by Rob Schmitz
On our slow march back to the hall, the autistic girl began to scream, “Wo zhiyao haochide! Wo zhiyao haochide!” over and over. I only want something good to eat! I only want something good to eat! she cried, growing more frantic with each outburst.
It was a chant whose shrieking volume had managed to rise above the others’. Her mother grabbed the child’s arm and shook it, urging her to stop, only making matters worse. I thought about the master’s diagnosis, “She’s a disciple of Guanyin,” as the rest of us watched the mother remove her distraught daughter from the ceremonial line, heading back toward the canteen in the pouring rain.
We returned to the main hall and chanted and prostrated before the Buddha for half an hour. The rhythm of the chanting picked up speed, cymbals and drums banged with a quicker tempo, boom-crash, boom-crash, boom-crash! I watched CK. His eyes were firmly set on the statue of Buddha as he walked toward the shrine. He closed his eyes and offered incense to the master. The master accepted it and stuck it into a pot atop the shrine. CK then pivoted with military precision and slowly marched away, his hands clasped together, deep in prayer as the tempo of the percussion quickened.
Through the incense smoke, CK’s face looked sincere, earnest. He really wants to be a better person, I thought. Many people I knew didn’t. They were too burdened by making enough money, helping their children, and among many here, finding sound medical help before they could begin thinking about improving themselves. And while the master of this temple was no medical doctor, he was a spiritual one. Just as Fu had learned to do at her illegal church, CK was carefully bypassing the master’s dodgier traits to glean what he could from him, like a lotus flower twisting through the mud, as this was the best opportunity he had found in his search for the light.
CK and the others returned to their cushions. The monks to the side were now crashing the cymbals and pounding the drum in a frenzy, and the worshippers responded by prostrating in one wave after another, faster and faster, alongside the furious pace of the deafening metallic collisions, thumping, and chanting. Finally, the master stood, seized a mallet, and struck a bronze bell.
In an instant, the noise ceased, the temple fell silent, and the vibrations of the bell resounded through the temple, blending with the rhythms of nature outside. Suddenly, the sound of rain pounding on the concrete was all we heard. I peered through the temple’s latticed window and noticed an elderly couple walking along the swollen river with hoes over their shoulders, on their way to their rice paddies to resume work.
LATER, BACK IN THE CANTEEN, we waited for a final meal before the bus took us back home to Shanghai. CK sat with me and asked me what I thought of the weekend. “It was interesting,” I said. “It seems like you’ve found something special here.”
CK nodded. “I’ve come here many times, but this time was different,” he said. “I’m surprised the master chose me to worship directly behind him.”
The master had given CK homework: prayers, chants, and a meditation schedule. I had requested an interview with the master, but he had instructed CK to tell me that he was too busy for questions from a foreign journalist. “You can write whatever you want about the weekend,” CK told me, “but my master has only one request: please don’t write where the temple is located. We’d like to keep that quiet.”
I nodded. I asked CK how his new faith was improving him. He thought for a moment. “Before I came here, I drank a lot, smoked pot sometimes, you know, if a friend wanted to get a drink, I’d stay up all night and drink with him. But after coming to temple, I don’t feel the need to do that anymore. It feels unhealthy—both for me and for my energy.
“Everything was out of control,” he continued. “I feel like I’m taking back control of my life now.”
The door opened and people shook their umbrellas in the entryway, walking to the kitchen to help set the tables for lunch. CK and I watched them. “I like going somewhere I can worship with others who feel the same way as me,” he added. “We’re doing it together, no matter who we are.”
All his life, CK had yearned to find a place where he truly belonged. He stood up to go help the others. Outside, the raindrops continued their steady beat, filling the river with ripples.
As we waited for lunch, I wandered into a storage area behind the canteen. Half-finished carved doors were stacked to the ceiling next to a wheelbarrow and an old circular saw. Light from the temple hall above shined through the cracks and onto discarded drums and broken incense pots strewn about the dirt floor. I could hear the faint voices of people upstairs mixed with the sound of raindrops outside.
Tucked away in a corner of the storage room behind a broken cabinet was a glass box as tall as me. Inside it, a statue of Mao, wearing his trademark gray suit, stared straight at me. I froze when I saw him. The Chairman was the last person I expected to meet in the basement of a Buddhist temple. But here he was, smiling, his face made to look like Buddha’s, with only his haircut and trademark mole above his chin giving him away.
I guessed the master had kept this display handy in case of a visit from local Party officials. But there was no such visit today. The people upstairs were merely laobaixing, commoners, who had learned everything they needed to know about this figure in the temple’s basement. Now they were searching for something more. On each side of the old leader hung red ribbons with black characters. They read:
ALWAYS REMEMBER CHAIRMAN MAO
NEVER FORGET THE COMMUNIST PARTY
A month after the demolition of Maggie Lane, Mayor Chen and his wife, Xie Guozhen, wrote a letter to the mayor of Shanghai:
We are now homeless. The weather is getting colder. Our property rights and our rights to live in peace have been ignored. We hope our leaders can look into this matter and restore a sense of fairness and dignity to our lives in this beautiful city of Shanghai.
