by Rob Schmitz
All Weiqi could do was hope she would come to peace with his father’s death in her own way and move on. But in the meantime, Weiqi would do what he could to make sure she was safe, and he would support her. “I read a story once about an airplane crash,” Weiqi told me. “A Japanese man; his wife was on the plane, and it crashed into the ocean and after he lost his wife, the man spent years learning how to dive. Even though he knew he had no chance of finding her, every weekend he dove where they think the plane crashed to look for her. He said he would never give up. My mother’s story is similar.”
I asked him if he had ever returned to the Street of Eternal Happiness. “No. Too much happened there,” he told me.
He asked me what it was like now. I told him about the empty lot across the street where Maggie Lane once stood and how every month or so there was a new restaurant on the street catering to foreign expats and wealthy Chinese. I told him about the shop owners I knew: CK, Zhao, and Uncle Feng.
“It sounds like the neighborhood has changed a lot,” Weiqi said, sounding distant. “There aren’t many local residents left, are there?”
“Not too many,” I said.
The same could be said for much of urban China. Within twenty years, neighborhoods that once functioned like villages had transformed into impersonal condominium towers like the Summit where nobody knew their neighbors and where a runaway economy had generated enough money to enjoy a meal at the new tapas bar down the street, but it also put more pressure on people, often making them grumpy and wary of others.
“My honest feeling as one of the old residents of the neighborhood is that I feel detached from my old home,” Weiqi told me. “The old people, the old stores, the old memories are no longer there. It’s been replaced by a neighborhood where foreigners live. All of it is a bit sad, I’d say.”
I was one of those foreigners. I tucked my sons into bed each night several stories above where Weiqi’s parents used to tuck him in. I was speaking to him from the very site where he lost his home and his father, the place my own children now called home. “Yes,” I said, speaking to the digital image of Weiqi on my computer screen. “It is pretty sad.”
WE MET IN PERSON a month later on the Street of Eternal Happiness. It was a blustery, sunny day. The wind blew from the south: gusts of warm, unpolluted air marking the start of spring.
Weiqi wore a black cashmere sweater and khakis. We sat on a bench in front of the Center, the office building across the street from CK’s café, behind my home at the Summit.
It was a holiday weekend. Locals had left town, leaving few cars on the street. The whistling of songbirds taking a rest from their northbound migration filled the trees. The bench was just ten feet away from the site of Weiqi’s old home.
Weiqi rested one foot on the opposing knee, unconsciously fiddling with his shoelaces while he stared up at the glass and steel Center building, and then at the Summit complex, trying to get his bearings.
“The only thing I recognize is the China Merchants Bank building over there,” he said, pointing behind us to a dusty building covered in purple and white bathroom tiles, the trademark architectural style of 1990s China. “They had just built that before we left. Everything else is different.”
It was the day after Qingming, “Pure Brightness,” when Chinese honor their deceased ancestors. Weiqi had flown in from Hong Kong to spend the holiday with his mother. They had taken a half-hour train ride to Suzhou to visit the grave of his mother’s grandparents. They spent the afternoon arranging food on the gravesite, and then they burned phony paper money so that their ancestors had something to spend in the afterworld.
Earlier that morning, they had done the same for Weiqi’s father on the sidewalk below their Shanghai apartment. It was a slightly more awkward ritual. His father’s ashes remain in a wooden box kept inside his mother’s apartment. His mother refuses to bury them until police investigate his father’s death. “We just burned two candles on either side of the box and propped up a framed picture of him in the middle,” Weiqi told me.
The box of ashes was delivered to Weiqi’s mother a few days after his father died in 1996. Police didn’t allow them to see his remains. Instead, the day after the fire, an officer visited the boy and his mother and showed them a picture of what was left of his body. “It was completely terrible,” Weiqi said. “I couldn’t believe it was my father. All I could imagine was that the fire must have been huge. You couldn’t make out the head, not even the skeleton. It was completely black. A little green, too, I don’t know why. You could see a little blue from the eyes, and that was it.”
