Street of Eternal Happiness

by Rob Schmitz

  It was as if he and the countryside he tilled had never existed.

  IT WAS MAY DAY, a five-day holiday, and when I stepped off the train at Zaozhuang Station, I climbed a broken escalator to the ground level where Zhao and her youngest son were waiting. It would be the last time I would be allowed to touch my suitcase. “Give it to me! Hand it over!” shouted Little Sun, wresting the bag from my hands and hoisting it into a cab.

  I barely recognized Zhao. The return-to-the-village uniform of two decades ago—a blue factory jumpsuit—was now a stylish formal dress decorated with flowers, hair styled with curls that graced her bare shoulders, topped off with mascara, lipstick, jewelry, and a sun hat.

  Zhao was dressed for a wedding, but not the one we were there to attend. Her nephew was to be married the following day in the countryside, yet she had come with a mission to arrange her eldest son’s marriage with a local girl. In a land of floating lives and families scattered to the cities to work, a hometown wedding was no longer about the bride and groom. It had become an event where family business was conducted, marriages arranged, and futures planned.

  “I can’t believe you’re here!” Zhao shouted, touching my arm. “When I told my nephew you were coming to his wedding, he was thrilled. Out here, we only see foreigners on television!”

  Zaozhuang looked smoggy and flat, and construction cranes towered over the skyline. Some cities in China are celebrated for local cuisine. Others are known for their ancient cultural sites. Zaozhuang draws its fame from fighting. This part of China is flat and green—fish and rice country, the Chinese call it—but its fertile plains are prone to devastating droughts. Weishan Lake, the local source of water, forms the midsection to China’s ancient Grand Canal, a waterway constructed fifteen hundred years ago. It makes up the border between Shandong, Anhui, and Jiangsu provinces, and tens of millions of people depend on it for their livelihoods. During dry spells, Zaozhuang’s men often wage water wars against their neighbors. In the last sixty years, there have been more than four hundred recorded cases of cross-border conflicts over Weishan Lake. Hundreds of local men have been killed or injured.

  The lake wasn’t the only thing the men of Zaozhuang shed blood for. During the Japanese invasion in the late 1930s, a local team of guerrilla fighters—farmers and workers from the surrounding coal mines—became national heroes after they launched a series of raids on the invaders, killing enemy soldiers and taking control of their trains to steal guns and explosives.

  The city had a bloodstained history, and the more I learned about it, the more I realized that Zhao’s stories about the lawlessness back in her hometown weren’t exaggerations. Zaozhuang’s men had never been ones to turn down a good fight.

  Zhao hoped Big Sun would make a life here. For his future family, she had bought an apartment on the twenty-first floor of a building named People’s Harmony Park. It was one of the tallest high-rises in the city, and it was next to Zaozhuang’s biggest tourist attraction: the Railway Guerrilla Memorial Museum. “There it is!” said Zhao, pointing out her open cab window at a building that looked like a castle. “I’m renting it out now, but someday Big Sun will move there.”

  The only thing missing was a wife. Zhao pulled her arm back inside the car, slunk into her seat, placed her hat in her lap, and closed her eyes, exhaling hard, letting the warm spring air blow through her hair. She had prepared for this weekend for more than a year. Ever since Big Sun had dropped out of high school and returned to her flower shop, Zhao had felt responsible for his path in life. Now it was time to help him find a wife, and this was the closest she had ever come. Big Sun and the girl had even struck up a friendship over WeChat, texting each other each day leading up to this weekend.

  “They met for lunch today,” Zhao said, her eyes still closed. “She’s very pretty.”

  Until today, all she had to go on was the girl’s profile photo on WeChat—the one where half her face was covered with a Hello Kitty air mask.

  “He’s meeting with her parents and relatives now,” she said, sounding a little worried. “They don’t seem to be very happy that Big Sun is a hairdresser. That’s not a popular job in my hometown. They don’t think his income will be very high.”