The couple had lost their home, but they had found shelter. After boarding in run-down hotels for a couple of months, they rented an apartment down a quiet lane in another part of the former French Concession. “This place is better than the Summit,” joked Mayor Chen when I visited.
Their new place was a two-room apartment with high ceilings that had been the upstairs of a European-style villa a century ago. We sat at a table in front of a pair of French doors that opened onto a balcony overlooking a garden. The couple rented the apartment for the equivalent of four hundred dollars a month, a little more than half their monthly pension.
Mayor Chen seemed unusually upbeat, given the circumstances. Shanghai’s mayor hadn’t responded to his letter, he hadn’t been able to retrieve his belongings, and local journalists wouldn’t talk to him. “There are simply too many forced demolition cases in China,” Mayor Chen recalled a reporter from Xinhua News Agency telling him over the phone. “We’ve run out of good angles to pursue.”
He told me that I was the sole journalist who remained interested in Maggie Lane, and he wondered if it made sense for us to visit the district housing bureau together. The last time I had done that was two years ago when I had accompanied Old Kang, who had been homeless ever since his house was torn apart by an excavator.
“After you visited their office, the officials were scared, so they agreed to give Old Kang a thousand yuan a month in compensation,” he told me.
Mayor Chen said it was enough money for Old Kang to afford rent in an apartment on the outskirts of Shanghai. I paused, unsure of what to think of that.
“Actually, I’m not sure if that’s a good idea,” he said, responding to my hesitancy. “They’d probably make me sign something promising I’ll stop bothering them.”
Mayor Chen had no intention of doing that. On his bedside table was a book he had checked out from the Shanghai Library, Regulations on State-Owned Land: Demolition and Compensation, a volume he had filled with bright yellow bookmarkers. He opened the book to a well-worn page, following the tiny Chinese characters with his forefinger: “Look at this passage—it couldn’t be more obvious,” he told me. “Regar
ding forced relocation: ‘The notary bureau must inform the property owner to be on site. If not, the notary bureau must make records of seized property. Then the property must be recorded and checked, one by one.’ ”
On the day their home was demolished, Mayor Chen and Xie returned to Maggie Lane and discovered the notary bureau officials didn’t have time to make a list of their belongings. Instead, officials had thrown their possessions into large plastic bags and hastily tossed them into trucks so that excavators and bulldozers could flatten the house as quickly as possible.
Mayor Chen flipped through the book to another marked page. “See here: even if they were to demolish our home, they have to notify us in advance,” he said, raising his voice. “Beijing must dispatch an investigative team down here! They’ve severely violated the people’s interest.”
Xie had been sitting quietly on the edge of the bed, but hearing this made her giggle, almost making her spill her tea. “Xi Jinping would never send ‘an investigative team’ down here!” she said, scolding her husband. “There are endless cases like this in China. What happened to us is just a drop in the ocean! Why would he bother?”
Mayor Chen shut the book with an angry snap. Xie ignored him. “He believes in a China that appears on television and looks perfect and nice,” she said, pointing to her husband. “But what’s happening right here, right now? This is the real China.”
Mayor Chen turned to his wife. “I honestly believed they wouldn’t demolish our house like that,” he said. “They kept on saying they would protect the people’s interest. I still have a hard time believing what happened to us that day.”
Xie shook her head and looked at her husband like a master looks at a puppy that won’t stop chasing its tail.
“I wanted to ask you,” Mayor Chen said, turning to me: “My brother lives in New York. Do you think we could appeal to the United Nations?”
Xie bit her lip and looked to the ceiling in exasperation.
“I’m not sure that would work,” I said.
He nodded, studying the cover of his book. His brother owned a house in Brooklyn and had urged him to move to the United States, too. Mayor Chen had never considered the possibility. Plus, he told me, he could no longer leave the country. He had left his passport behind inside his house—now a pile of rubble. In the months following the demolition of their home, Mayor Chen’s outlook had developed an icy stubbornness. Before, he’d felt it was his right to remain in his home inside an abandoned demolished neighborhood. Now, with his home and neighborhood wiped off the map, those feelings had only hardened. He was still holding out for the Xuhui District government to compensate him and his wife with a home near their demolished neighborhood, an unlikely outcome.
“At what point do you just give up?” I asked him. “When do you stop fighting and move on?”
He bristled at the question. “Impossible,” he blurted. “We’ve agreed among us neighbors that we’ll keep fighting. We just have to keep finding new ways to fight.”
“What does your brother in the United States think of all of this? He grew up in the house, too,” I said.
“We talk every day on the phone. He’s also asked me whether I’d just take one step back and compromise, maybe ask for homes in the countryside as compensation,” Mayor Chen said.
“Wouldn’t that be a better solution?” I asked.
“Why would we do that?” he asked. “We’re not slaves. We’re the masters of our house. It belonged to my father, and now it belongs to my family. It’s ours. The government has no legal right to it.”
