by Rob Schmitz
Children from the village dressed in school track uniforms with red handkerchiefs around their necks filtered in and out of the courtyard. They sat on the edge of the stage, giggling at the spectacle. At one point, a cameraman hurled a curse word at a child who was in the way of his shot. The child’s father, a cousin of the bride, shoved the cameraman into the audience, shouting obscenities at him. The host turned off the microphone, and the audience was entertained with a brief intermission as the two men swung their fists at each other wildly, neither of them landing a punch. Face lost, the guest gathered his wife and son and stormed off, disappointing those who were hoping to watch a good fight with their Western wedding.
I stood next to Zhao’s two brothers. They were large men with thick necks, broad bellies, and fat cheeks. Both reeked of grain alcohol. Zhao had warned me about them. “When those two get together, they drink too much,” she had told me, “and they’ll expect you to drink, too.”
The older brother was a truck driver. He boasted of dropping out of local school at the age of fifteen after repeating the second grade for eight straight years. The younger brother had done slightly better in his studies, but had ultimately dropped out after primary school and had followed his sister to Shanghai, where he worked in construction.
Keeping up with what seemed to be local tradition, each brother juggled a wife and a mistress, and from the looks of it, the younger brother continued to be on the prowl, eyeing a young woman in front of us who was a friend of the bride. He whispered, “You’re beautiful” into her ear, slurring his speech.
The woman jerked her head away as if a bee had been hovering over her. The older brother laughed. “He’s a wild beast when he drinks! My dad used to chain him to the dinner table at home because he was so wild!”
As the ceremony wound down, I watched Zhao from afar as she greeted long-lost family and friends. She smiled as easily as ever, gliding across the courtyard with the grace and poise of a sophisticated urbanite.
In this hometown of hers, filled with wild men, abused women, and forgotten children, her quiet civility stood out. Family spoke to her with deference, friends sought her advice. Inside a courtyard of her closest relations, she was the first person who had chuqu, “to go out,” yearning to see the world outside the narrow realm of her hometown. She had worked hard to earn money to buy a home for each of her boys, something her family and friends expected of a man, but not a local woman. Among the women here, Zhao was a pioneer. Among the men, she inspired both fear and attraction: she was a woman with power.
“Now is the moment we’ve all been waiting for,” shouted the host into the microphone. “It is time for the bride and groom to face each other!”
This was the cue for the groom to kiss the bride, but the couple demurred and hugged each other awkwardly instead, prompting catcalls from the audience and shouts demanding a genuine kiss.
“You should be more impulsive and your head should be on this side,” instructed the host into the microphone, moving the groom’s head, “and the bride’s head should be like this,” he said, positioning her face with both his hands as if she were a mannequin.
The couple hesitated again, before giving each other henpecks on the cheek, triggering more howls from the courtyard. Finally, Big Sun climbed atop the threshing platform. With both hands, he pushed their faces together, forcing a real kiss. The courtyard erupted in laughter. Whether the young couple liked it or not, their family had decided: they were now husband and wife. With her sons at her side, Zhao stood next to her brothers and sisters who had gathered together on the platform with the bride and groom. They posed for the photographer and smiled. “Three, two, one: Eggplant!”
“THAT PLACE IS no longer my home,” Zhao told me inside her flower shop on the Street of Eternal Happiness. “I’m merely visiting family and friends when I go back there. This is where I’m most comfortable now. This is my home.”
It had been two weeks since the wedding, a rush of business from Mother’s Day had subsided, and Zhao was now alone in her shop on a cool, misty day in mid-May, hunched over her phone, exchanging text messages with friends who had heard about Big Sun’s disastrous performance in Zaozhuang. The search for a mate had resumed, and this time around, Zhao was leaving friends from her hometown out of the matter. “Yesterday, my neighbor here in Shanghai found a new girl for him, but Big Sun refused to see her,” she complained. “He said she was too young. He’s simply hopeless!”