  They were right, of course, but their daughter’s income wasn’t high either. She made the equivalent of $150 a month managing the warehouse of a grocery store, and she had no desire to leave her hometown for better pay. After they married, Big Sun would be forced to return here to find work, and his options would be limited. He was naturally smart, but he had dropped out of high school and his work experience was limited to a golf course and a hair salon. Most jobs in Zaozhuang were at the coal mine, in the wheat fields, or in construction, but Big Sun shunned manual labor. Zhao worried what the girl’s parents would think about that, and she hoped the apartment at People’s Harmony Park would sweeten the deal. “In our village, there’s a saying,” Zhao said from the front seat: “ ‘You can only catch a bird after you buy a cage.’ ”

  Zhao had another cage. It was a spacious flat on the seventeenth floor of a blue-and-white-tiled building rising from a lush green grid of wheat and corn on the outskirts of town. When we arrived there, the bird—Zhao’s daughter-in-law Zhang Min, the wife of Little Sun—had flown off to accompany her hapless brother-in-law in his meeting with the Hello Kitty girl. Big Sun had gotten himself lost trying to find the girl’s home and had made an emergency call. “Aiya! He doesn’t even know how to chase a girl!” lamented Zhao when she heard the story.

  The apartment was an empty concrete shell. After Zhao bought it for Little Sun and Zhang Min, the couple had married, left for Shanghai to work, and had a son in such quick succession that they had never gotten around to decorating it. Someday when they had made all they could in Shanghai, they would return to settle down here with their little boy, Shuo Shuo. When Zhao retired, the third bedroom would be hers.

  Little Sun picked up the two-year-old Shuo Shuo and gave me a tour. It was around a thousand square feet—large by Chinese standards—and had three bedrooms. The living room window overlooked a large courtyard with a basketball court and a man-made creek filled with boulders. Below, teenagers were shooting hoops, and young boys were molding their own mini-river, corralling a trickle of water from a leaky fire hydrant. “I can picture Shuo Shuo playing down there,” said Little Sun, smiling in the sunlight.

  Whenever I saw him at his mother’s flower shop on the Street of Eternal Happiness, Little Sun was in between work shifts and he usually looked depressed and stressed out. But in Zaozhuang holding his young son, he was relaxed, optimistic, and happy. He was home.

  His big brother, on the other hand, had needed a tour guide for his own hometown. When Big Sun and Zhang Min arrived fresh from his meeting with his future in-laws, he still looked lost. He saw me and murmured a “Ni Hao,” briefly glancing my way before fixing his defeated gaze onto the floor. He had dressed in a paisley shirt and carefully ripped black jeans for the occasion.

  “How’d it go?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he moaned. “We were supposed to have lunch, but that didn’t happen. Having lunch is a sign her parents have accepted me into the family. Instead we just sat there and talked nonsense. Now I have to wait for them to let me know.”

  Big Sun had brought a get-well gift—a basket of fruit—for Hello Kitty’s father, who was recuperating from surgery. It was a gesture Zhao saw as courteous and filial but that the girl’s family had interpreted as too forward a step in the delicate dance of countryside courtship. Her parents had acted as if accepting the gift from this slick urbanite meant they approved of him as their daughter’s future husband. Zhao and Big Sun simply thought it was customary. It was a cultural misunderstanding between city and country. For rural folks, a gift was never just a gift. It was a debt that needed to be repaid. As Zhao thought to herself about what to do next, I thought about how she and her son seemed out of touch with their hometown’s customs.

  Zhao looked up
. “Where is she now?” she asked Big Sun.

  “She’s at work at the grocery store,” he said with a sigh.

  Zhao stood still and stared sideways in deep concentration. There was only a day left to finish this. Where her son saw a dark pit of hopelessness, Zhao saw opportunity.

