by Rob Schmitz
I’m hungry, so I stop, lock my bike, and join the line in front of the window.
“Try it. If it doesn’t taste good, don’t pay,” a gruff voice booms from inside the shop. I see a weathered, wrinkled hand emerging from behind the frame to shove a congyoubing—a scallion pancake, a popular Shanghai snack—into the slender hands of a young woman in a fashionable pink coat. The line is beginning to grow behind her.
“Shifu,” she says, using the honorific master to refer to the old cook, “I don’t want a scallion pancake. Do you have youdunzi?”
Youdunzi—literally “oily block”—are fried turnip cakes, another Shanghai treat. The man wipes sweat from his forehead, the oil on his hand making his silver bangs stand straight up.
“Yes, of course!” shouts the old man. “You’ll have to wait, though, while I make a batch. Why don’t you take a scallion pancake instead?”
“Your pancakes cost a kuai more than anywhere else.”
“That’s because mine taste better than anyone else’s! I won’t charge you one fen if you don’t like them.” The young woman pushes her lips into a pout. She eventually orders three more.
Snacks are big in Shanghai. From xiaolongbao—“little basket buns”—to xie ke huang—crab shell pie—it’s hard to walk a block without catching a whiff of the homemade goodies vendors cook from pushcart stovetops or from their own street-level apartments. Inside the old cook’s kitchen is a mess of partially cut garden onions, carrots, and lotus root on a tree stump cutting board, a red plastic bucket filled with batter, an electric griddle jam-packed with scallion pancakes, and a wok full of oil over a high gas flame. He plops dollops of turnip cake batter into the wok—it’s a mess of shredded turnip, mushrooms, and celery packed inside raw dough—and a scalding sizzle drowns out the sound of scooters buzzing through the neighborhood outside the old man’s window.
His kitchen is inside a stucco building that is more than a hundred years old. An intricate, colorful tile pattern on the floor suggests this structure used to be a wealthy residence. But, like many houses and mansions in the former French Concession, its occupants had vacated at some point during decades of war and Communist campaigns, and repopulated with commoners who divided the structures up into tiny, crowded apartments.
The old cook lives in a dark room tucked into the back of the ground floor. He shares the kitchen with tenants in four other apartments upstairs. When each of them descends the stairs and walks by on their way to work, they nod a cheerful “Zao,” “Good morning,” to the old man. The fact that he’s taken over the entire communal space to run his business doesn’t appear to be a problem. He’s the senior resident and he owns the deed to his room, so he notches above the younger renters in the apartment block hierarchy. Although they might complain among themselves, they pay the old man the appropriate amount of respect.
“Hey you! Buy a scallion pancake, will you?” shouts Shifu to passersby.
The line outside the window has dissipated, and he’s trying to unload the rest of his pancakes. A middle-aged man in glasses slows down to read the poorly written blue Chinese characters on a dry erase board hanging from Shifu’s window, but he doesn’t order anything.
The old cook’s name is Feng Jianguo, “Veng Jiguo” in his native Shanghai dialect. I simply call him Uncle Feng. Uncle Feng rarely flashes a full smile. He smirks when he’s trying to sell snacks, or when he hears something he doesn’t believe, but his face is usually locked into a skeptical Bruce Willis look—wondering when the other guy will strike first. Uncle Feng’s stocky torso makes him look ready for anything, and his broad chest is nearly always covered with a white apron.
On a busy day, he makes 180 scallion pancakes. He sells them for three yuan—fifty cents—each, one yuan more than most other snack stalls in the neighborhood. “They have a special flavor everyone loves,” he says.
He used to work in the kitchen at the Old Jinjiang Hotel farther down the Street of Eternal Happiness. Minutes later, four of his former coworkers stop by. They’re dressed in aprons, too. All but one smokes during their break. As a foreigner inside Uncle Feng’s tiny kitchen, I arouse their curiosity, and they take me for a potential customer.
“Nobody makes congyoubing like Old Veng!” one of them yells in a thick Shanghai accent, laughing. Feng doesn’t say a word as he flips a batch of them onto the griddle. He just smirks.