Back in Zhao’s hometown, talk of Big Sun’s fiasco had reached mythical heights. Zhao told me there were rumors circulating among her relatives that the girl was a Tongzi: a human who, under Taoist belief, had spent the previous life as a fairy and was reincarnated to carry out a special mission. According to legend, once the mission was fulfilled, a Tongzi would be called back to the spirit world. Tongzi were said to be attractive humans who had terrible luck in relationships and life in general. “The gods gave her a beautiful face,” Zhao explained to me, “but not a beautiful fate.”
Maybe Big Sun is a Tongzi, too, I thought. I could tell from Zhao’s furrowed brow that she may have been thinking the same thing. By her estimate, she had set Big Sun up with at least three girls a year for the past eight years. None of them had panned out. I was no expert on Taoist deities, but the odds of Big Sun meeting more than two dozen reincarnated fairies seemed to go against the laws of numerology.
“My brothers liked you,” Zhao said, changing the subject. “They enjoyed drinking with you.”
“I enjoyed drinking with them, too,” I replied, not entirely truthfully.
After the wedding ceremony, her brothers had filled me with as much grain alcohol, beer, and Sequoias as they could before I excused myself to stagger onto a train back to Shanghai. Following the track of the gale, I thought as the high-speed train picked up speed and barreled southbound under the night sky, I am chasing the sun.
“Each of my brothers has two wives,” Zhao told me matter-of-factly. “My younger brother was finally able to divorce his first wife, but my elder brother is too nice of a guy to let go of the first one.”
I wondered if there was a man in all of Zaozhuang who managed to survive with just one wife.
“Your husband doesn’t have another wife, does he?” I asked her.
The question triggered uncontrollable laughter. “You saw him! He’s not good-looking at all!” shouted Zhao between bursts of laughter. “If he had two wives, I’d love him a lot more! The more wives you have, the more capable you are!
“If I had to live back in my hometown with my husband, I would have drunk pesticide a long time ago,” Zhao told me, turning serious. “I’ve tried for years to divorce him, but he just won’t let go.”
Zhao had told me a number of times that one of her biggest fears was that her husband would come to live with her in Shanghai after he retired from the mine. “After the wedding, my sister cried and blamed my mother for not taking better care of our marriages. I have four sisters, and the men she found for us are all hopeless. Each one of us women is the pillar of our families.”
Zhao took out her phone to check and see if her friends had made any progress in their search for a suitable match for Big Sun.
Outside, a mix of smog and rain had reduced visibility to just the cars steadily driving by in front of us, each one of them sounding like a duck landing on a lake. Zhao turned off her phone and sighed. It appeared her firstborn son would remain single for the foreseeable future. She shook her head, exasperated, and said, “All men are useless.”
CK began to feel the qi one day three years ago. He was hanging out with a couple of friends playing videogames when he decided to lie down and rest. “That’s when I felt something,” CK told me. “There was somebody talking with me. It was another me.”
“It sounds like you were high on something,” I said.
CK smirked. “Actually, in that moment my mind was very clear.”
It was a sunny and warm Sunday afternoon in May of 2014. Outside,
the plane trees were bursting with bright green foliage, people were enjoying walks along the Street of Eternal Happiness, and, for a change, 2nd Floor Your Sandwich was busy.
CK’s waitstaff handled the traffic while their boss sat in the corner, talking to me about how he found the qi.
“The qi—the energy—it traveled through my body,” CK said. “The other me guided the real me in how to breathe and relax my body. Suddenly I couldn’t feel anything. I was just lying on my bed in another space. All colors disappeared and everything turned to black and white. And then I saw them. Lotuses. Lots of lotuses. And then there was someone else with me.”
“Someone else apart from you and the other you?” I asked.
“Yes,” said CK with a serious face.
CK didn’t know it at the time, but he now thinks it was Buddha.
“All I knew for sure was that it wasn’t a man or a woman. There was suddenly no difference between the two, just like there was no difference between right and wrong. Because in that space, all there existed was peace. There weren’t even any colors.”
