"Street of Eternal Happiness"

[fiefoe]

It's always nice to read about distantly familiar places through the eyes of an observant outsider like Rob Schmitz.

• Faguo Wutong, “French Phoenix Trees,” though they are neither French nor phoenix trees. Like the muddled history of Shanghai, they were much more cosmopolitan: London plane trees, a hybrid of the Oriental plane—native to Central Asia—and the American sycamore. The first London plane tree was discovered in Spain.
• pruned with a technique known as pollarding, which stunts their growth and forces the branches to grow toward the trees on the opposite side of the street, where they intertwine to form dark green tunnels between two and three stories high.
• Maoming, Famous People Road, is a thriving Cantonese port city.
• There was rarely a calm moment in those years. Survival depended on a keen ability to adapt to an ever-changing political environment, understanding that, like someone caught in a riptide, you must resist the urge to swim against a much stronger force. There was always the possibility of patiently maneuvering your way to safety, but you first had to cede control to the system.
• “An accordion is very small, and you have more than three thousand tiny parts inside of it, so a millimeter misstep is a huge mistake,” CK explained.
• Still, the prominent displays of government-issued directives remained. Sure, Haibao’s rollicking billboard presence was more adorable than the propaganda of the ’90s, yet it was there for the same reason: to remind people of what was right and what was wrong in today’s China. Killing your baby daughter is bad. Cities are good.
• The city government authors were on the defense, inside a twenty-first-century China where everyone else was on the move. The section “Competition and Modesty” implored Shanghainese to accept more menial work and keep an open mind,
• Hundreds of etiquette books were published in America at the turn of the twentieth century that bore a striking resemblance to How to Be a Lovely Shanghainese:
• bad press about a burned-out, partially demolished neighborhood—the site of a grisly murder at the hands of a developer—in the very center of the city. Xuhui District officials purchased the land back from the developer at a loss and promptly fenced it in with cream-colored stucco that stood ten feet tall.
• renao, literally “hot and noisy.” And for urban Chinese, life is an eternal quest for more hot and noisy.
• The USSR’s propiska—or internal passport—system had helped the Soviet leader build a socialist economy by keeping workers in industry and agriculture separated, restricting their movements inside the country.
• In addition to preventing the shantytown effect, China had forced more than 250 million people to retain connections with their rural hometowns, and this, too, had a long-term positive impact.
• The region’s economy was also flourishing thanks in no small part to the money and skills sent home through a network of migrant workers: trickle-down economics with Chinese characteristics.
• In the minds of China’s economic planners, the hukou system may have treated hundreds of millions of people like illegal immigrants in their own country, but, like the one-child policy, it was a necessary evil if the country was to raise the standard of living for its 1.3 billion residents.
• After controlling the region’s waterways, the Corps young members dug irrigation ditches and turned 140,000 hectares of scrubland into farmland, an area the size of the state of New York.
• It helped explain the name the Party bestowed on the country’s only state-sanctioned Protestant church: the Three-Self Patriotic Movement.
• His delivery had a distinct rhythm with a call-and-response cadence, which made it irresistible. Rote repetition followed by plainspoken lecturing was a feature of Chinese classrooms all over the country.
• I waited until she left the room, and then returned the coins to the container. It was a game of money tag I often played with friends along the street.
• He had the calm, patient eyes of a man with all the time in the world—one of the few souls in Shanghai who wasn’t in a rush to get somewhere. For Zhang, time was other people’s money.
• The south side of the street is the district of Xuhui; the north side, the district of Jing’an. This no-man’s-land designation meant it was littered with unpatched potholes—both districts left repair to the other, so it was almost never done.
• Zhang used this lack of oversight to his advantage. Whenever urban management officers from Xuhui threatened to haul him off for panhandling, Zhang would simply walk across the street to resume begging in Jing’an, outside their jurisdiction.
• In Shanghai, one of every ten teachers at Fudan University, the city’s top college, was declared a Rightist, along with one of every twenty of the city’s industrialists and merchants. Nationwide, half a million businessmen and intellectuals suffered the same fate.
• Within two years, his anti-corruption campaign led to disciplinary action against more than 400,000 Party officials.
• Instead, he was drifting from one menial service job to another, working as a hairdresser-philosopher.
