by Rob Schmitz
With that, CK began playing one: a slow, sad melody that conjured up a cold, lonely street in Paris. Or Shanghai.
CK’S FIRST JOB INTERVIEW after college was at Pearl River Piano, China’s largest accordion manufacturer. All the practice as a child had finally paid off. After the encounter with his father’s razor blade, he’d come to accept the idea that he would spend the remainder of his teenage years living under his father’s roof. So he decided to focus on what would come after. He worked hard in school, practiced the accordion, and earned a spot a few hundred miles from home at a college in the southern metropolis of Guangzhou, where he studied music. His Pearl River interviewer was impressed that he played the instrument, and within minutes CK found himself in the office of the president, who handed him an accordion and removed his own from a case next to his desk. The two played a duet together, and when CK was asked to play a solo, he thought about it carefully.
“I picked a very complicated piece: Liszt’s ‘La Campanella.’ I got the job.”
CK was assigned a position in the company’s accordion sales and marketing department. For the first time in his life, CK’s father was proud of him. Pearl River was one of a handful of state-owned musical instrument makers that had survived the country’s ambitious market reforms. Sales were picking up, thanks to China’s rising consumer class. CK would receive a competitive salary, health benefits, and a generous state pension. But the work was mind numbing. “Each day you’d work two or three hours and then you’d run out of things to do, so you’d just sit around chatting, reading the newspaper,” CK said. “Others used the time to cultivate relationships with each other, but I didn’t see the point of that.”
Instead, CK spent his free time looking for a more interesting job. After a quick search, he found one: Polverini, an Italian accordion maker, had opened a tiny factory a dozen miles west of Shanghai. The company sought an assistant to liaise between its Italian factory manager and its Chinese workers.
Polverini’s accordions were world-class—Pearl River accordions seemed like plastic toys in comparison. The job would be technically challenging: CK would have to learn every step in the manufacturing process so that he could help teach low-skilled assembly line workers how to do it.
CK read the job posting over and over.
“It sounded interesting,” he told me. “I could finally learn something.”
When CK called home to say he found a new job outside the state system, his father was livid. “You can’t just walk away from the iron rice bowl!” his dad screamed over the phone. He would earn less at Polverini, and he’d also lose the state benefits package he’d gotten at Pearl River.
“Suddenly, my dad felt unsafe,” CK said. “He was extremely angry with me. He kept repeating the same thing: ‘When you work for the state, your future is unlimited!’ ”
In the early 2000s, though, that was no longer true. CK’s father still hadn’t found a job since he was laid off from Hengyang City Number Two Construction Company. At forty-seven, CK’s mother was pressured into early retirement after Hengyang Chemical Factory’s orders were decimated by new competition from China’s nascent private sector. In 2001, China had entered the World Trade Organization, and cushy jobs at state-owned enterprises were becoming rare. Capitalism was the new norm. CK began to feel that his parents, exhausted from a lifetime of dependency on the state, were now adrift in these new surroundings, and each had begun looking to him for financial stability.
CK explained his decision patiently. He wasn’t learning anything by watching others socialize at Pearl River. At Polverini he’d at last acquire the skills to develop himself and his individual talents. This is something you should be able to relate to, he told his father gently.
The system had turned out exactly as CK’s father had explained it to him as a boy: it was there to restrain and control you, rather than to enable you to learn and grow. But as his father got older, he began to realize the importance of money, and the stability that the system provided. “When I started working at Pearl River, he suddenly embraced the system. I didn’t know how to talk to him about escaping it.”
CK took the job with Polverini and left for Shanghai. His new roommate—a middle-aged Italian engineer—also happened to be his new boss. The two shared a passion for tinkering. As boys, each had spent afternoons taking things apart and piecing them back together; now they would get paid to do it. At Polverini’s cramped factory on the outskirts of Shanghai, their mission was to modify the brand’s classic accordion to bring its price down. Chinese accordion players tended to either drop thousands of dollars on an expensive Italian instrument, or penny-pinch to buy the cheapest Chinese brand they could find. There was no accordion between the two price points, and therein lay CK’s mission: Creating an affordable Polverini, tailored for China’s rising middle class.
