Street of Eternal Happiness

by Rob Schmitz

  A photo of the couple staring into each other’s eyes appeared onscreen. The groom looked up at his tall bride. He had a pudgy face, narrow eyes, and what the Chinese call a “garlic nose,” nostrils flaring out like a bulb of garlic. The bride was thin and had an angular, freckled face. They stood on a rocky beach, the ocean behind them.

  “Where’s that?” I asked Big Sun.

  “Qingdao. That’s where the bride is from.”

  It was a scenic port city on the opposite side of Shandong province, where the couple had met.

  As photo after photo of the couple floated by, I thought about the different paths Big Sun and his little cousin had taken in life. His cousin had grown up in this tiny village, studied hard, and had tested into a reputable university in a desirable city. He attended a good graduate school where he met a city girl. He found a job as an engineer at a pharmaceutical company; she worked as a manager at IKEA, and now here they were, poised to live happily ever after. Had Zhao not left to work in Shanghai, Big Sun would likely have forged a similar path. He certainly had the smarts and drive to do so. Instead, here he was, a migrant hairdresser striking out with an inscrutable hometown girl.

  By the time we had arrived at the village, the entire family had already heard about Big Sun’s debacle. Out here among the corn and wheat fields of rural Shandong, news traveled fast.

  “Which girl was this?” asked an older cousin with a smirk. “The pretty one whose photo you sent me? The one wearing the mask?”

  Big Sun nodded.

  “I think the key here is you haven’t done anything to show you like her,” he lectured. “You’re just not romantic enough.”

  Big Sun sighed. “Sometimes I joke that love between a man and a woman is only useful to make babies. True love is between men.”

  It was a comment that—in the West—might raise questions about his sexuality. But here in a land where courtship rituals were the source of endless frustration that strengthened the bonds between fellow men, it seemed to fit.

  A squat, rough-looking fellow stood to the side of the scrum of cousins: Big Sun’s father. This was the mountain man who had emerged as the only local bachelor willing to marry Zhao after her leukemia went into remission. He was a coal miner who routinely beat her until she finally left for the big city, only to return for holidays, weddings, and funerals. He was a quiet man with big hands, bushy eyebrows, and a garlic nose. He stood several inches shorter than his wife, and when he looked up at others, he had a habit of squinting, making him look perpetually confused. Zhao had gussied him up for the weekend festivities with a navy blue blazer, blue-checkered shirt, and khakis. The old coal miner awkwardly picked at his new duds like a boy who can’t wait to change out of his church clothes.

  I shook his hand. “See?” Zhao shouted. “I told you he was ugly!”

  Zhao belted out a hearty laugh. Her husband ignored her, shaking my hand, looking perplexed at how his wife had come to know a foreigner in that faraway city on the sea.

  We were in a shaded part of the courtyard. Zhao’s husband was here with a dozen old men huddled around a table watching a bespectacled man in a Mao suit carefully inscribing characters into a small red booklet. They were connected to the groom’s family by blood or soil, and each of them held red envelopes stuffed with money in their callused hands.

  The first man handed his envelope to a man in a suit sitting beside the scribe. He was the village accountant, and he was the only one whose hands were clean. The accountant opened the envelope, slowly counting the money out loud: “ONE hundred, TWO hundred, THREE hundred…” The others pressed forward to watch. When he was finished, the scribe took a red booklet from the top of a large stack and wrote the name of the donor into a formal invitation for the next day’s wedding.

  Everyone here was accustomed to the ritual. They knew precisely how much to give based on a variety of factors: how you were related to the family, whether you someday wanted to be related to the family, if you did business with the family, how much the family had given at your son’s wedding, whether you owed the family any favors. It was like the opening scene of The Godfather cast with Chinese farmers. But here in the village, there was no secrecy—everyone was free to look at the accounting book to see what their neighbors had given—and many did just that prior to handing over their red envelopes.

  It seemed like a nerve-racking role, going through the motions of being a guest at a country wedding. But if you had a problem with it—as the driver reminded us in the cab—you could take it up with the godfather of all Chinese traditions. His hometown was just down the road.

