Street of Eternal Happiness

by Rob Schmitz

  BACK ON THE STREET OF ETERNAL HAPPINESS, I held in my hands the first letter Mother Liu wrote to her husband, Wang Ming. It is dated July 8, 1958, and she begins by telling him about their new child: “Little Xuesong has been weaned and is eating congee and gruel,” she writes.

  Xuesong had been born in 1957, only six months before his father was arrested. After six daughters, he was their first son. Like many Chinese families, they had kept having children until they finally had a boy.

  The rest of the children, writes Mother Liu, are struggling. Big Sister is falling behind in school, and Liu has sent their two-year-old Baby Sister to live with relatives in the countryside: one less mouth to feed. The sisters in between—whom she identifies as Sister Two, Sister Three, Sister Four, and Sister Five—are also doing poorly.

  Mother Liu concludes her brief letter with an admonishment: “I hope you continue to work and study hard and repent your mistakes. Plead to the government to grant you leniency so that you can return home.”

  Four months later, conditions worsen. “I’ve been forced to sell our personal belongings and have had to rely on welfare payments from the Bureau of Industry and Commerce in order to survive,” writes Liu.

  She ends with another reminder of his duties at camp: “Focus on your studies, work hard, and please accept your re-education. It’s the only way out.”

  In the next letter later that year, Mother Liu reports that the Party has assigned her a job making boxes at a state-owned factory. She outlines the family’s new routines, highlighting the progress of their only son. “I wake up at four thirty each morning to go to the wet market,” she writes, referring to a market north of the Street of Eternal Happiness that still operates along the same block today.

  When I return, I wash all the vegetables and cook them, and after breakfast I go to work at 7:30. The elder sisters take turns preparing lunch and dinner, and feed Little Xuesong.

  After a lot of practice, the kids are now capable of arranging what needs to be done and when. They’re never late nor do they miss class. They’ve developed good hygienic habits and are careful about what they eat, so they rarely get sick and are very healthy, especially Little Xuesong, who is very active and healthy. He’s starting to talk and sing…

  Lastly, I want to tell you to take care of yourself. Take care of what you eat. Don’t miss home. Focus on getting well and recovering. After you recuperate, I hope you can study more political thought and obey all the instructions from your leaders and proactively take the lead in labor. Help others and try to be good and march toward the bright path.

  It was common for letters to and from labor camps to be sprinkled with political encouragement and praise of Chairman Mao and other Party leaders. Every single letter sent to and from prisoners was inspected thoroughly by authorities. Inmates and their families understood that too candid an assessment of conditions at home or at camp would be punished.

  Letters between Wang and Liu throughout the 1960s are peppered with praise of either China’s economic advancement—despite widespread famine due to Mao’s failed campaigns—or the wisdom of Chairman Mao’s policies.

  In February 1961, Mother Liu learns her husband’s re-education is proceeding slowly, potentially lengthening his prison sentence. She employs the propaganda of the times in a single, seething run-on sentence, scolding her husband.

  You should get the government policies straight and shed the bad habits that remain in you from the old society and you should read beneficial books and newspapers and emphasize your political studies and follow the teaching and guidance from the Party and Chairman Mao, and completely reform yourself and become a new person so that you can return home and reunite with us as soon as possible and share the responsibility along with me to raise these children and contribute to the construction of socialism.

  Nine years pass before Mother Liu writes another letter to her husband. Wang’s sister Mei Mei fills the void, explaining that his wife is trying “to save money on stamps. She needs to calculate how to spend even one fen.”

  Your wife isn’t doing well financially, and she has to raise seven children alone. It’s indeed not easy. Whenever she is allocated a food ticket for fish, she gives it away for money or favors. From the welfare subsidies she receives each month from the industry and commerce union, she can only afford to eat basic vegetables and rice. This holiday season, she was given a special gift of eight kuai so the kids will be able to get by on that. After all, some of this food she naturally needs to give away as bribes or gifts.

