Neighbors

Story of Rob Schmitz

Hello everyone, my name is Rob Schmitz.

I’m a reporter for NPR based in Shanghai,

and the author of Street of Eternal Happiness: Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road.

Today, I’d like to tell you stories about my neighbors.

I first came to China twenty years ago.

At that time, I had just graduated with a degree in Spanish,

I spoke Spanish and had lived in Spain for several years.

I had never planned to come to China.

My dream had always been to join the Peace Corps,

a large volunteer organization in the United States that sends young people to developing countries around the world.

On my application, I wrote that I spoke Spanish and asked to be sent to a Spanish-speaking country in South or Central America.

Two months later, I received a call from them.

They told me I had been accepted.

I said, “That’s great! Which country are you sending me to?”

They said, “China.”

I said, “China? You’re sending me to China? I don’t even speak Chinese, I’ve never been there, and I know nothing about it.”

But I still didn’t want to refuse the opportunity.

After all, this was volunteer work, and in my understanding of volunteer spirit, I shouldn’t say no.

This is a photo from 1996, when I came to China with the other volunteers.

I’m in the front row — there were fourteen of us in total.

At that time, we were all assigned to normal universities in Sichuan Province to teach English.

Two other volunteers and I were sent to Zigong, a city in southeastern Sichuan.

This photo was taken in 1996 at one of Zigong’s most famous teahouses.

In 1996, Zigong had almost no contact with the outside world.

In fact, the three of us were the first foreigners to live there permanently since 1949.

So you can imagine — walking down the street there was like seeing a giant panda in Shanghai;

people gathered around to stare.

That’s what it was like when I first arrived.

I lived on the ground floor.

On the first morning after I arrived, I went to the window and pulled back the curtain—

and I almost screamed.

Outside my window stood about ten children,

their hands gripping the bars,

waiting for the foreigner to wake up and open the curtain.

As soon as I did, they all shouted together: “Laowai! Laowai!” (“Foreigner! Foreigner!”)

I was stunned.

That was basically how my two years in Zigong went.

One of those kids was named Zeng Yang.

He was twelve at the time.

Here he is in a photo with his friends, playing soccer in the courtyard.

The day after I arrived in Zigong, someone knocked on my door.

It was this little boy.

He looked up at me and said,

“My name is Zeng Yang. Teach me English.”

I looked at him, thinking, Who is this kid?

But since teaching English was my job,

and after getting permission from his parents—who happened to be my upstairs neighbors—

I started giving him English lessons.

So for the next few years, besides teaching at the university,

I also taught Zeng Yang at home.

This was a particular time in China’s history—only twenty years ago, not so long—

when neighbors all knew one another.

People knew everything about each other.

And my neighbors knew everything about me.

Once, an upstairs neighbor called to say,

“Your clothes have been hanging in the hallway for three days; I think they’re dry.”

I said, “Okay.”

To me, this was all fascinating, because in the United States,

if a neighbor did that, you might call the police.

It would be considered very strange.

But back then, everyone looked out for one another.

That was how China was.

Maybe some of you here still remember that time—

you knew your neighbors, their grandparents, their children;

you knew their dreams, their struggles, their achievements;

you trusted and understood each other.

That was life then.

Six years ago, in 2010, when I returned to China,

I had changed a lot—

I was now a foreign correspondent, reporting on China.

And China, too, had changed.

Its economy was ten times bigger than in 1996,

it had become the world’s second-largest economy,

and might soon become the first.

I came to Shanghai.

I had never lived there before.

Shanghai was huge,

a symbol of the wealth China had built in the last twenty years.

Countless migrant workers from places like Zigong had helped create its prosperity.

I found myself in a completely different city,

where I didn’t know my neighbors,

and my neighbors didn’t seem interested in me.

So I had an idea.

As a new journalist, I thought I could do what twelve-year-old Zeng Yang once did:

step outside, knock on my neighbors’ doors,

and ask them to tell me their life stories—their own and their families’.

Of course, many people, seeing a foreigner with a microphone knocking at their door,

would quickly shut it.

That happened a lot.

But I lived on Changle Road, a street in the old French Concession,

and most people there agreed to talk.

So I began going door to door,

because I thought it was a great way to understand what had happened in China over these years—

and also to know my own neighborhood better.

I wanted to know my neighbors.

I missed those days in Zigong when neighbors knew each other.

So over the next few years, I made a radio series called “Changle Road.”

It was for a program I worked for then.

The series ran for a year, one episode per month.

Each story focused on one person or one family—

all of them living or working on my street.

The stories I found were fascinating.

Some people’s lives deeply captivated me—

unique backgrounds, dramatic conflicts.

Later I realized I had enough material for a book.

So I wrote one.

It took three years.

The book is called Street of Eternal Happiness—published this May—

and today I want to share a few of the stories from it.

The first is about a woman everyone on our street knows—

the owner of a flower shop.

Usually, people only see her on Valentine’s Day or anniversaries:

you buy flowers, pay, and leave,

and then forget about her.

Her name is Zhao Shiling.

Now she’s my friend.

