Chris Jaffe's Reviews > Street of Eternal Happiness: Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road

This was a REALLY good book. Schmitz is a journalist who spent several years living in Shanghai along a road that is best translated into English as the Street of Eternal Happiness. There he chronicles the lives of some people who live or work along the street that he knows. You primarily learn about the people in the community, but that also serves as a window into modern China - how it's changing, what advantages it has, what problems it has, how the past influences it (or doesn't influence it).

The chapters bounce between five families. There is flower shop owner Zhao, who struck out on her decades ago leaving her kids behind in order to help provide for her kids. There is the eternally squabbling couple of Uncle Feng and Auntie Fu. They run a pancake shop while she puts all her money in get-rich quick scams, and their relationship appears to keep worsening. There are the people of Maggie Lane - residents (illegally) forced from their homes by the state to make room for new, more profitable construction. They fight to preserve their homes, but the system is rigged against them. There is the family from the box of letters he finds in a pawnshop. The letters are from the Cultural Revolution and afterwards and show how that era tore the family apart. The family lived near where Schmitz lived - and he is even able to eventually contact one member. Finally, there is my favorite - sandwich shop owner CK. Born in the 1980s, he had a rough family upbringing but was able to take advantage of the Deng-era reforms to make a profitable accordion sales business - which let him start the sandwich shop in Shanghai.

The characters all vividly come to life, and you get a sense for China as a whole. The Mao-era projects were entirely disastrous and left their mark on many in the book. While the current era works much better, there are still problems of corruption, lack of a real legal system, and difficulties caused by official residences. Overall, a really great book.