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Street of Eternal Happiness

Page 24

by Rob Schmitz


  I took a sip of tea and shook my head. I should’ve known their squabbling would spill over into the courts. Auntie found a manila folder and placed it in front of me. “After I lost the first case, he wasted all the money he made off the apartment and he bought another one for some woman from Anhui!” she yelled.

  Had I not just swallowed my tea, I would have spit it all over her papers in disbelief.

  “Wait a second. Why’d he do that? Who’s this woman?” I asked.

  Auntie told me that when Uncle returned from Xinjiang twenty-five years ago, he said a thief had tried to rob him in a train station on his way to Shanghai. A woman and her husband had helped him, he said, and after all these years, he had decided to return the favor by buying the woman a home.

  “I told him he was right in returning the favor,” Auntie told me, “but he didn’t have to go and buy an apartment for her! Even the stupidest person in China wouldn’t do that! I was so mad.”

  The story sounded implausible—a spectacularly bad lie. I let her finish.

  “I finally called the police, and they interrogated her,” she said.

  Auntie fished out the police report from her folder, and we read it together. On May 5, 2011, police had interviewed a divorced woman from Anhui province named Bu. Bu confirmed that Uncle Feng had bought her an apartment in Shanghai and that her name was on the ownership certificate. According to the transcript, Bu was fifteen years younger than Uncle. She said she had known him for many years and that when she divorced her husband in Anhui and moved to Shanghai in 2010, Uncle felt sorry for her and proposed to buy a house where she and her two daughters could live comfortably. In return, Bu told police she had agreed to be Uncle and Auntie’s caregiver when the couple grew too old to manage themselves.

  I gently placed the report on the table, trying to make sense of it all.

  “Do you think she’s telling the truth?” I asked carefully.

  “Of course not! She’s from Anhui!” Fu said.

  Urbanites often blamed outsiders for the problems that plagued city life—and not just outsiders in general, but specific ones. People in Beijing found their scapegoats among the migrants from Henan, one of China’s poorest and most populous provinces. For residents of Shanghai, the people from Anhui, a poor, mountainous province within a day’s drive of the city, were usually blamed for much of the lying, cheating, and stealing that happened within city limits.

  “You’re a foreigner. You don’t understand. They’re just bad people,” my Mandarin tutor once told me when I questioned the stereotype.

  But Auntie learned not everyone from Anhui was bad. She had filed a lawsuit in a local court against Bu for tricking Uncle into buying her an apartment. The Anhui judge agreed and ruled in Auntie’s favor. But Uncle refused to sign the verdict, and the house remained in Bu’s possession.

  “My husband isn’t a bad person, but he’s prone to being used and tempted by others,” Auntie told me as I examined the court documents.

  It was one of the nicest things I had ever heard her say about her husband.

  “He really is a good person, but his mind is slow and he has a hard time figuring out whom he should trust,” she said with a sigh.

  Auntie put the court documents and police report back into the manila folder and walked across the room to place it into one of the dozens of boxes scattered around the tiny apartment.

  “Perhaps I’ve sinned too much,” she said, sitting back down again. “That must be why God is making me suffer so.”

  Auntie didn’t know where else to look for an answer to why her life had descended into such chaos. There wasn’t much to say other than a phrase in Chinese that seemed made for situations like this. “Luanqibazao,” I said under my breath.

  Auntie nodded quietly. It was a saying that described a circumstance where everything was in disorder, a hideous mess of a situation. And in a land of constant change, luanqibazao was often used to describe the indescribable clutter that had arisen from all this chaos.

  Auntie didn’t seem eager to seek order from the mess her husband was in. Maybe Uncle really was paying the woman from Anhui back for help two decades ago. The more likely conclusion, though, was that she was his mistress. Auntie wasn’t interested in parsing out the details. The only thing that mattered to her was the money. Uncle had given away a valuable home meant for their son and their future grandchildren, and her friends and family had lent her tens of thousands of yuan so that she could afford the legal fees to try to get it back. “That’s why I’ve been involved in all of these investments,” she explained. “I’ve got to find a way to pay back all this debt.”