This block of the Street of Eternal Happiness is bookended by two hotels of the same name: Jinjiang. To the west is the Old Jinjiang, Uncle Feng’s old workplace. The fifteen-story brick hotel was built in 1934 by Dong Zhujun, a former prostitute who became one of Shanghai’s first successful businesswomen. It was one of the tallest buildings in Shanghai at the time. When the Communist Party came to power in 1949, Dong wisely partnered with them, offering up her hotel to house state leaders like Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, and in 1972, U.S. president Richard Nixon during the signing of the Shanghai Communiqué, which opened Communist China to a surge in foreign investment.
It was a bad deal for the Jinjiang. Like many state hotels of the era, it lost its status to a new wave of luxurious hotels opened during Shanghai’s economic revival. The New Jinjiang, forty stories of glass and steel with a revolving restaurant on top, was the city’s tallest building when it was constructed on the opposite end of the block in 1988.
The stretch between the old and new hotels is a timeline that connects an icon of 1930s Shanghai prosperity to a symbol of the city’s power today. To compare the two, all you have to do is walk a single block along the Street of Eternal Happiness, from the Jinjiang Hotel on Maoming Road to the Jinjiang Hotel on Ruijin Road.
That’s all it takes. One block.
Uncle Feng’s kitchen is in the middle. Metaphorically it makes sense. The major events of his life transpired in the three decades of chaos and poverty under Mao between the boom years of the Jinjiangs. “Before he was our leader, Mao made a big contribution to China,” Uncle Feng once explained to me. “But afterward, he seemed to want everyone to memorize his heroism. Had he opened his mind to capitalism, China would be much more advanced today. Back in the time of the Old Jinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan were much poorer than Shanghai. Later on, they learned from the foreign countries. Shanghai was left behind.”
So was Uncle Feng.
HE WAS BORN IN 1951, two years into Mao’s tenure. His parents and four siblings lived in a small alley home just a few blocks south of the Street of Eternal Happiness. Mao’s influence was at its peak during Uncle Feng’s childhood, and he became so immersed in the propaganda and campaigns of the era that by the time he was in middle school, he yearned to leave China’s richest city for the countryside. He wanted to toil alongside the proletariat masses he had read so much about in school.
On May 25, 1965, Feng noticed posters along the halls of his school inviting students to join a mass rally that night at the Shanghai Cultural Plaza. There, the posters said, they would learn about a place called Xinjiang.
Xinjiang, “new frontier” in Chinese, is smack dab in the middle of the Eurasian landmass, the place on earth farthest from any ocean. It spans an area the size of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico combined. The region had been occupied by a group of Central Asian ethnicities dominated by the Uighur people until the Qing dynasty annexed the territory in the nineteenth century after decades of war. The ancient Silk Road ran through its middle. During the 1940s, Xinjiang slipped away from Chinese control, but after the Communists came to power in 1949, the new leaders were determined to dominate Xinjiang for good. China’s military built garrisons throughout Xinjiang; all it needed was hundreds of thousands of settlers to occupy the desolate region.
Uncle Feng was just fourteen years old when he saw the posters. He’d never heard of Xinjiang, but he skipped dinner to attend the rally with classmates. They joined tens of thousands of young people in the stands. On the lit stage below were dozens of People’s Liberation Army soldiers who had served in Xinjiang.
“The organizers choreographed the rally very carefully,” Uncle said. “The soldiers told us Xinjiang was just amazing—it was a very nice place to work and the food there was plentiful. You could eat all the melons and grapes you wanted.”
Uncle Feng remembered this part of the speech resonated with the crowd. It had been just a few years since tens of millions starved to death in the famine that followed Mao’s Great Leap Forward campaign. Shanghai had escaped the famine largely unscathed, but food was still in short supply.
The following day, news of the youth rally dominated the headlines of city newspapers. “50,000 Shanghai Youth Display Dedication to the Full Construction of Xinjiang” read the top line of the Liberation Daily on May 26, 1965. The two-page spread included reports about young men and women from China’s cities, dubbing them “pale-faced pedants who had zero knowledge about farming.” The report claimed the former urban know-nothings were transforming Xinjiang’s arid soil into rice paddies. “Each young person on the farm manages 25 acres of paddies, 20–25 acres of cotton, or 50 acres of wheat. They are ‘little tigers’ who have endured pain and hardship to create wealth for China.”