  I WOKE UP the next morning to the piercing blast of a trombone. In an instant, my body jolted itself up in bed. My mind felt its way through a pounding headache to work out where I was, what time it was, and why a trombone was blaring “Jingle Bells” outside my window.

  I stumbled out of bed and opened the curtains. Directly below the window, a six-piece marching band of elderly men in bright red suits hunched over their instruments: a man on trombone, another pounding a big bass drum, one on snare, and the rest of them smashing cymbals together at intervals detached from any sense of rhythm. It was clear and sunny. I sat down on the edge of my bed trying to recall what had happened the night before, while the cacophony outside streamed into my room…Prancing through the snow, in a one-horse open sleigh…I had obviously gotten drunk, and my clothes smelled like smoke….O’er the fields we go, laughing all the way…I noticed a crumpled cigarette atop my notebook on the nightstand. “Suyan” was scrawled just above the filter in traditional Chinese characters. Ah, yes. I had accepted the countryside greeting between men—a cigarette—and that had eventually snowballed into Suyan after Suyan. I had written the cigarette’s English name in my notebook—“Sequoia”—and below that, I had taken note of the eloquent English motto written on each pack:

  FOLLOWING THE TRACK OF THE GALE,

  I AM CHASING THE SUN.

  I coughed up some phlegm and winced. My throat felt like I had chased the sun, caught it, and swallowed it whole. Foggy snapshots of the evening began to surface. I recalled sitting at a table with women and children only to be lured by Sequoias to the men’s table, seated between two drunken fishermen who were sharing swigs from a bottle of grain alcohol. After we polished the bottle off, we moved on to local beer. I had a memory of looking over to the women and children’s table and noticing little Shuo Shuo on his mother’s lap, sipping on cup after cup of red wine until he passed out in his mother’s strong arms. My drinking partners laughed and said the two-year-old could put away more than me.

  I remembered frequent visits to an outhouse where the walls seemed to be moving. Then I took a drag from a Sequoia and the orange embers lit up the grimy stall, revealing a wall crawling with maggots. When it came time to return to the motel, I remember quietly walking upstairs in the groom’s country home to retrieve my bag in one of the bedrooms and startling a pregnant woman who was inside. I stammered an apology, explaining who I was, but before I could finish speaking, she had vanished through the door.

  The next morning when Zhao picked me up at the motel, I asked about the woman. We were seated in a tiny covered vestibule on the back of a three-wheeled motorcycle cab on our way to her cousin’s home. Thin red-velvet curtains blocked the windows, making everything inside appear rose-colored. “That was the wife of the groom’s younger brother,” Zhao said. “She’s in hiding.”

  “Whom is she hiding from?” I asked.

  She looked at me, disappointed by my stupidity. It was obvious why a pregnant woman in the countryside would be in hiding.

  “The family planning bureau!” Zhao said.

  The agency was in charge of enforcing China’s planned-birth policy. Zhao told me the woman and her husband already had a little girl, and they had tried again for a boy. In China, doctors aren’t allowed to reveal the sex of the child, so Zhao’s relatives visited an illegal clinic to find out. An ultrasound revealed another girl. The couple
made an appointment for an abortion. “But when she got to the doctor’s office,” Zhao said, “she didn’t have the heart to go through with it. So she’s hidden upstairs in that bedroom ever since. She’s usually locked inside. If she’s discovered, she’ll have to pay a sixty-thousand-yuan fine. That’s a lot of money out here.”

  It was a tragic situation, but Zhao spoke about the girl’s dilemma without a hint of emotion.

  “What’s going to happen to the baby after it’s born?” I asked.

  “The family’s already decided,” Zhao said. “Her sister and brother-in-law have tried to have children, but they keep having miscarriages. She’ll give the baby to them and they’ll register the child as their own.”

  Out here, there were all sorts of ways to get around the rules of the system, and when a relative had a problem like this, family members worked together to solve it internally rather than let the state intervene. There was nothing that shouldn’t be kept in the family, especially its newest member.