Xuhui District officials detained Weiqi and his mom in a government hotel on the southern edge of the district for ten months. They didn’t allow him to go back to school and he missed nearly the entire fourth grade. That year, he suffered from insomnia. When he did sleep, he had a recurring nightmare. “I was on a track. A railway. It was endless. And I was running. Then something—I don’t know what it was—but something black and horrible would chase me. It was very, very abstract.”
Nearly a year later, district authorities allowed him to return to school and begin the fifth grade, escorting him with an official vehicle each morning and afternoon to and from the hotel where they were being detained.
“That first day back, my classmates stood in two groups, in two lines,” he said. “And they all clapped in unison to welcome my return.”
Weiqi returned to school a quiet and morose boy, a year behind his peers and struggling to catch up. By the end of junior high, though, Weiqi had surpassed his classmates academically and he was confident again. His mother had recovered, too, even though she was frequently in Beijing to continue to seek an investigation into her husband’s death.
One night, when he was in junior high, the police knocked on the door of Weiqi’s apartment. He was home alone; his mother had been gone for weeks. He had just cooked noodles for himself and he figured the matter had something to do with his mother, so he ignored the knocks and began to eat. The police knocked harder. No response. They finally smashed through the door, ripping it off its hinges. They found a startled Weiqi at his table. They handed him a document that stated his mother had been detained in Beijing. They demanded he sign it. “My mother told me never to sign anything from the police, so I refused,” Weiqi said.
Their mission thwarted, the officers stormed off, leaving the boy inside an apartment without a door. At fourteen years old, Weiqi had lost his father, his home, and now his mother would be away for a while, too. Hardly anything scared him anymore. He stepped over the splintered mess, walked through the naked entryway, down the stairs, and out onto the street where he found a handyman. A new door was in place before he tucked himself into bed that evening.
SINCE THE DEATH of Mao in 1976, the leaders of China’s Communist Party have been big on slogans to define their guiding principles. Deng Xiaoping preached the Four Modernizations, Jiang Zemin the Three Represents, and Hu Jintao envisioned a Harmonious Socialist Society. Propaganda signs at train stations, airports, along highways, and everywhere in between advertised the clunky mantras, big red Chinese characters defining the rule of one leader eventually making way for those of the next.
For the 1.274 billion Chinese who weren’t members of the Party, these slogans were about as meaningful as they are to the average American, unless they’ve studied and absorbed the finer points of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. For most, the phrases were mysterious and nonsensical, and for the few laobaixing who had time to stop and consider them, they served little purpose except to remind them that there was a very large gap between them and their leaders.
So when Xi Jinping was formally approved as China’s leader in March of 2013, there couldn’t have been lower expectations for what would replace Harmonious Socialist Society.
The mild-mannered son of a revolutionary aimed high, restoring faith among the masses with a guiding principle that people wouldn’t forget within seconds of hearing it: , Z
hongguo Meng, the Chinese Dream. It was simple, evocative, and immediately understandable by anyone. Finally, here was a slogan the Chinese could stand behind.
That is, until Xi Jinping attempted to explain what it meant in his first speech as president in March of 2013:
The Chinese Dream fundamentally is the dream of the Chinese people, the realization of the Chinese Dream closely relies on the people’s effort and in return benefiting the people. In order to build a moderately prosperous society, a prosperous, democratic, civilized, and harmonious modern socialist country and to achieve the Chinese Dream that will see the great rejuvenation of the nation, we need to achieve national prosperity and the revitalization as well as the happiness of the people. These things profoundly reflect the dreams of the people of China today and they are in accord with our glorious traditions.
In a carefully executed career from low-level bureaucrat to local leader to provincial leader to national leader, Comrade Xi had consumed decades of vague and clumsy Party catchphrases, and he was now regurgitating them, restoring what seemed to be an intriguing slogan to the familiar Communist drivel people had grown accustomed to.
