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

Can a book be both inspiring and depressing?

This investigative reporting is done by an American economic journalist who speaks Chinese. His bicultural dexterity is impressive, and the individuals he profiles are fascinating. It’s jaw-dropping amazing that these residents of this street in central Shanghai are so frugal in their daily lives that they have money to invest in shops, apartments, dowries, extravagant weddings, pyramid schemes, support of spiritual institutions, trips to other provinces or even overseas. What opportunities! This is the new China that is lifting millions into middle class lifestyles.

On the other hand...
This is the China of the Cultural Revolution, where people still have nightmares decades later about being invaded and assaulted. It’s the China where eminent domain means that just about any corrupt official can arrange for a neighborhood to be bulldozed and even for recalcitrant holdouts to be murdered. It’s the poorly regulated China where fraudulent investment schemes abound, and gullible desperate people keep forking over their savings.

The people the writer profiles are truly characters. And their characters are representative of some of the challenges facing today’s China, challenges that I do not see or hear much about in my sheltered China experience.