One story highlighted an eighteen-year-old Shanghai native who became a deputy platoon head within a year of arriving in Xinjiang: “When I learned I had come to Xinjiang to raise pigs, I was unhappy,” the young man said. “But after being re-educated, I realized that being a ‘pig class head’ is meaningful work. Serving pork will improve the meals for all the workers!”
The young Feng had never been to such a large rally. He was so excited that he couldn’t sleep that night. The next day, he announced to his parents he was dropping out of middle school to help develop Xinjiang. His mother and father were unemotional.
“By then, Mom and Dad had four other children to feed, so they didn’t care,” Uncle Feng told me. The day after that, he boarded a train that would take weeks to reach China’s new frontier. He was farther from home than anyone in his family had ever gone.
An estimated 17 million young people were uprooted from China’s cities in the 1950s and ’60s. The purpose was twofold: The country’s brightest could be “re-educated” by the peasantry, and also help develop the nation’s poorest and most remote areas in the process. This mass migration of China’s youth became known by four of the simplest characters in Chinese: . “Shangshan Xiaxiang,” or “Up to the mountains and down to the villages.”
Uncle Feng was among 100,000 young men and women from Shanghai assigned to work in Xinjiang in a group known as bingtuan, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. The Corps harnessed dozens of rivers that bordered two of China’s largest deserts and built 96 reservoirs and 117 dams. After controlling the region’s waterways, the Corps young members dug irrigation ditches and turned 140,000 hectares of scrubland into farmland, an area the size of the state of New York.
On December 7, 1963, the Liberation Daily published an article about developing a farm at the foot of the Tianshan Mountains. The area would later become Uncle Feng’s sent-down home. “Alongside old soldiers: Shanghai youth active in Tianshan,” read the article, which included a poem by the leader of the No. 19 Victory Farm:
Saying goodbye to Shanghai’s Huangpu River,
Advancing to Xinjiang with loud songs,
Wade through the dust of tens of thousands of roads,
Young men must have high ambitions.
The country holds limitless goodness,
The youth must be more courageous,
By the desert we thresh the wheat fields,
And the sea of sand rolls by in waves.
“What a shithole,” Uncle Feng told me later, shaking his head at the memory of his new desert home. “It was a wasteland—an uninhabited wasteland. Most of us immediately regretted going there, but it was impossible to return to Shanghai. The place was so barren and remote that you couldn’t leave even if you wanted to—there was no food, no roads. You’d starve to death trying.”
Uncle Feng and his new coworkers began to question everything they had heard in that rally back in Shanghai, now three thousand miles of treacherous roads and rail away. “We had been told how great this place was, so we never asked what we’d be doing. When we got there, we realized they had tricked us and that our job was to try and turn this dry wasteland into farmland.”
Feng was assigned to a division outside the town of Aksu, less than a hundred miles from the mountainous border of Kyrgyzstan, at the time a part of the Soviet Union. “There were no homes in Aksu. Nothing, really. The people there were so poor they lived inside mud houses covered with grass. When we first arrived, we didn’t even have a place to sleep, so we dug holes, covered them with dry scrub, and collapsed. That’s how we slept for two years.”
There were 150 young people—mostly men—in Feng’s work unit, and they came from all over China: Hebei, Shanxi, Sichuan. Some were soldiers who had fought against local Uighur and Kazakh resistance forces to take control of the area. Nobody seemed to have much food. “They gave us three buns a day. That was our breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That was it.”
It was a race against starvation. Feng and his coworkers frantically learned how to drive tractors imported from the Soviet Union. They flattened and tilled the white salinized soil, eventually managing to grow vegetables alongside the Tarim River. A few years later, they grew enough produce to barter for small game with local Kazakh and Uighur hunters who would come down from the mountains. The whole affair gave new meaning to “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages.”
“NI-HAO!” Uncle Feng’s wife bursts through the door carrying bags of giant purple grapes, and then stops when she notices a foreigner in her husband’s kitchen.