It didn’t take long for scholars to offer a concise explanation of Xi’s long-winded definition. Sinologist Geremie R. Barmé summed up the above portion of the speech in seventy-seven fewer words than its official English version: “The Chinese can realize their individual dreams only if they also accept the common national goals derived by the Chinese Communist Party.”
Most of my neighbors didn’t hear Xi’s speech. But the people I knew along the Street of Eternal Happiness had heard of the slogan, and the consensus was that the Chinese Dream had a good ring to it, whether they understood it or not.
“It sounds nice,” Zhao Shiling told me one day while preparing flowers at her shop, “but I don’t pay attention to politics, so I’m not sure what it means.”
Inside Maggie Lane, Mayor Chen saw the Chinese Dream as a positive development. “Xi Jinping has been in power for a very short time, but it seems like he’s already accomplishing a lot of practical tasks,” he said with a smile.
China’s new property laws encouraged Chen, and he was especially impressed with the new president’s promise to root out corrupt officials. “I like that President Xi says he’s going after the tigers and flies,” Chen said, referring to the nicknames of crooked powerful leaders and local officials. “We’ve certainly got a lot of flies buzzing around here.”
One morning in the spring of 2013, I looked out my bedroom window and noticed a couple dozen men in hard hats digging ditches alongside the remaining homes in Maggie Lane. Later that day, Chen brushed aside the activity over the phone. “Oh, they’re just installing new gas lines for us,” he said. “The old ones had been damaged by the demolition crew and they were all leaking.”
He seemed encouraged by this, optimistic that change was afoot not only in Beijing, but that the new edicts from on high had filtered down to China’s local officials, scaring the flies into making amends for their past transgressions.
The days of big-spending Party officials appeared to be numbered, and decades after the rule of a megalomaniac who demanded a kind of loyalty among the masses that often transcended worship, here was a Chinese leader asking his people to corral their dreams into a single national dream where the Party, not the individual, was the chief consideration. Yet in today’s China, where people had money to spend and more options than ever, state propaganda became easier to tune out.
THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 24, 2013, started like any other inside Maggie Lane. Mayor Chen brushed his teeth and washed his face in his bedroom while his wife, Xie Guozhen, used the toilet upstairs. It was a gorgeous autumn day: blue skies and a slight breeze blew from the east, pushing clean air from the ocean into the city. A pleasant draft wafted through the open windows of their home.
That’s when Chen heard a loud slam downstairs. Before he could make it to the stairwell, six men emerged from around the corner. Three of them rushed toward him, taking him by the arms and forcing him to the floor. They tied his wrists together with rope as he yelled for help. The other three ran up the stairs and forced open the bathroom door where Xie was using the toilet.
“I was only wearing underwear. I screamed, ‘This house is mine! My father-in-law bought it with gold! You can’t rob our house like this!’ ” said Xie. “They looked like migrant workers and they didn’t understand. One of them punched me and then gagged my mouth to prevent me from screaming. I tried to fight, but they twisted my arms so far behind my back I thought they were going to break.”
The men ordered Xie to get dressed, and then dragged the couple downstairs and out their front door into the morning sunlight to where a van was parked. They pushed the couple inside, rolled the door shut, and drove past the security guard onto the street. It was the last time the couple saw their home. By the end of the day, Maggie Lane would be destroyed.
I MISSED THE DEMOLITION. I was in the United States on a business trip. When I woke up, I read an email from my assistant describing what had taken place. It was a well-coordinated blitz, she wrote. The demolition crew had removed Chen, his wife, and his neighbors from their homes and detained them in a courtyard complex a few blocks away for eight hours while excavators demolished their homes. The same day, Marketplace’s account on Weibo—China’s version of Twitter—was shut down for the first time ever, preventing us from posting news about the demolition. I was the only journalist keeping tabs on the story, and Chen suspected the district had waited until they were sure I would be gone to go ahead with the demolition.