Afterward, CK read a book that described Buddha as being gender-neutral, and it reminded him of his vision. He began to study Buddhist scriptures, and soon after, CK met his master.
“He’s a monk at a small temple outside the city. He told me I was born to be a monk, too. The first time I met him, he asked me to cut my hair and stay in the temple.”
“Do you think you have the discipline to be a Buddhist monk?” I asked.
“Not at the moment. It’d be too hard to quit sex,” CK said, pausing to take a sip of coffee. “I told my master I’m not ready for a commitment like that yet. I’m still too accustomed to life in the city.”
CK’s sandwich shop had turned a corner and was finally making a profit, and his accordion business was thriving. There were few other cities in China—or in the world, for that matter—where you could make a decent living selling sandwiches and accordions.
But life in Shanghai had its disadvantages. When I’d arrived, I noticed a bandage on CK’s left ear. He was also sporting a three-inch gash on his chin. “I blacked out at a club,” he explained. “I fainted and fell down the stairs. When I woke up I had blood all over my face and my ear was ringing.”
Doctors had stitched up his chin and had performed surgery on his ear. “Were you drunk?” I asked.
“No, just two glasses of wine. I’m just not getting much sleep these days. And business—I mean, it’s stressful, you know?”
The sandwich shop was busier now, and CK hadn’t had a day off in months. He had grown accustomed to working twelve-hour shifts at his café while handling orders over the phone for his accordion business. When I asked him about sleep, he replied, “Not much.” He was getting by on four or five hours a night. Going out with friends after he closed up shop was usually too tempting.
The pressure of life in the city had made CK feel out of sorts. He sought balance and quietude, anything that could calm his anxiety and his desires. When a friend introduced him to a Buddhist monk, CK felt he had found what he was looking for.
The temple was a four-hour drive from Shanghai. He went there once a month with a few friends who also worshipped and studied there; “brothers,” he called them. Their master was the same age as them. Like CK, he was born in the countryside and when he was eighteen years old, he had told his parents he was leaving for a temple in Shanghai to become a monk. Years later, he saw a vision of Tibet while he was meditating. In the vision, CK said, the master met an elder monk in the mountains who had instructed him to establish his own countryside temple.
“It’s a small temple without any visitors,” CK said. “It’s just him and four other monks.”
And maybe someday, CK hinted, he would become the fifth.
THE PEOPLE I KNEW along the Street of Eternal Happiness were no strangers to religion. At the corner flower shop, Zhao had learned about Christianity from her devout mother. A block away, Auntie Fu had been converted after she gave birth to her firstborn son in a remote desert in Xinjiang and was now a regular underground churchgoer. And just a couple blocks south of CK’s restaurant in Maggie Lane, Mayor Chen and Xie, like many Chinese who grew up in Shanghai, were lifelong Christians.
For the under-forty set, however, religion was something few had time to consider. Weiqi, who grew up on the land where I now lived and had earned his PhD in the United States, didn’t seem interested. For Henry, the adman who worked in the skyscraper across the street from CK’s restaurant, practicing yoga was as spiritual as he got. CK, on the other hand, seemed hungrier than the others for some guidance.
Buddhism was a natural choice. CK disdained the materialism surrounding him in Shanghai. Capitalism was undergoing a renaissance in China, but it had just started. Those who were rich in twenty-first-century China were nouveau riche, and they usually acted the part. They drove neon-colored Ferraris, wore Prada, and spent weekends clubbing. Buddhism’s rejection of desire and materialism—beliefs shared by Chinese Communists before they came to power—appealed to young Chinese who felt uneasy with this new era of greed.
Yet China’s sudden wealth was also funding Buddhism’s rise. By 2005, there were just as many Buddhists in the country as there were people in the United States, a number that had tripled from 1980. One of every five Chinese was Buddhist, outnumbering Christians in China two to one, and their money flowed to temples throughout the country. Tours of historic Buddhist sites across China were popular among the new consumer class. Local officials, eager to profit off religious tourism, helped fund the repair of Buddhist temples destroyed during the Mao years. Though the Party was officially atheist and it discouraged members from practicing religion, local officials understood the value of the renminbi, and for them capitalism was more important than atheism.
