Street of Eternal Happiness

 书的链接

P65

Snacks are big in Shanghai. From xiaolongbao - "little basket buns" - to xie ke kuang - it's hard to walk a block without catching a whiff of the homemade goodies vendors cook from pushcart stovetops or from their own street-level apartments. Inside the old cook's kitchen is a mess of partially cut garden onions, carrots, and lotus root on a tree stump cutting board, a red plastic bucket filled with batter, an electric griddle jam-packed with scallion pancakes, and a wok full of oil over a high gas flame. He plops doolops of turnip cake batter into the wok - it's a mess of shredded turnip, mushrooms, and celery packed inside raw dough - and a scalding sizzle drowns out the sound of scooters buzzing through the neighborhood outside the old man's window.

a frantic, whirling force of nature. 

p 130

She opened a thermos to take a sip of tea. Steam gushed forth, swirling in the freezing room. Winter was my least favorite season in Shanghai. The wet, frosty air penetrated clothes, gradually dampening each layer until your skin was clammy and frigid. It felt like being trapped inside an icy sponge. Retreating indoors didn't improve things much. Nearly all buildings lacked insulation and only the swankiest residences in town had central air. 

p174

Her perseverance was impressive, but it also seemed pointless. Why continue to seek justice from an unjust legal system? 

The type of determination was typical among petitioners. After years of reporting in China, I had interviewed several of them. When I mentioned their stories to my Chinese friends in Shanghai, they often shook their heads as if these people were an embarrassment to the whole nation. They saw petitioners as desperate, penniless, and uneducated commoners who were all slightly out of touch with reality. China's state-run media had helped push their idea, and petitioners' fearlessness - repeated getting beat up and throw into prison - was baffling to many in a culture that emphasized a pragmatic approach to settling problems. 

It seemed like a harsh criticism of people whose lives had suffered terrible damage from people in power, but I sometimes found myself agreeing with the stereotype. Though their causes are usually just from a moral standpoint, many of the petitioners I knew seemed dysfunctional and unbalanced. Their quests to right society's wrongs often seemed unreasonable given the harsh system they were up against. Fighting China's system almost never produced good results. It was like trying to swim against a powerful rip current: You would likely drown. My neighbors along the street who successfully navigated this system - people like CK and Zhao - refused to allow it to drag them to unknown depths. Instead, they swam with careful strokes at an angle that followed the current but took them to the edge of it, carving their own way while ceding control to its raw power. 

p202

The Chinese had evolved into a people who had learned to detect the slightest ideological shifts in the ruling hierarchy so that they could quickly recalibrate their positions, protecting themselves and their families. Adjustment to ever-changing surroundings was a rule of life in China. 

p214

In the couple of years I had known them, the only visits free of yelling matches were the rare instances when one of them was at home alone. When I first met the two, I suspected my presence heightened the abuse. But after spending time with each of them separately, I came to understand this was simply the only way they knew how to pass the time with each other, stubbornly trading barbs in a never-ending struggle session that had raged since the days of Mao. 
Each thought the other was crazy. Uncle Feng thought his wife too lazy to find a job and hopelessly naïve with her get-rich-quick investments. Whenever he and I were alone in his kitchen, he complained about the money she had lost in investment scams, wondering when she would figure out there was substitute to earning it through hard work. In turn, Auntie Fu saw here husband as a simpleton. She believed he was blind to the opportunities in twenty-first-century China. She thought he was a lousy businessman, unaware of the most basic negotiation tactics. 

Urbanites often blamed outsiders for the problems that plaque city life - and not just outsiders in general, but specific ones. 

Auntie didn't know where else to look for an answer to why her life had descended into such chaos. There wasn't much to say other than a phrase in Chinese that seemed made for situations like this. "Luanqibazao."

It was a saying that described a circumstance where everything was in disorder, a hideout mess of a situation. And in a land of constant change, luanqibazao was often used to describe the indescribable clutter that had arisen from all this chaos. 

Auntie didn't seem eager to seek order from the mess her husband was in. 

Risk was the one thing people of Uncle and Auntie's generation had learned to try to avoid, and yet most had not. 
Many of their lives had been ruined serving as human guinea pigs for Mao's riskiest political and economic campaigns to reshape China. After those policies failed, they left their revolutionary roles in the countryside to rejoin civilian life in urban centers, where the rules suddenly changed. The revolution was over, capitalism was the new way of life, and risk - the thing they had come to fear most - crept back into their everyday lives.

The 156 million Chinese born in the ten-year period after the 1949 Communist Revolution were dubbed the Lost Generation. They didn't have much of a childhood, a family, or an education, and the experience had left them without the skills needed to succeed in this new China. 

Those of the Lost Generation to whom I had become close all seemed to be going it alone, without much guidance. They had missed out on a formal education and the positive role models that come with that. This had forced them to become stubbornly independent in their actions, and it also meant they seemed perpetually at risk of making big mistakes. This was certainly true of Uncle and Auntie, and it was also a problem I saw with ..., who refused to compromise their quixotic mission to conquer the corruption of local officials, restore justice to their slice of China, the remain living in their home, happily ever after. 

As their best-connected peer put it, their young lives had served an illusion. In their old age, many of them had pursued new illusions, ones that were less naïve. They might be out of reach in the system they lived under, but they were legally guarded rights elsewhere in the world. They were pursuits like investing in a trustworthy company, owning property, and realizing a national dream that strove to make everyone equal.

A refreshing breeze from the east blew down the Street of Eternal Happiness. it rustled layers of green leaves from the plane trees above, and speckles of sunlight danced across the street, glinting off the watemelon rinds that littered the sidewalk. 

They had tilted their heads back to let the breeze caress their faces as they listened to the steady rustle of leaves. The strong wind made the plane trees sound like rapids on a river: always rolling, its flow eternal. The gusts diminished and the song of the cicadas returned. 

I like this book a lot and laughed out loud a couple of times. It never fails to bring smiles on my face during my reading. I can picture very well the people in the book thanks to his vivid description. This book is also very well-written. I truly believe the author does understand more than the ordinary lives of all the people lived on Changle Road. Often I would feel homesick reading the book as I could see the scenes he mentions in the book. The Congyou Pancake vendors!! I could even smell the food. The book cover is also very eye-catching and reflects the spirit of the book. Indeed a good read.