When I returned home a few days later, I looked out my bedroom window. What once looked like an abandoned lot sprinkled with several homes was now just an abandoned lot. Shikumen-house-sized piles of rubble littered the landscape, each of them underneath bright green netting. The portion of the wall that had been destroyed to allow the large equipment inside had already been rebuilt, and there was little sign that just a week ago, there had been people living here.
The next day I met Chen and Xie at a run-down hotel a few blocks away. They wore identical blue shirts, looking like prison inmates. Their son had given them his official work uniforms because they no longer had any clothes. They looked terrible. Neither of them had slept much, and bags were forming under their eyes. After being detained, Xie was taken to the hospital. She had already been suffering from colon cancer, and the stress of what had happened that morning had caused her to vomit and then faint. When she came to, she had shown signs of a heart attack. The demolition crew had paid her hospital bill and was covering their hotel stay, too.
I sat on the edge of their bed and took out my notebook. It had been several days since the incident, but when I began to ask questions, the two spoke over each other, angrily yelling their accounts of what had happened as if it had occurred minutes ago. “In my seventy-three years, I have never lived a more undignified day,” Xie told me. “I was no longer a human being. They kidnapped me! They kept us hostage. It was unimaginable. It was what the Mafia would do. They were like thieves. And this is supposed to be a socialist country!”
Xie wiped her eyes. She showed me purple bruises around her biceps where the men had grabbed her that morning. Chen told me they’d been kept inside a courtyard the entire day, allowed to leave only when their son showed up with a lawyer.
It was early evening when they returned to Maggie Lane. Security guards wouldn’t let them inside. One guard was resting on the couple’s bed, which had been deposited on the sidewalk. Another was lounging on an antique mahogany chair that had been salvaged from their home. The rest of their belongings were nowhere to be seen. The demolition crew told Chen some of their stuff had been taken to a warehouse, and other things had gone down with the house. What about our cash and our jewelry? Chen asked them. He had thousands of dollars in cash and gold and silver jewelry, as well as family heirlooms that were stored inside their bedroom. The workers said they didn’t know what
happened to any of it.
It was unclear whether the demolition was legal or not. An official with the Xuhui government told the couple the land would be used for the public good, which would make a forced relocation permissible under Chinese law. However, it was clear the tactics the demolition crew used to clear the land—abducting residents and detaining them—were illegal. In the case of a forced demolition, a local court is required to personally notify residents in advance so that they have time to move their belongings. No such notification was given to them. “They stormed the lane like Nazis,” Chen told me.
Legal or not, Maggie Lane was now gone. It was another piece of Shanghai’s history to be redeveloped. “Shanghai brags that it’s an international metropolis, but it’s a city without any culture,” Xie said. “It only has skyscrapers. The property prices are too high for laobaixing to afford. Xuhui just sold a piece of land for a record amount. Our land is five times as big as the one that was just sold. How much will our land sell for?”
Chen had gone to the Xuhui government office and asked the same question the day after he had lost his home. “I told them that the Japanese didn’t steal our house in the 1930s, the Nationalists didn’t take the house in the forties, and it survived the Cultural Revolution. But now a gang of outlaws has taken it from us.”
Xie took out a letter the couple had written to the Xuhui government and read it aloud to me. “ ‘As long as you have power, you can trample the constitution and insult and humiliate people, as well as violate your people’s human rights. We’ve been overly naïve to believe in the reports in the newspapers and television about the government’s propaganda and false promises to the people. You can take the people’s land, but what you lose is our trust, the cornerstone of this Republic.’ ”
I thought about my last meeting with Chen before I had left for the United States. He was upbeat about his prospects of getting a fair settlement, confident the new president was finally rooting out corruption. It had been six months since the unveiling of the Chinese Dream, and now here he was, homeless.