  THE CREDITS for Journey to the West rolled across Uncle’s television. He turned it off, got up from the bed, said goodbye to me, and left with his bicycle.

  “Always going out to play,” Auntie muttered after he had shut the door.

  It seemed like a good time to ask her about Gatewang. “Auntie, it’s February already. Did Gatewang list on the London exchange?” I asked.

  She stood up and began to tidy up the table, clearing it of walnut shells, distracting herself. “They originally told me January, but we’re going to have to wait until March now,” she said, pushing the fragments into her other hand. “They must want to wait until after the Chinese New Year,” she guessed, keeping the tone upbeat.

  “I’m not afraid, though,” she said. “This is sure to bring money. The other company I invested in will get listed in March, too, so it’ll be a good month for me.”

  Uh-oh. “What other company?”

  Fu reached over to a manila folder and fished out a business card. The company’s name was Liaoning Dingxu. Liaoning was a province in Northeastern China. Dingxu meant “Era of the Dawn.” The two characters for Dingxu made up the first words of a poem scrawled atop a photo of a field of verdant green rice shoots on the business card. It read:

  WEIGHTY CREDIBILITY IS GOLDEN,

  THE SUNRISE SHINES OVER HEAVEN AND EARTH.

  “What kind of company is this?” I asked.

  “They grow mushrooms. The government gave them thousands of acres of land. They’re going to get listed on NASDAQ in March.”

  I flipped the card over. Characters on the back of it promised “Investing in Dingxu’s original shares will quickly multiply your wealth.”

  “The company organized a trip for eight of us investors from Shanghai so that we could inspect the operations,” Fu told me with a touch of pride at being important enough to be invited on an inspection tour.

  It was the first time Fu had ever flown on a plane. She was so impressed with Liaoning Dingxu’s operations that before she boarded the flight back to Shanghai, she handed over the renminbi equivalent of fifteen thousand U.S. dollars in cash to company officials as an initial investment. She told me she had borrowed much of it from her son.

  I began to voice a word of caution, but she was used to my warnings and she reassured me it was a safe bet before I could say anything.

  “Don’t worry. A lot of others invested, too. We all signed contracts with the company. There’s zero risk!” she said with a smile, repeating the familiar phrase as if she needed to convince herself. “Zero risk.”

  RISK WAS THE ONE THING people of Uncle and Auntie’s generation had learned to try to avoid, and yet most had not.

  Many of their lives had been ruined serving as human guinea pigs for Mao’s riskiest political and economic campaigns to reshape China. After those policies failed, they left their revolutionary roles in the countryside to rejoin civilian life in urban centers, where the rules suddenly changed. The revolution was over, capitalism was the new way of life, and risk—the thing they had come to fear most—crept back into their everyday lives.

  The 156 million Chinese born in the ten-year period after the 1949 Communist Revolution were dubbed the Lost Generation. They didn’t have much of a childhood, a family, or an education, and the experience had left them without the skills needed to succeed in this new China. />
  A prominent member of this generation summed the experience up in an interview on CCTV: “In the past when we talked about beliefs, it was very abstract…but it was emotional. It was a mood. And when the ideals of the Cultural Revolution could not be realized, it proved to be an illusion.”

  It was 2003, and the disillusioned interviewee was future president Xi Jinping. He was among a select group of his cohort who had flourished after the dust settled, thanks to having relatives within the Party leadership ranks.

  But most weren’t fortunate enough to ascend the Party’s political ladder, and their lives had become a quest for order and stability. Their prime working years were spent serving the Party—sent off to the countryside like CK’s parents, to a labor camp like Wang Ming, or to China’s Western frontier like Auntie Fu and Uncle Feng—where one of the few lessons they’d learned was how to survive, while they had witnessed friends and family suffer and die. The trauma of the period’s political turmoil was embedded in their psyche like the nightmares that haunt soldiers who have returned from war.