  Mei Mei later reveals the truth behind his wife’s silence. The political environment has grown increasingly hostile in Shanghai. Neighbors, local police, teachers, and classmates have begun targeting her and the children for associating with him, a “bad element” of society. Local police have tried to kick them out of their home, but Mother Liu has been able to fend them off by bribing them with food tickets. Liu decides to cut ties with her imprisoned husband, Mei Mei finally admits, to “draw a clear class boundary” between herself and her capitalist, Rightist husband. Meanwhile, China’s Great Famine—the “three-year natural disaster,” as Mei Mei writes in Party-approved language—has arrived in China’s richest city.

  It’s difficult for the Shanghainese, because we’re not used to skipping meals. I hope this year’s harvest can improve the situation.

  The first sign that Shanghai has recovered comes a few years later in a letter I read from the summer of 1963. Mother Liu and her six children have made it through the worst years. Little Xuesong will start school in the autumn. “His growth is all due to your wife’s hard work. You should also thank the country for taking care of them and preventing them from starving, and for being able to live through their childhood,” Mei Mei writes her brother.

  Big Sister and Sisters Two and Three are enrolled at an industrial “middle school,” where each work inside textile factories making silk or handkerchiefs. After three years of training, they’ll be assigned to work at the factories full-time. “They love labor and are thrifty, too,” Mei Mei writes.

  “Today I write to tell you another thing,” continues Mei Mei:

  Your wife’s family could no longer care for your youngest daughter. They’ve sent Baby Sister further into the countryside as an adopted daughter for a peasant family…I don’t have the capability to raise her, otherwise I would’ve done so. It pains to see my niece sent away for adoption to complete strangers. When you receive this letter, please don’t worry. You should focus on working hard to receive leniency from the government so you can be released soon.

  In the future, Mei Mei concludes, we will all be reunited.

  Mei Mei’s letter is written on rice paper that has turned yellow with time. It feels brittle, and my fingers carefully avoid a small tear through the middle, the result of years of folding and unfolding the note. I think of what Wang Ming must have felt when he read this very letter fifty years ago. The news that people he had never met—never even heard of—were raising his youngest daughter must have been devastating. He was reading the letter thousands of miles away, powerless to help. He could only toil in the fields, working hard to smother his capitalist thoughts in the hopes that someday he would be fully re-educated, reformed, and reborn as a true Communist.

  “WE WERE BORN at the wrong time,” says Professor Wei.

  It’s a scorching hot spring afternoon in Nanjing, and I’ve told Professor Wei the story of his fellow Delingha inmate.

  “Wang sounds like he was a natural capitalist,” he says. “He would’ve probably struck it rich today in China. He was stuck in the wrong era. We all were.”

  Professor Wei sighs loudly and says, “mei banfa.” It’s one of the most common Chinese sayings to arrive at the end of a long sigh: Nothing can be done.

  Professor Wei hands me one of his novels. It’s titled Chan Deng (Temple Light). On the cover, a woman with a voluptuous figure and long flowing hair tucked under a beret stands in a white dress gazing across a blazi
ng orange desert. I read the book jacket description. The novel is about an intellectual who is labeled a Rightist and spends the next twenty years at a labor camp. After his release, the copy proclaims, “he becomes a university professor and later starts to do business. His entangled relationships with several women turn his heart into a cauldron of love and hate.”

  It’s clearly autobiographical, although I wonder about the romantic encounters. I don’t prod for details. He’s spent two decades in a labor camp. Why not cast yourself as a Don Juan in the book version of your life? I thank him for the gift.

  “I’m seventy-nine years old,” Professor Wei says. “There aren’t many people left who were sent to the camps. Pretty soon we’ll all be gone. I feel like it’s my responsibility to write about what I could.”

  Even so, Professor Wei believes young people would prefer to remain ignorant about any uncomfortable period in China’s recent history. “Isn’t it nicer to sit back and watch a Korean soap opera?” he asks me.