I often chat with her in the shop for hours,

getting to know her, her story, her family.

She once invited me to her hometown,

and I even attended a wedding there.

Her home village is in a poor rural area of Shandong,

near the birthplace of Confucius.

She had many brothers and sisters,

and her father was very traditional.

When guests came, only men could eat at the main table;

women ate in another room.

She once asked her father,

“Why?”

He said, “Because Confucius didn’t like women.”

She replied, “Then why did Confucius get married?”

Her father clearly didn’t like that answer.

When she was young, Zhao Shiling got very sick—leukemia.

Her parents sent her to a county cancer hospital.

Her ward was full of girls with cancer, dying one after another.

Her parents thought she wouldn’t survive either,

so they bought her a coffin—

the first “gift” they ever bought her.

But she didn’t die.

She survived.

She’s a fighter.

Even so, her illness affected her life.

No one in the village wanted their sons to marry her.

Her family finally found her a husband in a remote mountain village—

a coal miner, also very traditional.

When she disobeyed, he beat her.

At the time, that was common among men.

They had two sons.

She didn’t like that life.

This was when China was beginning to develop;

she dreamed of leaving, of earning her own money.

In the early 1990s, after Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour,

she was inspired to go out and “get rich.”

She dreamed of going to Shanghai.

She only knew the name “Shanghai,”

and the two characters—literally “on the sea.”

She imagined beaches, palm trees,

a tropical paradise.

After her two sons grew up, she left home and took a train to Shanghai.

When she arrived, she got a job in a TV-assembly factory,

and soon realized there was no sea in Shanghai.

But she began earning her own income.

When she went home for the first Spring Festival,

some women in the village started spreading rumors—

that she had gone to the city to be a massage girl, that she was immoral.

So the next year, she went home wearing her factory uniform the whole time,

to prove she was a worker, not a prostitute.

She earned more than anyone in the village,

so her two sons could have better futures.

After about ten years,

she opened her own flower shop and earned even more.

She soon made enough to buy apartments for both sons

in the nearest city to her hometown.

When she went home,

those same women who gossiped now asked her to help them find jobs in Shanghai.

Her husband began respecting her,

and stopped hitting her,

because she had taken control of the marriage.

Later, her younger son married a woman much like her—

strong, smart, independent.

Now Zhao Shiling is a grandmother.

She took risks and worked hard

to create a better life for the generations after her.

A bit further down from the flower shop is a sandwich shop,

which I sometimes visit since I live right across the street.

The owner’s name is Chen Kai.

He, too, came from far away—from an industrial town in Hunan Province.

His childhood wasn’t easy.

His parents both worked at a state-owned factory,

but in the 1990s they were both laid off.

During China’s state-enterprise privatization,

money was tight,

his parents argued constantly,

and finally divorced when he was very young.

He was eleven.

He was depressed, under great pressure,

and even thought about ending his life—though he didn’t.

After that, he studied hard.

He loved music.

Because his family was poor,

the only instrument he had was an old accordion from his uncle’s house.

He borrowed it and practiced endlessly.

He became so good that he earned a scholarship to a university in Guangdong.

After graduation, he got a job at a state-owned factory assembling accordions,

where he became a line manager.

His parents were proud—

a stable job right after college, an iron rice bowl.

But he wasn’t happy.

After a year he grew restless.

He felt he wasn’t learning anything.

He secretly looked for other work.

He met an Italian engineer in Shanghai who assembled accordions for a big European brand,

and was looking for an assistant to help teach others how to assemble and disassemble them.

Chen Kai thought it was a great opportunity but a big risk.

His parents were furious.

They argued on the phone.

He told them,

“If I don’t take risks, if I never try anything new,

how can life move forward?”

His parents had grown up in a different era—

for them, risk usually meant trouble.

But Chen Kai understood modern China:

to live better, you had to take chances.

He worked with the Italian for years,

rose quickly,

and soon became sales manager for Borsini Company in Shanghai.

He earned more than the average American salary.

Eventually he had enough money to open the sandwich shop as a side business.

The shop didn’t make much,

but he didn’t mind.

He wanted a place to attract people like him—

risk-takers, artists, musicians—

to gather and share ideas.

When I was writing about him for my book,

he had grown restless again.

He was still selling accordions and running his unprofitable sandwich shop,

but now he wanted to be more spiritual.

He found a teacher and became a devout Buddhist,

spending his days in meditation.

I wrote about his journey and dreams,

because they reminded me of Sichuan in the 1990s.

Back then, everyone had the same dream:

to make money.

The nation wanted to rise, and people wanted to prosper.

Now, many young people have achieved that dream.

Like Chen Kai, they’re searching for new ones—

beyond material life—

for spiritual fulfillment.

Those dreams are spreading quickly.

My final story takes place in an era when dreams were hard to realize.

When I was making my radio series,

two friends in Shanghai invited me to their home.

They were renovating an old house in the French Concession.

They often shopped at secondhand and antique stores,

buying used furniture and small objects.

Once, they bought a box of old letters—

more than a hundred of them—

written between the 1950s and 1980s.