  The Chinese I know between the ages of fifty-five and seventy appear to be normal retirees, but there’s a thick layer of resentment just beneath that surface. All those years spent devoting themselves to the ideals of selflessness and egalitarianism have made them cynical about the rampant inequality plaguing China today. Their peers who have become rich and powerful are typically the most corrupt. They are those who had gotten to their positions of power through the same vicious and duplicitous tactics they had exercised as Red Guards in the 1960s: bullying their superiors and snitching on their friends. The generation’s majority, though, have remained frustrated and poor, and they aren’t afraid to speak out against the great injustice.

  Those of the Lost Generation to whom I had become close all seemed to be going it alone, without much guidance. They had missed out on a formal education and the positive role models that come with that. This had forced them to become stubbornly independent in their actions, and it also meant they seemed perpetually at risk of making big mistakes. This was certainly true of Uncle and Auntie, and it was also a problem I saw with Mayor Chen and his wife, Xie, in Maggie Lane, who refused to compromise their quixotic mission to conquer the corruption of local officials, restore justice to their slice of China, and remain living in their home, happily ever after.

  As their best-connected peer put it, their young lives had served an illusion. In their old age, many of them had pursued new illusions, ones that were less naïve. They might be out of reach in the system they lived under, but they were legally guarded rights elsewhere in the world. They were pursuits like investing in a trustworthy company, owning property, and realizing a national dream that strove to make everyone equal.

  THE INFOMERCIAL BEGAN with a barrage of statistics: A quarter of all men have problems getting an erection. Half of all women suffer from low sex drive. Two out of every three men catch venereal diseases. The numbers flashed across the screen, superimposed on scenes of a middle-aged woman crying into a tissue and a forlorn man moping around his dimly lit home. The numbers didn’t stop: More than half of all marriages end in divorce. Three out of every four divorces are caused by a lack of sexual harmony. Next, scenes of smokestacks and people shuffling down a smoggy street wearing air masks. China’s worsening environment and the pressures of everyday life, announced a booming voice in Mandarin, are ruining your sex life. Auntie Fu’s next investment opportunity promised to solve all these problems.

  Over the phone, she insisted I attend. After watching her sink her pension into Gatewang and the mushroom company, I felt protective, so I tagged along. We met up at an abandoned, bankrupt shopping mall on Shanghai’s outskirts. Inside, garbage piled up against empty storefronts. Escalators lining the empty three-story atrium were frozen in place. The elevators worked, so we took one to the top floor. As it lurched upward, I began to wonder what she had gotten herself into. Over the phone she said it was an investment meeting for a health product: “A big opportunity!” she gushed. But I felt nervous. What kind of company has its office in a dark, abandoned mall?

  A loud ding, and the elevator doors opened to a dark hallway lined with construction scrap. We used the light from our cellphones to guide us to the only sign of electricity: a partially opened door to a lit office.

  As my eyes adjusted, I made out a muscular middle-aged bald man extending his arm toward me. “Our esteemed visitor!” he boomed in Chinese, shaking my hand vigorously.

  “See who I’ve brought?” said Fu, nudging him with her elbow. “A real American journalist!”

  “A foreign guest! And he can speak Chinese! Wah!” exclaimed the man. “Ayi, your connections are far and wide!”

  The bald man’s name was Xue. He was a retired army helicopter pilot from Sichuan. He looked like a Chinese version of Mr. Clean: shaved head, bull neck, and a tight white T-shirt. He appeared calm at first, but after he began to speak, I noticed the left side of his face contorted every ten seconds or so, a facial tic that distracted from his pitch.

  Behind him, seven seniors—all potential investors—lounged on black leather chairs around a long wooden table that faced a flat-screen television. On the opposite end hung a framed Chinese calligraphy painting penned by former president Hu Jintao. The characters read: “Be Honest.”

  “This is what we’re selling,” said Mr. Clean, shoving a box into my hands before turning to face the others. “It’s a great product, for both men and women. It’s now available in forty countries around the world.”

  He paused to pivot in my direction: “Including America.”