CK spent months on the assembly line, learning about every part of the instrument. In Italy, his boss designed Ferraris. An accordion was an even more complicated machine, he told CK.
“An accordion is very small, and you have more than three thousand tiny parts inside of it, so a millimeter misstep is a huge mistake,” CK explained. “You must have a good understanding of chemicals, wood, steel, how they interact inside the machine, and the sounds they create.”
Within a year at Polverini, CK had mastered every step. In the years to come, CK’s boss encouraged him to learn more, and he became a jack-of-all-trades. “I was a manager, a translator, a supply chain point person, a customer service agent, I made the prototypes, I was in charge of sound QC, and by the end, I could build an accordion from scratch.”
Within four years, CK went from making $400 a month to $4,000, jumping from the average salary in China to that in the United States. For the first time, Shanghai—with its fancy cars, scenic tree-lined boulevards, and international appeal—began to feel like home.
“CAN YOU PLAY something else?” I asked.
It was eleven o’clock and CK had been playing for over half an hour. 2nd Floor Your Sandwich had been empty all morning. The lunch hour was approaching, and soon hundreds of hungry office workers would be spewed onto the sidewalks of the Street of Eternal Happiness. CK checked the clock, paused, and then nodded, his hands expanding the instrument, letting it breathe.
“I wrote this for a girl I once loved. It’s called ‘2-27.’ That’s the date we met.”
It began with a sustained note in a minor key, and then another, and another, haunting tones patiently repeating like the deep breaths of someone fast asleep. Then, a playful melody arose, unpolished at parts, like a boy strolling down the street without a care in the world, whistling to himself.
CK closed his eyes again, and I stole a glance at his wrists. The wounds of his childhood had long since healed. His music filled his shop. And for the moment, the system disappeared.
While the north side of my apartment had a view of the Street of Eternal Happiness, the southern floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked a walled-in vacant lot of weeds and stray cats. It was punctuated here and there with the burned-out corpses of traditional gray-brick homes. Occasionally, I saw people emerge from the hollow structures, looking skyward and moving slowly as if the daylight was an interruption.
Homeless squatters, I assumed.
I often stood at my window and wondered about the carnage. It seemed strange that a space the size of three football fields in the middle of one of Shanghai’s—and China’s—swankiest neighborhoods was left to rot. I asked the owner of the apartment upstairs about it. He nodded, pensive, taking a draw from his cigarette and exhaling fumes onto his window as we stood there, taking in the expanse of space.
“It was going to be a big modern complex like ours, and the developer began to demolish most of the neighborhood,” he said, pausing to take another drag. “But a few locals wouldn’t budge. Mei banfa,” he said. There was no other way.
This made little sense. Showdowns between developers and local residents standing in the path of
the wrecking ball were common in China, and they almost always unfolded the same way: City officials identified a good site for a luxury condo complex, there was usually a run-down neighborhood in the way, and they would negotiate relocation deals with the residents. They would demolish the neighborhood, auction the land to the highest bidder, and then fill city coffers and officials’ pockets with renminbi. Should there be angry residents who refused to budge for the new development, there was usually a way to deal with them. There was always a banfa for Chinese developers.
When I had asked the landlord upstairs about the neighborhood our own complex had replaced, he brushed away the question. “Just a bunch of old, run-down hovels,” he said with a swipe of his hand.
Later, when a historian showed me an old browned map of the neighborhood from the 1940s, I noticed a maze of alleyways snaking south from the Street of Eternal Happiness down through dense rows of tiny residential plots where my high-rise apartment building now stood. I peered closer and counted well over a hundred structures inside one square block. I thought about the hundreds of families who had lived where my family now slept. Where did they go? Did they leave peacefully?
