Street of Eternal Happiness by Rob Schmitz

Author:Rob Schmitz
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2016-05-17T04:00:00+00:00

“I WAS SO NAÏVE,” Mayor Chen told me, thinking about the gold. “I was young and naïve.”

We sat in the reading room of a community center across the street from what was left of Maggie Lane. My first visit had gotten the security guard in trouble and I was now barred from entering the lot. It didn’t matter; I had a clear view of daily goings-on there from my bedroom.

The wall surrounding Maggie Lane had been stripped of dozens of “Better City, Better Life” posters from the Shanghai world’s fair. At the event’s closing ceremony in October of 2010, Vice Premier Wang Qishan told the audience the motto of the event would be carried forward from generation to generation. “I am convinced that the vision of ‘Better City, Better Life’ will become reality,” he announced confidently.

The following morning, Shanghai was engulfed in a toxic cloud of smog. Skyscrapers a kilometer away from our bedroom window at the Summit had suddenly disappeared behind a thick haze. During the fair, construction sites had been closed, farmers upwind from Shanghai were prohibited from burning rice husks, and there were clampdowns on heavy vehicles entering the city. Shanghai’s air quality was recorded as “good” for 90 percent of the duration of the six-month event. Now all of these rules had expired, and the air in Shanghai was back to its gritty, polluted self.

At Maggie Lane, a demolition crew visited Mayor Chen, his wife, Xie Guozhen, and the four other families who remained living in partially destroyed homes—a dozen people in all. It had been five years since their last visit had ended with arson, murder, and prison time. This crew came better prepared. The Xuhui District government had sent them notices, and they carried an official-looking relocation order signed by a local court.

By now, Chen had become an expert on laws pertaining to forced relocations. He was, after all, the lane’s unofficial mayor. He knew that in order for a document like this to be legally enforceable, it had to be issued and sent to individual residents, not through a demolition crew.

The crew—a group of hardened middle-aged men used to dealing with stubborn residents—were not swayed by Mayor Chen’s interpretation. They returned one day with sledgehammers. The Mayor had dealt with this before. He retrieved a propane gas tank from his kitchen and called down to the men from his balcony. “I told them that if they try to take me from my home, I’ll strap the gas canister to myself and we’ll all die together,” Chen told me. “I told them, ‘I’m in my sixties, and you guys are in your forties. You’ve got families, you’ve got kids, and you have your lives ahead of you. I’m not afraid to die.’ ”

The crew didn’t come back.

Xuhui District officials had rezoned Maggie Lane as “public” land. The designation meant it could be used later as a park, school, hospital, or government building—anything serving the public—but not for commercial or residential purposes.

Nobody in the neighborhood put much stock in this designation, though.

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