“Oh! Hello! Would you like some tea? You haven’t offered our guest tea, have you?” she asks Feng, scolding him. He ignores her, suddenly becoming quiet as he pours more batter into the wok.
I decline the tea. “Here! Have some grapes! They’re delicious. They’re from Xinjiang. I’ve washed them all.”
The conversation with Uncle Feng screeches to a halt. It’s as if his wife has pointed a remote control at him and put him on mute. I address Auntie Fu with an honorific as she spews questions.
“Are you American?” Auntie asks.
“Yes.”
“Are you married?”
“Yes.”
“Your wife must be Chinese, that’s why you speak Chinese, right?”
“No, she’s from America. I learned to speak in Sichuan.”
“Sichuan! I’m from Sichuan! Have you been to Songpan? It’s close to Jiuzhaigou. Wah! It’s a shame you didn’t marry a Sichuanese girl! So your wife is American, then?”
“Yes. Actually, she’s Chinese American.”
“Wah! Mixed blood! What a blessing! Your children will be very smart. It’s genetic.”
This woman is a frantic, whirling force of nature. While her husband sits like a rock watching his scallion pancakes sizzle, dollops of dough turning crisp on the griddle, she is like the wind—in constant motion, always talking.
Auntie Fu is short and fat. She wears a pair of glasses that always slip down to the bottom of her nose, the top edge of the frame lining up neatly with her eyes. Instead of pushing them up, she repeatedly tilts her head either up or down to get a clear look at her surroundings. Auntie is nearly ten years younger than her husband. The two met in Xinjiang. She arrived as a laborer at the farm in Aksu five years after he had arrived. By then, Uncle Feng and his team had developed a range of crops and they had built proper wooden homes to house everybody. Auntie Fu, an educated youth fresh from Sichuan, ate more than three buns a day upon arrival thanks, in part, to years of Feng’s labor.
“Are you a Christian?” Auntie Fu asks me excitedly.
I tell her I grew up Catholic. Thank God, she tells me, and promptly invites me to church to meet her preacher.
“Preacher Shen used to be a bandit. He’s illiterate, but someone recited the Bible to him in prison and he’s memorize
d the whole book! He’s amazing.”
This seems odd to me. A bandit who reformed in prison and was now running a church? It sounds like Shen might still be a bandit.
I turn to Feng, unmuting him: “Have you been to this church?”
“I don’t believe in those sorts of things. Somebody needs to run the family,” he says.
“When you get older and have more time, you need to come and listen,” she yells at her husband. “God created the world and everything on Earth. He created human beings, too. We belong to Him.”
Uncle rolls his eyes. He turns toward the open window, this time muting himself. Auntie turns back to me. “You must come! There are many young people like you there! Preacher Shen is so good.”
Unmute. “Just leave, then!” yells Uncle. “Stop talking so much! If you’re going to go, go!”
“The church is owned by a rich man from Wenzhou!” Auntie tells me, ignoring her husband.
Auntie’s talk of illiterate bandit preachers and businessmen from Wenzhou—a prosperous city in the South infamous for exporting scam artists—leaves me wondering if it’s a sanctioned church. China’s government keeps a tight lid on religion, and only sanctioned mainstream faiths whose local leaders vow allegiance to the Party are allowed.
“Is it a legal church?” I ask.
“I don’t think so,” Auntie answers, with a wave of her hand.
Uncle Feng has something else to say. “If she keeps going to church, pretty soon she won’t be able to afford to eat.”
I glance at Auntie Fu and she shakes her head, waving her hand again. “God tells us ‘What I’ve given you will be enough.’ ”
“Ha! Then don’t bother returning home!” yells Feng.
I DIDN’T KNOW MUCH about illegal churches in China until one moved in next door to me. A year after we arrived in Shanghai, a blonde American woman in her twenties had rented the apartment next to ours. Like the rest of our neighbors, she kept to herself and was rarely home. But on Friday nights, I began to notice an unusually long queue for the elevator. What was on every other day of the week a quiet ascent to my floor became a ride crowded with young, smiling foreigners and Chinese, all gabbing with one another in English. When the elevator arrived at my floor, they would stream past me to my neighbor’s apartment, where there were usually at least a dozen more twenty-somethings inside, singing about Jesus.