  It’s certainly safer. History of the Great Famine—still known fifty years later as a “natural disaster” or “three years of difficulties”—remains tightly censored by China’s government. School textbooks avoid using the term “famine” to describe the period, and people who lived through it aren’t allowed to publish anything about it. Later this year, former Xinhua reporter Yang Jisheng’s meticulously reported book about the Great Famine, Tombstone, will be released. Based on fifteen years of poring through official archives, it will be hailed by historians as one of the most exhaustive and accurate accounts of the famine.

  No one in China will be allowed to publish it.

  Professor Wei shakes his head. “Mao had a famous saying: ‘Hao bu li ji, zhuanmen li ren,’ ” he tells me—Devote yourself to others without any thought for yourself.

  “It’s clear now that it was Mao who was the most selfish,” Wei says. “After he died, everyone began to behave in direct opposition to what he’d always said. What do people care about these days? A good job, a healthy family, enough money to buy a house and a car. Who actually cares about the country and the people anymore? Very few.”

  After years of living and traveling throughout the country, I had met only a handful of Chinese who truly, deep down, believed in the Party. It was foolish to have faith in a government that, time and time again since the beginning of its rule, had proven it wasn’t trustworthy. The Party’s principles—broadcast in flowery catchphrases—might sound nice, but after so many years of authoritarian rule, the Chinese had become pragmatists. Inside of a political system that provided little real benefit, you were left only to rely on your family and, ultimately, yourself. Mei banfa.

  The new government under Xi Jinping seemed to understand this lack of faith. Xi had become China’s ruler in early 2013. In the first speech of his presidency, he told his countrymen they should strive to realize “the Chinese dream.” Its meaning was yet to be clearly defined. “The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is a dream of the whole nation, as well as of every individual,” Xi said.

  Corralling people’s dreams—one of a human being’s most personal, individual posessions—to serve the nation and the Party sounded an awful lot like the Communist directives of the Mao era. I thought about Wang, his wife, and their seven children, who were likely adults now. How would they see the Chinese dream? How devoted would they be to a government that had robbed them of their father? Would they dream of the Party’s “great rejuvenation” of the Chinese nation? What were their dreams?

  Professor Wei has heard about the Chinese dream, too.

  “The sound of it is very inspiring, but first the Chinese people need to rejuvenate their trust in this country. There is no patriotism anymore. There is no trust. There is no love,” he says. “China is on a path without a soul.”

  Visit Gatewang and you can buy nearly anything, says Mr. Huang, his nose tilted toward the ceiling. He points his inch-long pinkie nail to the offerings on his computer screen: a cicada made of green jade, a shiny golden carry-on suitcase, or an air filter that promises to remove every particulate of city smog from your apartment. Gatewang has it all, Mr. Huang insists, and it will soon be a household name.

  We’re five miles north of the Street of Eternal Happiness in an office overlooking Shanghai’s train station. Auntie Fu sits beside me on a leather sofa. Neither of us has ever visited Gatewang. It’s a virtual place, not a physical one. Auntie Fu has come to Mr. Huang’s office before, though, and this is the second time she’s heard his sales pitch. The company’s tagline: Whatever you can’t find on Taobao—China’s largest online retail site—you can find on Gatewang.

  The shopping experience begins with the Gatewang terminal, Mr. Huang tells us. It’s a machine that resembles a 1980s-era arcade game. “Pretty soon, you’ll find these machines in most public places,” he promises.

  Once stationed in front of the terminal, shoppers log in, browse through wares on the secure Gatewang site, select items for purchase, and pay with special Gatewang money. It’s so easy, Mr. Huang assures us.

  “But I can buy whatever I need over Taobao on my phone,” I say. “Why should I leave the comfort of my home in search of a shopping supercomputer?”

  Huang bows his head and holds up his finger, its curved nail high in the air, dismissing a line of reasoning he’s heard before. He lifts his head and looks me in the eyes. “On Gatewang, you can buy anything,” he repeats slowly, pausing to add: “except for human beings and weapons.”