Money wasn’t the only reason the Party looked favorably on Buddhism’s revival. The country was in the grips of a moral crisis. Just a few decades ago, China was an agricultural society where people relied on the help of their community. The economic boom spurred 250 million of them to migrate to the cities. Suddenly, few people knew their neighbors, and trust was in short supply. Videos of incidents capturing pedestrians ignoring others who were having medical emergencies routinely went viral on China’s Internet, and a national discussion about morality and social responsibility followed. Tens of millions of Chinese were turning to Christianity to rediscover these values. But Buddhism had two millennia of history in China, and Party leaders were more comfortable promoting it as a safe way—when not mixed with ethnic or political concerns as in Tibet—to restore an ethical value system. Doing so would help fulfill one of the Party’s top priorities to keep itself in power: greater social stability.
I occasionally had coffee with Henry, the philosophy major I had met in the ad agency high above the Street of Eternal Happiness in the skyscraper across the street from CK’s café. When I told him about CK’s conversion to Buddhism, he was hardly surprised. He was a post-eighties generation member, too, and he faced many of the same hurdles in life. “Theoretically, you’re supposed to move up in life,” he reasoned. “Otherwise, what’s the point? You’ve already fed yourself; you’ve got a comfortable life. What else is there? You fill a black hole.”
Many Chinese CK’s age were embarking on spiritual quests, and they reminded Henry of the Beat Generation writers of the 1940s and ’50s in the United States who grew up during a similar stretch of economic growth and social change. Like the Beats, today’s young Chinese were exploring paths to enlightenment through religion and philosophy indigenous to China. Taoism was undergoing a rebirth rivaling that of Buddhism. The number of Taoist temples in rural China had multiplied sixfold from the 1990s. And in urban China, more and more study centers were devoted to the scholarship of Confucian classics.
One of these centers was in an alley off the Street of Eternal Happiness, behind CK’s restaurant. Many of its members worked across the street in the assortment of multinational
companies piled atop one another in Henry’s office building. The name of the center was Guoxue Xinzhi, “new knowledge of sinology,” and it occupied a renovated first-floor apartment.
Xu Yuan had established the center. He didn’t have a background in the Chinese classics; he had studied electrical engineering at Fudan. The idea for a Confucian center came to him when he read about how universities in the United States required students to take a smattering of humanities and literature courses before they moved on to their majors. China’s schools had no such liberal arts requirements, and classical studies courses offered by even its best colleges were typically weak.
“Chinese society has been through a lot of revolution and trauma that has destroyed our traditional culture,” Xu said between sips of tea at his center. “Many of us have completely forgotten about the essential characteristics of being Chinese, but they’re reflected in our everyday habits and in our daily lives. When we discover the origins of these characteristics, we can better understand ourselves.”
Xu was a tall and lanky man in his thirties with puffy lips and eyeglasses that framed a calm and serious gaze. In just two years, more than fifty thousand young people had attended his weekly events. It may not seem like a lot in a city as populated as Shanghai, but given the center’s mission, it was impressive.
Xu noticed that—as his new members reacquainted themselves with Confucianism—many struggled to incorporate the philosophy’s core tenets into modern life. “One consequence of China’s urbanization is the loss of filial responsibility,” he said.
Xu hoped to channel the deep-seated responsibilities young Chinese felt for their parents toward helping the elderly in their adopted neighborhoods in Shanghai. It was a goal that seemed to fit neatly under the umbrella of leader Xi Jinping’s Chinese Dream and government efforts to restore Confucian traditions in China. In my reporting trips across the country, I had begun to notice propaganda posters extolling traditional Confucian virtues and tenets, often topped with the characters : “China’s dream, my dream.”