MY WIFE AND I had left our home in 2010 to move to Shanghai with our eighteen-month-old son, Rainer, whom we nicknamed “Rainey.” We were welcomed by a smiling blue cartoon character with rubbery arms and legs—a cross between Gumby and a Smurf—waving hello. His name was Haibao, the official mascot of the 2010 world’s fair, and he was on nearly every billboard on our ride from the airport. Tens of millions of visitors from the farthest reaches of China were descending upon Shanghai to celebrate the city’s arrival on the world stage, and Haibao followed them everywhere. He waved hello from the island of the luggage carousel, the airport’s greeting hall, taxicab seatbacks, and inside subway stations. He was the twenty-first-century version of the Mao portrait that had adorned public spaces throughout Communist China decades ago: ever-present, always watching. Mao looked dignified, confident, and a little scary. Haibao’s deer-in-the-headlights gaze made him appear slightly lost and vacant.
Rainey shouted and waved back whenever he caught a glimpse of him, screaming “Blue!” each time.
“That’s Haibao,” I told him.
“Hai-bao,” Rainey said slowly. He repeated it, smiling. “Haibao…Haibao…”
It was his first word in Chinese.
One of the Haibao billboards caught my attention, too. Haibao posed politely with his arms behind his back, in front of the glowing Shanghai skyline. Above loomed bright yellow characters: .
“The city…makes life more beautiful,” I said out loud, translating the phrase to no one in particular, struggling to salvage the remnants of a language I hadn’t spoken in years.
The slogan was the official theme of the world’s fair. Its English equivalent was simpler: “Better City, Better Life.” Shanghai was being showcased as the model Chinese city, and China’s government was moving forward with an ambitious urbanization campaign, working hard to convince hundreds of millions of rural Chinese that a city life was a better one.
It was a stark departure from the Chinese propaganda I had grown accustomed to years ago. I first came to China near the end of the twentieth century. I was in my early twenties, working as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the countryside. My salary was $120 a month, twice as much as the 800 million Chinese—roughly two-thirds of the population—who lived on less than $2 a day. Hand-painted signs on the edge of my town reminded residents in bright red characters that little girls were people, too—a warning against the quiet tradition of infanticide among farming families who preferred boys.
Fifteen years later, as I arrived with my family to work as a foreign correspondent in China’s wealthiest city, the change was remarkable. The country was about to oust Japan to become the second-largest economy on the planet. Hundreds of millions of Chinese had worked themselves out of poverty. The view from our apartment was a jagged skyline clogged with hundreds of gleaming high-rises. Still, the prominent displays of government-issued directives remained. Sure, Haibao’s rollicking billboard presence was more adorable than the propaganda of the ’90s, yet it was there for the same reason: to remind people of what was right and what was wrong in today’s China. Killing your baby daughter is bad. Cities are good.
Shanghai, with its mix of sleek, modern skyscrapers and green, leafy neighborhoods of nineteenth-century European homes, was a city at its peak. The government had spent the equivalent of $45 billion remaking it, building seven subway lines in five years, the world’s longest subway network. Journeys to and from this city now took place on bullet trains traveling at 200 miles per hour. If this century belonged to the Chinese, Shanghai led the way.
Yet change had come quickly, and old habits remained. Social etiquette wasn’t part of China’s growth strategy; people commonly spat on sidewalks along the Street of Eternal Happiness, threw refuse onto it, and elbowed one another to get to the front of any line. Elderly Shanghainese men in the neighborhood commonly wore pajamas in public. Children were accustomed to squatting and urinating in open view of passersby. Pet owners left dog feces to ferment on sidewalks. This was all standard conduct in urban China, where millions of migrants just off the farm mingled with sophisticated urbanites, each faction wary of the other.