  The motorcycle cab jolted to a stop outside another relative’s home. Zhao stepped out and embraced a woman who looked to be her age. She had shoulder-length hair and was thin and pretty. She smiled with the bottom half of her face. Her eyes looked sunken and sad; her droopy eyelids made her look sedated. “I told you about this cousin!” Zhao yelled to me. “She’s the one who doesn’t need to work. Her husband is quite capable! Whereas me, bah! I work too hard.”

  It dawned on me that I had heard stories about this cousin back at the flower shop in Shanghai. This was the wife of the infamous tax official, the cousin who was routinely beaten by both her husband and his young mistress, the one who had attempted to kill herself by swallowing pesticide. We had come to discuss Big Sun’s courtship disaster. It was this cousin who had helped Zhao arrange the pairing.

  Inside her cousin’s fifth-floor penthouse, Zhao didn’t bother sitting down. “She didn’t give us face at all!” Zhao said, skipping any small talk.

  “This isn’t your fault,” Zhao’s cousin told her. “It’s Big Sun’s problem.”

  Zhao shook her head. “He’s so unreasonable! Gao bu cheng, Di bu jiu!” she yelled.

  It was a Chinese saying describing someone who can neither accomplish something big nor settle for something small. It seemed appropriate for a young man whose dreams had been lost somewhere between the big city and the countryside.

  “Aiya! He’s nearly thirty years old!” said the cousin, slapping her white leather sofa. “There’s something wrong with the girl, too. She kept giving him excuses not to meet. ‘I’m too tired,’ ‘I’m sick,’ she just didn’t want to meet him.”

  “That just shows she’s not interested. Still: suppose you worked in the supermarket and a group of people came to see you. Wouldn’t you go out to say hello?” Zhao asked her cousin.

  “You have to! It’s common courtesy! You must give face!” her cousin yelled.

  “Of course you must! She lacks any culture! How impolite!”

  Their cackles bounced off the walls of the bright, airy apartment. A fountain with an angel as its centerpiece jutted from an interior wall. There were framed photos throughout the apartment of Zhao’s cousin and her children. There was no trace of her husband—he paid the rent and sometimes showed up to beat her, but for the most part, he lived across town with his mistress.

  Zhao and her cousin went on howling about Big Sun, the girl, and the indignity of it all. The two were a curious pair of matchmakers: both of their marriages were train wrecks, and Zhao told me neither of them had been in love before. Yet here they were, beside themselves as to why Big Sun wasn’t interested in any of the girls they had arranged for him.

  After they settled down, Zhao’s cousin turned to me. “You’re from America, eh? Is your house in America bigger than this one?”

  “Um…yes, but houses in America tend to be bigger, generally speaking. Your house is very nice,” I said.

  Zhao’s cousin flashed another dead-eyed smile. Her expression remained completely sullen.

  “I have four others,” she said.

  “HER HUSBAND IS so capable,” Zhao said.

  We were back in a cab on our way to the countryside wedding. The banquet the night before was just a warm-up for today’s festivities. Zhao’s voice carried a tone of envy. The man may have abused her cousin and taken a mistress, but he was rich and powerful—more than could be said for most men in her hometown, especially her own husband.

  “He’s very well connected and he works all the time,” Zhao continued. “He and my cousin are actually second cousins.”

  “They’re related?” I asked, a little confused. “Wait. You’re related to him, too?”

  “We’re all related,” Zhao answered. “They’ve got three kids—their son has a genetic disorder—something’s wrong with his eyes—but their two girls are fine.”

  The windows of the taxi were open and a warm wind blew through Zhao’s hair. Outside, the apartment blocks of the city made way for fields of newly planted wheat and corn. I thought about the life of Zhao’s cousin and how messy and chaotic it had become.

  “The women here aren’t like Shanghai girls,” said Zhao, her arm out the window, grasping the door. “They’re not feminine and soft at all. Women here—when they’ve had enough of life, they drink pesticide.”

  The driver, a man with cropped gray hair, nodded. “I know a lot of women like that,” he said.

  The meter had dropped. Another taxicab therapist was in.

  “So do I,” said Zhao. “It’s common out here.”