• There are conflicting goals, Doctoroff believes, inside every Chinese. “It’s a tension between upward mobility and ambition on one hand,” he explained to me, “and on the other hand, a need to master a system, as opposed to rebel against it; a need to navigate a mandated order to climb the hierarchy of success.”
• In China, on the other hand, the basic economic unit has traditionally been the clan, whether it’s the family or the Party itself. Individual Chinese often don’t feel like they’re in complete control of their own destinies, and they don’t necessarily believe the future is going to be safe.
• admiration. Part of the challenge of doing communications in China is knowing how to balance the aspiration for individualism over the fear of rebellion,
• Wenqing evoked a love of art, culture, and living life to its fullest without the snobbery and cynicism associated with the hipster label in the West.
• he worked in a store that specialized in Lomography, an obscure art movement dedicated to a Russian camera that devotees used to take colorful lo-fi images of everyday objects.
• Who would’ve thought that, fifty years after such violent revolution and catastrophic famine, the Chinese would have enough spirit left in them to be able to dream, much less have the means and freedom to try to pursue them?
• “I’m sorry,” he remembers the teller saying, “but we can’t give you your gold back. Possessing gold is against the law.” The teller gave Chen 2,900 RMB, the bank’s assessment of the gold’s value. It was a sixth of what the gold was worth on global markets. Chen didn’t raise a fuss.
• and selling it to developers to turn a profit. By 2013, local governments in China made, on average, more than a third of their operating revenue from these types of land sales.
• After arriving in Beijing, they had been apprehended by “interceptors,” thugs hired by their hometown governments. Majialou was like a second home for Xi. “I’ve been in and out of there for half a year now,” she said.
• When the subway first opened, there were two types of tickets. For one yuan, you could experience what it was like to ride in a subway, but you had to return to the same station you started from. Weiqi’s parents bought the two-yuan tickets,
• Weiqi never seemed frustrated. “I pretty much have always agreed with her, because first and foremost I think what she’s doing is right,” Weiqi told me. “I think it’s the most basic pursuit of a human being. It’s become her life’s task, her only goal, almost like a religion. If I try to stop her or even express a different opinion about what she’s doing, she’ll feel really, really lost and sad. I’m her only son, and if I don’t support her, I can’t imagine what it would do to her.”
• “There aren’t many local residents left, are there?” “Not too many,” I said. The same could be said for much of urban China. Within twenty years, neighborhoods that once functioned like villages had transformed into impersonal condominium towers like the Summit where nobody knew their neighbors
• In the United States, Harley-Davidsons start at eight thousand dollars. The same machines in China start at twenty thousand dollars and work their way up past fifty thousand, with an additional ten grand for a license plate.
• China didn’t have places like this, Wang said. Each time he entered the bright and warm environs of the Flushing public library, he felt hopeful. He felt free.
• “You want to work for the MTA?” I asked. “It’s an exam for a mechanical engineering job. Similar to what I did back in Shanghai,” he said. “If I pass, I’ll fix subway card machines. There are usually openings for this job.
• It was a cultural misunderstanding between city and country. For rural folks, a gift was never just a gift. It was a debt that needed to be repaid.
• ritual. They knew precisely how much to give based on a variety of factors: how you were related to the family, whether you someday wanted to be related to the family, if you did business with the family, how much the family had given at your son’s wedding, whether you owed the family any favors. It was like the opening scene of The Godfather cast with Chinese farmers. But here in the village, there was no secrecy—everyone was free to look at the accounting book to see what their neighbors had given—and many did just that prior to handing over their red envelopes.
• 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.
• that the Party’s respect for personal property would ultimately determine whether it succeeds or fails. “Once a government shows respect for personal property, then it gives itself a chance to build wealthy, powerful groups of people who won’t fear for their safety,” Weiqi explained. “After a period of time, these groups will become relatively reasonable and they’ll learn to compromise with each other in terms of setting up the new rules for a better country.”
• On the surface, these two appeared to live a life of simplicity—a tiny apartment, modest pensions, children and grandchildren to visit each weekend—yet underneath were chaotic lives filled with deception, heartbreak, and greed.