They showed me the letters,

because they were all addressed to the same place—

a house on Changle Road, my street.

So they thought I’d be interested.

I said, “Of course.”

One of my friends spent a long time translating them into English.

The letters were from a husband.

In 1957, he had been arrested as a “capitalist,”

accused of illegal profit,

and sent to Qinghai for labor reform.

His wife stayed behind in their Changle Road home

with no income and seven children to raise.

The letters were precious—

dramatic, vivid, firsthand history.

In China, we usually know history from official sources—

same in America, honestly—

but I rarely trust them.

These letters felt real, unedited.

For nine years, the wife couldn’t reply to him.

He had been labeled a “bad element,”

and communication was forbidden.

She feared any contact would bring trouble,

and even burned all his photos.

Their children forgot what their father looked like.

In the 1970s, he was finally released.

He wrote to say he could come home,

telling her the exact time.

She sent two of their children to Shanghai Station to meet him.

They knew which train he was on.

When it arrived,

they passed each other without recognizing one another.

The children didn’t know his face; the photos were gone.

And after twenty years apart, he no longer recognized them either.

They finally reunited at home—

thankfully, the address had never changed.

I wanted to find this man’s descendants,

to confirm details and see their lives now.

With a friend’s help,

we found their only son.

The wife was still alive,

but they no longer lived in China—

they had moved to my country, the United States, to New York.

When I called him in Flushing,

he told me their story.

He was in his fifties;

his mother was in her eighties, with Alzheimer’s, remembering nothing.

They lived in Flushing, and he cared for her.

They had come to the U.S. by winning the immigration lottery—

a rare stroke of luck.

They were still poor.

In Shanghai, he had been an engineer,

but in New York he had to start from zero.

He didn’t speak English,

knew nothing of the place.

Besides caring for his mother,

he went to the local library.

Flushing has many immigrants,

so the library offered free English and business classes,

helping people earn a U.S. high-school diploma.

His dream was to get that diploma.

After many years, he was close.

Once I asked him,

“You know, I have your parents’ letters—you’ve never read them. Would you like to see them?”

He said, “No, I don’t want to see those letters.”

He said,

“My generation remembers clearly what happened then. I don’t want history to repeat itself.”

I was taken aback.

I said,

“But isn’t that exactly why we should keep these letters—so your children will know what their ancestors went through?”

He said,

“No, I don’t want them.”

The conversation couldn’t go further, so I let it go.

A few years later, I saw him again in New York.

He had just graduated from high school—at fifty-eight.

He was happy,

but he had another dream: to go to college.

By the time he graduates, he’ll be retirement age,

but he still wants to achieve it—

working at it like a child chasing a dream.

He also told me something else.

He had met a woman.

He had never married, busy caring for his mother.

Now he’d met someone, through introduction.

She was much younger,

from a poor village in Guangdong,

coming to America to marry him and have a child.

I asked for a photo.

He said,

“I don’t have one—but she’s not very pretty.”

He laughed happily,

then added,

“If she were too pretty, she’d run away once she got to New York.”

Later, he told me,

“I want my parents’ letters back.”

So I returned them to him—

his family’s letters, where they belonged.

That was the last time I saw him.

All these stories came from one small street in Shanghai.

Shanghai has hundreds of streets,

and millions of people, each with their own story.

Your family’s story might be just as remarkable.

These stories deserve to be told—

not necessarily to a foreign journalist,

but at least to your children.

Because today’s children should know

the efforts and sacrifices their parents, grandparents, and ancestors made

so that they could live better lives.

I’ve stayed in touch with Zeng Yang—

that twelve-year-old boy who knocked on my door in 1996.

He’s now thirty, living in Chengdu.

When he was a child, his parents each earned about one hundred U.S. dollars a month —

and that was the average income for most people back then.

Now, when I visit Chengdu, he drives one of his five cars to pick me up at the airport.

He studied art.

Today, he is among the most well-known young painters in China.

Each of his works sells for at least one hundred thousand yuan.

He’s doing very well — he has agents in New York, Paris, and Shanghai.

His paintings are all abstract,

yet they revolve around one central theme:

the transformation of rural society into an urban one —

how a community where everyone once knew each other

has turned into a society of strangers living side by side.

We talked while standing before one of his paintings.

He said that many Chinese people now feel

as if they are living in the wrong place —

as if they no longer belong anywhere.

They all come from somewhere else,

yet are not truly “home” where they are.

He said there’s a saying in China: “Fallen leaves return to their roots.”

It means that when the leaves fall, they return to the soil where their roots lie.

But now, he said, many Chinese people have no roots left.

They feel lost.

He believes the whole society is lost.

I thought about his words,

and I thought again of my neighbors on Changle Road —

the florist Zhao Shiling,

the sandwich-shop owner Chen Kai,

and the family from those old letters.

All of them left their hometowns,

found new lives,

and lived happily in their own ways.

They arrived in new places,

formed new dreams,

made new friends,

and took root in new soil.

So when they grow old and their leaves finally fall,

the ground where those leaves rest

will be the new land that holds their roots.

Thank you very much.