  The driver grinned and shook his head. “Their husbands beat them, and they feel like there’s no other way out,” he said.

  I wondered if he beat his wife, too.

  “My cousin drank half a kilogram of pesticide. It wasn’t enough. They pumped her stomach and she was in the intensive care ward for days,” Zhao said.

  “Wah,” said the driver, impressed.

  “Another cousin of mine was able to do it right—she drank a whole bucket of pesticide and died, just like that,” Zhao said.

  “A lot of women here jump off the suspension bridge into the river,” offered the driver.

  Zhao nodded. “After my cousin survived drinking pesticide, she jumped into a well. That didn’t work, either,” she said with a chuckle.

  It was a hell of a conversation for a sunny springtime drive to a wedding. Zhao and the driver chatted and chuckled as if these things were funny. Both claimed to have firsthand experience.

  “I don’t have the courage to drink pesticide or jump into a well,” said Zhao. “I admire them for that. Sometimes I want to die, but I can’t bring myself to do it.”

  “Why would you say such a thing?” I asked.

  Both Zhao and the driver laughed at my show of concern. “If it were easier to kill myself, I would’ve done it a long time ago!” Zhao said. “All I do is work, eat, and sleep. It’s meaningless.”

  A gust of wind blew through the car. The driver smiled and nodded his head in agreement.

  “TODAY IS MAY FOURTH, 2014 A.D. Today, the sun shines and the wind is gentle. The sweet fragrance of the osmanthus tree is in the air. It is an auspicious and festive day. We gather together in the most happy mood to witness the ceremony of this beautiful young couple!”

  A responding chorus of Hao—Good!—erupted from the audience. A tall young man with a microphone stood between the bride and the groom. The couple had forgone the red traditional outfits for a Western look: a black tux and a poufy white dress. To honor tradition, the groom sported a red tie, and the bride, red-framed sunglasses.

  The pair had arrived in a rented white BMW. As they stepped out of it, family members lit a thirty-foot-long roll of firecrackers that unraveled into the shape of a heart. They exploded like machine-gun fire for nearly a minute, triggering alarms in cars parked along the village’s main street. Next, a row of red cannons released one exploding rocket after another. Little Shuo Shuo, hungover from his red wine binge the n
ight before, wailed in panic through the racket.

  Inside, more than a hundred family, friends, and neighbors crammed into the courtyard. They quietly watched the bride and groom ascend the family wheat-threshing platform. It had been converted into a stage framed by a pink curtain bearing the single red Chinese character : “happiness.”

  “Groom! Please take one step forward and face the people!” shouted the man with the microphone. “Today’s groom is handsome with an imposing appearance. Let me ask everyone here: Is the groom handsome?”

  The man pointed the microphone at the audience, but they missed the cue. Most of them had never attended a Western-style wedding ceremony and they couldn’t fathom why a man with a microphone would be talking to them when they weren’t the ones getting married. For a moment, the only sound was the background music, a sappy violin piece seeping from the speakers onstage. A machine propped up atop one of the speakers spit out hundreds of bubbles that hovered just above the heads of the mute audience.

  The host cleared his throat. He was a handsome man with glasses dressed in a black suit resembling a Catholic priest’s frock, but he was no man of the cloth. He was a professional wedding host the family had rented for the afternoon.

  “Ahem. There are tens of thousands of brides in the world, but today’s bride is the most beautiful!” he continued. “As the bride stands here, the sun is stunned, the cosmos is shattered, and the earth is paralyzed. Why? Because she’s a fairy of the earth! Let’s prove that with our applause!”

  The stunned, shattered, and paralyzed audience broke from their trance and responded with a loud ovation.

  The ceremony went on like this for an hour. The host seemed to be working from a memorized script that was often interrupted by a videographer and a cameraman who walked on and off the stage whenever they felt like getting shots of the couple and their families. They would interrupt the wedding by shouting, “Three, two, one: Eggplant!” as family members smiled and shouted it in return. The word in Chinese, qiezi, pushes your mouth into a smile when you say it, much like “cheese” does in English.