  Ten minutes later, the entire family was outside the grocery store, demanding to talk to the girl. Big Sun and his mother stepped up to the warehouse door at the back of the store. The rest of us retreated half a block away, trying to look inconspicuous. But the presence of a foreigner this far afield from the big city began attracting a throng of onlookers. “Laowai!” someone yelled: Foreigner! and then there were more yells.

  Zhao nodded her head, and Big Sun knocked. Zhao walked away to join us down the street. She had done all she could. Her son would have to take it from here.

  More people stared at me. On the street, rubberneckers in their cars stopped; one of them honked his horn. Big Sun glanced back at us with a look of horror. His courtship was turning into an event.

  The door opened, and the girl stepped into the doorway.

  Hello Kitty looked more Shanghai than Zaozhuang—she was petite and very pretty—but she had the temper of a local girl, and she looked to be on the verge of losing it when she saw Big Sun. “Why are you bothering me at work?” she screamed at him, flailing her arms.

  We stepped around the gawkers to get a clear look. Zhao stood in front, holding the hand of little Shuo Shuo, who sucked on a lollipop.

  Hello Kitty turned her head and finally saw us. “Eh? Who are all these people?” she shouted, stretching an arm toward us.

  The gathering mob now had something else to stare at: a live soap opera unfolding on the streets of Zaozhuang. For a moment, all was quiet as the point of distraction shifted. The only sound was the loud slurping from Shuo Shuo, who was busy with his lollipop. Big Sun looked dumbstruck by the scene, unable to answer. Hello Kitty flew into a rage. “What the hell’s going on here?” she yelled in exasperation. “What is this? You’re going to get me in trouble!”

  Big Sun suddenly found his voice. He stammered that he only wanted to invite her to his cousin’s wedding. This prompted more frantic screaming.

  Zhao watched the scene she had created, shaking her head. “Big Sun is useless,” she said under her breath. “It’s not difficult to find a wife here, but it’s so difficult for him. He’s just useless.”

  More screams. The mob slowly surrounded the two, eager to watch a fight. This seemed to energize Hello Kitty, and she yelled even louder at Big Sun. He nervously glanced at the people surrounding him, hands in his pockets, mortified.

  “Girls here are more interested in scoundrels who waste their money on booze, gambling, and prostitutes,” Zhao said out of the side of her mouth to me while watching her son. “Big Sun’s too much of a nice guy,” his mother said sympathetically. “He’s too innocent, too honest. He’s useless.”

  The girl slammed the door in Big Sun’s face. He stared at it for a few seconds, pondering whether to knock again, but persistence wasn’t in his nature. The crowd dispersed, disappointed with the abrupt ending. Big Sun turned and walked toward us, his head sunken into his chest. “She’s not coming,” he grumbled, stating the obvious.

  Before we got into a waiting cab, Big Sun glanced one last time at the warehouse door. Goodbye, Kitty.

  He slouched next to me in the backseat, and we set off for Tanghu, the village where the wedding would take place. Zhao sat in the front seat, staring out the window.

  Her phone rang. It was Hello Kitty. “Wei? Ah. I understand. That’s fine. Please don’t be angry…relax. He told me your father was sick, and I told him he should come and visit him, regardless of whether you two will be married or not…”

  There was a long pause. Zhao shifted the phone to the other ear. Hello Kitty’s voice sounded angrier.

  “Right, right. That’s fine. Don’t feel embarrassed,” Zhao said into her phone, reassuring the girl. “We were waiting outside because we had a friend who came from America to meet you…yes…I understand your boss was there…I know…Big Sun really likes you, I can tell.”

  I looked over at Big Sun. He stared out the window, limp. Outside, city had turned into country. We passed a cart pulled by a donkey.

  Zhao glanced at her son as she spoke. “Perhaps you don’t like him, perhaps it’s because he grew up in the South; he’s not familiar with how northern girls expect to be treated. But I know he likes you. It’s my fault. I was never good at educating him…”

  Big Sun’s face turned from mopey to annoyed. He barely knew Hello Kitty; apart from the texting, he had only seen her twice. This was his mother’s deal. But he was still angry about what had just transpired. When Zhao hung up, he sat upright. “What did she say?”