What would visiting foreigners think? Beijing had been trying to eradicate these habits since the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, with varying degrees of success. Alongside “Better City, Better Life,” the characters littered Shanghai’s advertising space. Pronounced “Wen-Ming,” the words translated to “Civilized,” and signs instructed citizens to help make a “civilized city.” The Shanghai government stepped up its efforts in the months leading to the fair. Copies of an etiquette book were mailed to residents. How to Be a Lovely Shanghainese was compiled by the city’s Commission for Cultural and Ethical Progress in 2006. The guidebook’s 242 pages contained pointers on everything from how to cut your hair (“Your hairstyle should not be flashy; just natural and simple”) to how to eat Western food (“Don’t pick up the bowl or plate with your hands and tilt it toward your mouth to eat”).
For native Shanghainese along the Street of Eternal Happiness—those whose ancestors were from the region—the need for such a book was an uncomfortable topic. They had always considered themselves among the most sophisticated Chinese. They’d been ruled by Europe’s most civilized powers and had enjoyed the culture and comforts introduced to them by Western residents. Its unique history had made Shanghai one of the great world cities. What use would the “Paris of the East” have for an etiquette guide?
The truth was, nearly half the people who now lived in Shanghai—up to 10 million of its 24 million residents—were workers who had recently moved from poorer parts of China. They were known pejoratively as waidi ren—literally, “outside people”—and How to Be a Lovely Shanghainese seemed to be written with them in mind.
One chapter began with the stark admission “Shanghainese are generally considered to be cold, detached, and unemotional, unlike people from other places who are rather warm and exuberant,” before setting the record straight:
Urban residents, especially those from the city, are generally cold to strangers because of the current population flow, vast differences between people, and a low trust level. Even in the U.S., people from New York or Chicago are less warm-hearted to those from small towns…Most of Shanghai is now occupied by waidi ren.
The city government authors were on the defense, inside a twenty-first-century China where everyone else was on the move. The section “Competition and Modesty” implored Shanghainese to accept more menial work and keep an open mind, as migrants were pushing Shanghai residents out of parts of the labor force:
Shanghainese aren’t willing to sell vegetables at the wet market or run barbershops. They aren’t willing to be construction workers. There are even fewer Shanghainese starting businesses outside Shanghai or abroad. To fight over small things and to remain ambivalent ove
r the big things remains a negative spirit of the Shanghainese.
One of the main conclusions from how to “Correctly Understand the Shanghainese Character” was that their dominant flaw seemed to be blaming others for those defects. But How to Be a Lovely Shanghainese didn’t discuss that.
OUR NEW HOME stood eight stories above the Street of Eternal Happiness, nestled inside a complex named the Summit. The development contained seven white-tiled high-rises, one of them standing forty stories. Had it been plopped down in my home state of Minnesota, the Summit would have been the seventh-tallest building. But in Shanghai, it was just another collection of towers woven into a tapestry of hundreds of skyscrapers of all shapes and colors. The Summit towers surrounded a rectangular courtyard with a curved pond, a grassy pitch, and two playgrounds.
Underneath was a multilevel garage jammed with the spoils of China’s rising economy: millions of dollars’ worth of neon-colored luxury vehicles. A year later I would stroll through this same garage with Rainey, horrified by his expanding Chinese vocabulary, parroting the propaganda of consumerism.
“Baoma! Benchi! Baoshijie! Falali!” he’d yell: BMW, Benz, Porsche, Ferrari.
The south side of our apartment faced a road named Peaceful Happiness; the north side, Eternal Happiness. Wherever we looked, there was happiness.
Except when we happened to glance past the stucco wall lining Peaceful Happiness Road and into the burned-out neighborhood beyond. That autumn, I took walks with Rainey around the perimeter of the abandoned lot. From the ground level, it appeared nothing was amiss. The ten-foot-high wall surrounded it on all sides, world’s fair posters greeting us every five steps or so. “Haibao! Haibao!” Rainey screamed.