  Mr. Huang’s business card lists several occupations: Painter, Calligrapher, traditional Chinese medicine vendor, Gatewang representative. It’s been three days since I attended the illegal church service with Auntie Fu, and she’s already convinced me to attend this investor meeting. I’m skeptical of Mr. Huang’s sales pitch, but that doesn’t faze Auntie, who’s already given him more than five thousand dollars—months’ worth of her retirement savings—to buy Gatewang shares.

  Huang hopes I’ll eventually do the same. The gleam from his freshly shined black loafers match the glare of his slick shoulder-length hair, dyed jet black. A mole the size of a five-jiao coin protrudes from his left cheek, and his smile reveals a missing front tooth. He holds his head with his chin tilted upward and his eyes half closed when he shakes my hand. I see a man ready to pounce.

  But Auntie, well, she only saw opportunity.

  There were three of us. Auntie Fu had brought a church friend named Xia, a middle-aged dark-skinned peasant from the countryside of Jiangsu province. The women addressed each other as zimei—sister. When we met outside, Xia looked me up and down suspiciously, turned to Auntie, and proclaimed: “He’s a foreigner.”

  “Yes, I’m a foreigner,” I repeated back to her, my voice muffled by an air mask.

  Auntie broke the ice. “He’s a dixiong, a brother. He’s Catholic. He’s a believer, just like us. He speaks Chinese, too!”

  Xia looked up at me and smiled, giving me a thumbs-up.

  Xia and I were there for the same reason: we were both too polite to turn down Auntie’s invitation to an information session about a vague but “lucrative” investment opportunity.

  Mr. Huang greeted us in the doorway of his ninth-floor office. It was difficult to look at him without feeling hypnotized: he was covered in stripes. Navy blue ones on his pin-striped suit, royal blue and white ones on his shirt, and diagonal red ones on a tie that hung loosely from his long, thin neck.

  The walls of Huang’s office were four panes of dirty glass. Inside, particleboard desks and cabinets were covered by rice paper watercolors depicting various songbirds perched on trees. Huang had painted them in the morning and set them out to dry in the hazy sunlight streaming through floor-to-ceiling windows, which looked out onto a landscape of dozens of identical white and gray high-rises stretching as far as Shanghai’s smog allowed us to see.

  Auntie Fu sat close to me, folding and unfolding her fingers. “I’ve told them the company will be listed on the London exchang
e in January,” she announced, pointing to Xia and me, “and that they’ve only got two months to invest, so they’ve got to make their minds up fast.”

  Mr. Huang nodded slowly, his fingers clasped.

  “I’ve told them there is no risk,” Auntie added.

  “Zero risk,” interrupted Mr. Huang calmly.

  “That’s right! Zero risk!” she repeated, as if waking from a dream. “And that’s because this is not just a private company, but a company with national support behind it, so the listing must happen. I told them our company would service all of China and the rest of the world. It will enter foreign markets and eventually allow the renminbi to flow freely around the world!”

  Mr. Huang nodded majestically, pleased his loyal pupil had spread the good news so thoroughly. He leaned forward and began to speak. “China’s exports have slowed and the government needs to boost consumption,” he said matter-of-factly. “A week ago, Taobao announced sales of nineteen billion renminbi. That was a big boost to consumption. But the majority of the profit goes to Japan, not China. Eighty-seven percent of Taobao shares belong to the Japanese. That means we’re working for the Japanese.”

  Taobao belonged to Alibaba, a company started by Jack Ma, China’s most successful entrepreneur. Japan’s SoftBank had been an early investor in the company, but Mr. Huang was wildly exaggerating the firm’s stake in Alibaba. SoftBank owned 37 percent of Alibaba, not 87 percent. He made it sound as if Chinese shoppers who make purchases on Taobao funneled their money directly into the coffers of the enemy.

  “Due to these circumstances, China helped create Gatewang,” said Mr. Huang, pointing to the name of the company printed on the wall behind him.

  Mr. Huang turned back to us and smiled, the gap in his teeth exposed, as he challenged his pupils. “What’s the difference between Gatewang and Taobao?”

  Xia stared blankly at him. She had never been online, much less on Taobao. Auntie gave me an encouraging smile. I played along, shrugging my shoulders.