Street of Eternal Happiness

April 25, 2016
Structuring the narrative around the lives of everyday people in his neighborhood in Shanghai, Marketplace correspondent Schmitz offers a snapshot of rampant modernization in China. His web of characters speaks to his time in the country and his exemplary journalistic abilities as he introduces a wealthy businessman who is contemplating Buddhism; a rural woman who settled in Shanghai, opening a successful flower shop to provide for her sons; and a Shanghainese man now living in New York, whose family lost their money after Mao's revolution. Through these individual stories, Schmitz creates a mosaic of the modern Chinese experience, hitting on issues as varied as the filial duties, the one-child policy, bride prices, copyright polices, widespread development, and get-rich-quick schemes. Weaving a gripping narrative peppered with historical facts, he leaves readers with an intimate glimpse into a culture undergoing a complex transformation.

April 1, 2016
A study of vastly changing China from the perspective of one busy street in the center of Shanghai. In his deliberative, observant journalistic style, Schmitz, the China correspondent for the public radio program Marketplace, chronicles his interviews and friendships with several of the shop owners on the street where he has lived for some years, plumbing their dreams and capitalist motivations. Once part of the French Concession, a haven for foreigners, lined by a luxuriant alley of London plane trees, the so-called Street of Eternal Happiness is a narrow two-way thoroughfare where "vehicular pandemonium" invites survival of the fittest on the road between masses of provincial migrants and sophisticated urbanites. All of the entrepreneurs Schmitz befriended have navigated "the system." There's CK, the young owner of "2nd Floor Your Sandwich" shop, who was a musician as a kid and now sells accordions to pay the bills; and Zhao Shiling, who runs the lively corner flower shop and has a mighty tale of woe and survival about leaving a "useless" husband back home in Shandong province and taking control of propelling her two sons to future prosperity. With each chapter, Schmitz delves deeply into the families' endurance through the Cultural Revolution and famine and current drive to better themselves, sparked by the economic flourishing of the mid-1990s. Many of the author's acquaintances were determined to strive and even get rich--e.g., the risky investments of Auntie Fu, the disputatious wife of the Shanghai-born pancake seller Uncle Feng. Moreover, Schmitz explores some of the current Chinese fads and phenomena, such as the underground lure of Christianity, the fastest-growing religion in China; the resurgence of Buddhism; the shocking demolition of neighboring Maggie Lane to make way for Shanghai's world fair of 2010; and the baneful task of finding a suitable wife. Probing human-interest stories that mine the heart of today's China.

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Starred review from April 15, 2016
In a counterpart to New York Times reporter Elaine Sciolino's profile of one Paris street (The Only Street in Paris, 2015), Schmitz also looks at one thoroughfare, Shanghai's Street of Eternal Happiness, which runs through the heart of that city and whose denizens share the perks and dislocations of modernity also found by their French opposites. But SchmitzChina correspondent for Marketplace, a business-news program aired on public radiogives his portraits a financial underpinning, which reveals both the sparkle of a dynamic economy and the longtime corruption and ineptitude by China's central government that have ruined so many millions of lives, whether it's that of Old Kang, made homeless by a real-estate development that never was, or of the taciturn Uncle Feng, who sells deep-fried scallion pancakes from his shop window while his wife loses a small fortune investing in get-rich-quick scams. China's appalling history of privation is never out of view, as when one professor, sent to a faraway hard-labor camp in the 1950s, reveals the extent to which prisoners would go to avoid starvation: After the wheat harvest, I remember men crouching down to eat the remaining grains, he told Schmitz, but they were hard to digest. So we would sift through our own feces to eat the undigested wheat. A brutally revealing, yet unexpectedly tender, slice of Shanghai life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)