  “She said her bosses were all there and she couldn’t leave work. She acted like you were going to drag her out of there like a caveman!” Zhao shouted. “Aiya, people here! The way they think—they’re so fengjian!”

  The word meant “feudal,” and I had heard urban transplants like Zhao use it when describing the habits of people in their rural hometowns.

  “How could I drag her out of there?” asked Big Sun defensively. “I’ve never even touched her!”

  Zhao looked back from the front seat. “She felt that since you were outside the door asking her to come with you, she was losing face in front of her boss.”

  “Too fengjian!” shouted the driver with a burst of laughter.

  The cabbie was a burly man with a crew cut and aviator sunglasses. He looked eager to participate in the conversation.

  Big Sun looked at the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “In Shanghai, if someone likes you, isn’t that something you feel happy about? Isn’t it normal for me to pursue a girl?” he asked. “But here in our hometown, it has to be this protracted and painful process. I can never figure this place out!”

  “It’s Confucian!” shouted the driver, turning around to explain it to the foreigner in the cab. “His hometown is down the road!”

  The great sage had hailed from Qufu, an hour away, and people here—the same people city-dwellers often considered fengjian—still lived by many of his traditions.

  Zhao and the driver talked about her son’s predicament in the front seat.

  Big Sun slumped in the back, growing angrier. “She’s as stubborn as a bull!” he shouted. “I go and meet her mother, and she doesn’t give me any sign whether they approve of me or not. So they bring me to her father, and I bought a little gift for him! That’s just being polite! But after I go and buy it, she gets angry with me.”

  “You were in the right,” the driver said decisively.

  “I mean, who am I marrying? Her or her father?” Big Sun asked, exasperated.

  “Ha ha ha! You hit the nail on the head!” roared the driver, slamming his hand on the dashboard.

  This was about as close to a therapy session as you could get in China. Shanghai cabbies usually ignored the banter in their backseats, but not their rural counterparts. They owned the car and any conversation that occurred inside. It was natural for them to insert themselves into discussions of the most intimate personal matters as if they had a stake in it, too, acting as a sounding board while troubleshooting perplexing Confucian duties.

  “Listen,” the driver said, looking at Big Sun in his rearview mirror. “Your mom mentioned you work in Hangzhou, right? You’ve seen the world. You’ve got a foreign friend. This bumpkin girl makes a thousand yuan a month at the supermarket! What’s the big deal?”

  Big Sun considered this point for a moment. “Property prices are going up across the country, and the price of a wife is, too,” he said.

  “Yeah, but you’ve already got a place in town, right? After hearing about your situation, I think it’ll be easy for you to find a girl. If I were that girl, I’d be flattered you came to see me at work.”

  The driver stopped his car along a dusty main street lined with run-down
shops. Fields of bright green wheat lay beyond. He twisted around. “I was going to turn in for the day, but I saw you had a foreigner with you! I’m almost fifty and I’ve never seen one before! And you, young man,” he said, pointing to Big Sun. “Don’t worry about a thing. You’ll find a better girl than her.”

  Zhao took out a fifty-yuan note and handed it to the driver, paying him for the ride. The therapy session was free.

  HAD BIG SUN grown up in Zaozhuang, he might have already found a better girl. His cousin did. “They met in graduate school,” Big Sun said as we watched romantic photos of the bride and groom dissolve into each other on a flat-screen television.

  We were in the courtyard of a two-story concrete farmhouse. Workers stepped around us to construct the stage for the next day’s wedding ceremony. Behind us came the machine-gun-fire sound of women chopping meat and vegetables for the banquet dinner. Buckets of live fish and soft-shelled turtles covered the courtyard. Canvas tents lined the alleyway outside the house, extending to the wheat fields beyond. Neighbors were unfolding dozens of tables underneath them. Nearly all the village’s residents had come to help marry off Big Sun’s cousin.