  Heads nodded around the table. I examined the box. “Personal Ecological Care” was written in English below a large photo of a buff white model with his shirt open a couple of buttons. He looked like an older, more mature version of tennis star Novak Djokovic, with salt-and-pepper-colored hair. Below him, an English description of the product:

  CREATING POWERFUL DETOXIFYING, CONFIDENT LIFE

  GET RIT OF TOXINS, BEAUTIFUL APPEARANCE

  The Chinese description was less baffling: Each box contained thirty pads saturated with traditional Chinese medicine. You affixed them to the inside of your underwear. Within days, it promised to detoxify your body and restore a youthful sex life. The Chinese name of the product was Lian Zhi Yang, “Nurturing Lotus,” and a company named Golden Days International made it.

  Mr. Clean turned on the television.

  The narrator of the Nurturing Lotus infomercial had a smooth, powerful voice packed with emotion. At the end of each sentence, he sounded as if he were on the brink of orgasm. In my fifteen years in radio, I hadn’t heard a voice-over actor who commanded an audience quite like this. “Nurturing Lotus pads,” he crooned, “are infused…with thirty…different…kinds…of…HERBS!”

  “But none more important,” announced the host, “than Saussurea involucrate, a flower…that grows…in the remote mountains…of…XINJIANG!”

  Auntie elbowed me excitedly. Never had her Xinjiang sounded so mind-blowing. I looked around the room. The other seniors sat up straight, alert, smiling.

  “It warms the uterus,” the host said in a sultry voice, “stimulating menstrual flow…con-tracting the uterus!

  “In men…it stimulates…libido! It cures im-po-tence…and prevents…VENEREAL DISEASE!”

  Onscreen, an image of a hand stamping the Nurturing Lotus’s patent with the words United States of America dissolved into a scene of Chinese technicians in lab coats jumping up and down, cheering, high-fiving one another.

  The infomercial’s final scene was of a woman, stretching her arms out, head tilted back, as rain poured down, soaking her, purifying her, ridding her of all her toxins. “Your…sexual…health…is…RE…STORED!” the host bellowed, gushing one last time.

  “That’s it,” said Mr. Clean, turning the television off. “The company’s global headquarters are in Singapore. That country’s president and first lady are using the products,” he claimed
.

  Auntie took a box and removed one of the individually wrapped pads. “Heavenly Happiness” was written across the wrapper. She opened it and removed a white pad that smelled like a cross between Tiger Balm and rotting fruit.

  “You put this in your underwear!” she said, giggling. “You peel off the back and stick it to the bottom so that it’s touching your little brother!”

  The rest of the room erupted in laughter at Auntie’s vernacular.

  “I’ve used them for a few days now,” Auntie announced. “They really work!”

  I paused. I thought about Auntie and Uncle’s deteriorating relationship. I thought about their separate televisions, and their separate lives. I began to wonder how, exactly, her sex life had improved. Then I shuddered a little and stopped thinking about that.

  Mr. Clean handed me a folder. Inside were dozens of photos. Everyone in the room huddled around me as I examined them. The first one was labeled “Male’s Heavenly Happiness Pad after First Use,” and it showed a pad filled with a discharge that bore a resemblance to blackberry jelly.

  “Wah!” Auntie shouted while we all stared at it together.

  “What’s that?” I asked, pointing at the black jelly.

  “Toxic discharge!” shouted Mr. Clean from the other side of the room.

  I winced. “You mean this came out of his…”

  “Yes! His little brother!”

  More laughter. People passed around the photo, impressed with Heavenly Happiness’s results. It looked more like Hellish Misery.

  The Chinese typically weren’t squeamish about bodily discharges. The gory images of bodies mangled in traffic accidents were commonplace on local television news, and I had once been treated at a hospital that, in its waiting room, displayed a series of gruesome photos of a farmer who had managed to impale his skull with a steel pole. A poster described how the hospital’s talented team of doctors had successfully treated the unfortunate man.

  Mr. Clean passed the photo back to me and I glanced at it again.

 

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