Review*

“A portrait of China from the stories of a single Shanghai street…a poignant microcosm.”
—*The Economist

“Enjoyable and illuminating… The great virtue of these books is that they offer Chinese people a voice, something that is often lacking in news coverage. Schmitz writes with great affection about the shopkeepers and other residents of his street: in telling their stories, he shows how the goals of the Chinese state have ‘often stood in the way of individual dreams.’”
*—*The Guardian*

“Hopes and struggles rise to the surface in this intimate portrait of modern China.”
—NationalGeographic.com

“Educational and entertaining… rich with voices… The people [Schmitz] features are…fully rounded characters, whose stories emerge in chat after chat, chapter after chapter, so we feel we are getting to know them as the writer does... [Readers] will feel much wiser about China and the Chinese than when they started.”
—The Telegraph

“This beautifully conceived and written book conveys the joys, the tragedies, the comedy, and the vivid humanity of modern China. No one will talk about ‘China's rise’ or ‘the China model’ in the same way after reading it, and years from now people will turn to this book to understand the China of this era.”
—James Fallows, author of China Airborne and Postcards from Tomorrow Square

“Street of Eternal Happiness is a marvel of place-based reporting. This single road illuminates the complexities, contradictions, and funny wonder of today’s China. This book is really about family—the most eternal force on any street in the country.”
—Peter Hessler, author of River Town, * Oracle Bones, and *Country Driving
 
“Rob Schmitz has given us a treasure: a patient portrait of an impatient country, a China that is utterly true to life in its beauty and heartache, tenderness and greed. His story is told in real lives that are, like Shanghai itself, modern and imperfect, romantic and ruthlessly practical. Reading this is as close as most people will come to living there.”
—Evan Osnos, National Book Award winning author of Age of Ambition
 
“Schmitz peels back the layers of a single street to discover ambition, reinvention, faith, corruption, murder, and heartbreak. In this intimate and revealing book, a two-mile stretch of road embodies the dreams and dramas of modern China.”
—Leslie T. Chang, author of Factory Girls
 
“Rob Schmitz is a master storyteller who leads his readers into the heart and history of modern China. Street of Eternal Happiness is, in turn, funny, moving, tragic and—ultimately—emotionally satisfying. Nobody can pretend to understand Shanghai and contemporary China without reading it.”
—Adam Minter, author of *Junkyard Planet

“At last, an intimate look at daily life in contemporary, convivial Shanghai. All great cities have a great book that captures their rise or fall; *Street of Eternal Happiness is Shanghai’s.”
—Michael Meyer, author of In Manchuria and The Last Days of Old Beijing
 
“A kaleidoscope of Chinese history, from famine and Cultural Revolution to one-child policy. Above all, these tales illustrate the perils and hopes of living the Chinese Dream, written with penetrating insight and charming fluidity. A delight.”
—Mei Fong, P…