“But these laws you’re talking about,” I said, “they may be written down somewhere, but the Party is above the law. If you’ve got a legal dispute with the government, these laws are as good as jiade.”
The word meant “fake,” and Mayor Chen shook his head vigorously at the sound of it. “No!” he shouted. “These laws are real. The government in this case just refuses to follow them. How about the Chinese constitution? I suppose that’s not real, either? You can’t just say these things are all fake. Even the Party insists they’re real.”
They were real—for the Party. The Party had created these laws and the Party’s leadership—not China’s 1.4 billion citizens—had the final say on how they should be interpreted. If any legal disputes arose between the citizenry and the state, it didn’t take a genius to figure out who would win.
A WEEK AFTER my visit to Chen and Xie’s new apartment, a court in Beijing heard the case of a local legislator who called on the Party to enforce its own constitution on behalf of its citizens. It was January of 2014. The man’s name was Xu Zhiyong, a forty-year-old who carried the physique of a marine and a mind that had made him one of China’s brightest lawyers. In 2002, state television had named him one of the “Top Ten Figures in the Rule of Law.” In his work as a legal activist, Xu had called on the government to give children of migrant workers better access to educational opportunity, the sort of thing that had dimmed the hopes of Zhao Shiling’s sons Big Sun and Little Sun back on the Street of Eternal Happiness. Xu had also made a public plea for China’s leaders to disclose their assets, a sensitive topic for leader Xi Jinping, whose family members were discovered by Bloomberg to have amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.
Xu had formed a group called the New Citizens Movement. It sought to push for reform from within China’s system to ensure the rule of law. At the time, his demands weren’t that different from those of China’s leadership. Key figures in the government were also pushing for educational reform, and Chinese president Xi Jinping had overseen an anti-corruption campaign that had removed thousands of corrupt officials from office and brought them to justice. Yet when Xu called for an end to corruption, he was arrested and removed from his second term in office as a representative to the National People’s Congress. And on that cold day in January, he was sentenced to four years in prison. As Xu was led away by guards, he told those present, “The court today has completely destroyed what remained of respect for rule of law in China.”
When I saw the headlines of Xu’s imprisonment on foreign news sites the next day, I thought of Mayor Chen. He fought with the same zeal and sense of righteousness as Xu did. Would he end up in prison, too?
LATER THAT YEAR, I woke up to the rumbling sound of an excavator clearing the rubble of Chen and Xie’s house. The bright orange mechanical dinosaur lurched forward, scooping red bricks, crushed concrete, and pieces of splintered wood. It jerked and swiveled, lifting all of it high up into the air before dropping the debris into a green dump truck with a terrific crash. It took just a day to remove all traces of a neighborhood that had lasted eighty years. Later, a work crew in orange jumpsuits appeared. They poured concrete and built a red-roofed dormitory for workers. The rumor among residents at the Summit was that the land had been leased to a developer and work on a series of new high-rises would soon begin.
“Bu dui,” Mayor Chen told me when I called him. “That’s incorrect. The district hasn’t sold the land. They’re not going to do anything until they settle our complaint. The city’s got a bunch of public works projects this summer. That’s just temporary housing for the workers.”
Each morning that summer I ate breakfast and watched the workers—migrants from the countryside—mill outside their dorm rooms, squatting in the sun, sipping gruel from their bowls. They would leave together to repair a street or install a new gas line, and they would reappear in the early evening, exhausted and sweaty, a day’s wage earned, a little more money for their families back home.
As night fell, so did the lights from their windows. They would fall asleep and dream where Chen had slept and dreamed as a child, and where countless others had slept and dreamed before him. And like everyone else, one day they disappeared. In the autumn, the workers in orange jumpsuits reemerged to dismantle the structure, and by the end of the year, Maggie Lane had reverted to a walled-in abandoned lot where stray cats roamed through a wilderness of chest-high weeds. For no
w, it was a quiet jungle in the middle of China’s biggest concentration of humanity, indifferent to anyone who bought it or sold it or called it home. It sat still, awaiting its next reincarnation.
WHEN I MOVED TO SHANGHAI in 2010, the wall surrounding Maggie Lane read “Better City, Better Life.” Five years later, the message read:
FULFILL OUR CHINESE DREAM
AND VITALITY WILL FILL CHINA
The first sign was nailed to the other side of the wall from where Mayor Chen and Xie had lost their home, facing the street. Every twenty feet after that, another one appeared. Each carried a different saying or poem, all with the same message: Embrace the Chinese Dream and love your motherland. The framed propaganda posters followed the wall as it snaked around Maggie Lane and wrapped around two corners, the last sign facing the spot where Weiqi’s father had burned to death trying to protect his home from a demolition crew.
In Hong Kong, a storm was brewing when Weiqi answered the phone. “The weather’s been terrible—every afternoon around this time, a storm comes that looks like the end of the world,” he told me. “It reminds me of home—kind of like huangmei tian in Shanghai.”
They were known as the plum rains in English, and they arrived each June, coinciding with the appearance of yellow plums in the countryside. The few weeks of stormy weather ushered in the oppressively humid summer to the Yangtze Delta.