ROB SCHMITZ is the Shanghai correspondent for National Public Radio. Previously he was the China correspondent for NPR's Marketplace. He has reported on a range of topics illustrating China's role in the global economy, including trade, politics, the environment, education, and labor. In 2012, Schmitz exposed fabrications in Mike Daisey's account of Apple's Chinese supply chain on This American Life, and his report headlined that show's much-discussed "Retraction" episode. The work was a finalist for the 2012 Investigative Reporters and Editors Award. He has won two national Edward R. Murrow Awards and an award from the Education Writers Association for his reporting on China. Schmitz first arrived to the country in 1996 as a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Sichuan province. This is his first book.
Praise for Street of Eternal Happiness A World Magazine Best Book
of the Year
A Telegraph Best Travel Book of the Year "Poignant [and]
enjoyable... Schmitz's eye for scenes and ear for dialogue give an
immediacy to his stories that more expository works often
lack."
--New York Times Book Review "A portrait of China from the stories
of a single Shanghai street...a poignant microcosm."
--The Economist "Enjoyable and illuminating... The great virtue of
these books is that they offer Chinese people a voice, something
that is often lacking in news coverage. Schmitz writes with great
affection about the shopkeepers and other residents of his street:
in telling their stories, he shows how the goals of the Chinese
state have 'often stood in the way of individual dreams.'"
--The Guardian "Hopes and struggles rise to the surface in this
intimate portrait of modern China."
--NationalGeographic.com "Educational and entertaining... rich with
voices... The people [Schmitz] features are...fully rounded
characters, whose stories emerge in chat after chat, chapter after
chapter, so we feel we are getting to know them as the writer
does... [Readers] will feel much wiser about China and the Chinese
than when they started."
--The Telegraph "This beautifully conceived and written book
conveys the joys, the tragedies, the comedy, and the vivid humanity
of modern China. No one will talk about 'China's rise' or 'the
China model' in the same way after reading it, and years from now
people will turn to this book to understand the China of this
era."
--James Fallows, author of China Airborne and Postcards from
Tomorrow Square "Street of Eternal Happiness is a marvel of
place-based reporting. This single road illuminates the
complexities, contradictions, and funny wonder of today's China.
This book is really about family--the most eternal force on any
street in the country."
--Peter Hessler, author of River Town, Oracle Bones, and Country
Driving "Rob Schmitz has given us a treasure: a patient portrait of
an impatient country, a China that is utterly true to life in its
beauty and heartache, tenderness and greed. His story is told in
real lives that are, like Shanghai itself, modern and imperfect,
romantic and ruthlessly practical. Reading this is as close as most
people will come to living there."
--Evan Osnos, National Book Award winning author of Age of Ambition
"Schmitz peels back the layers of a single street to discover
ambition, reinvention, faith, corruption, murder, and heartbreak.
In this intimate and revealing book, a two-mile stretch of road
embodies the dreams and dramas of modern China."
--Leslie T. Chang, author of Factory Girls "Rob Schmitz is a master
storyteller who leads his readers into the heart and history of
modern China. Street of Eternal Happiness is, in turn, funny,
moving, tragic and--ultimately--emotionally satisfying. Nobody can
pretend to understand Shanghai and contemporary China without
reading it."
--Adam Minter, author of Junkyard Planet "At last, an intimate look
at daily life in contemporary, convivial Shanghai. All great cities
have a great book that captures their rise or fall; Street of
Eternal Happiness is Shanghai's."
--Michael Meyer, author of In Manchuria and The Last Days of Old
Beijing "A kaleidoscope of Chinese history, from famine and
Cultural Revolution to one-child policy. Above all, these tales
illustrate the perils and hopes of living the Chinese Dream,
written with penetrating insight and charming fluidity. A
delight."
--Mei Fong, Pulitzer Prize winner for International Reporting and
author of One Child "For nearly two centuries Shanghai has been a
city that offered both Chinese and foreigners the possibility of
success, wealth, and status. Rob Schmitz paints a vivid canvas of
the city from the perspective of one big city street that neatly
encapsulates the myriad aspirations of one country and its people.
The Street of Eternal Happiness: a thoroughfare of aspirations and
dreams, hard earned successes and sadly thwarted hopes where
Schmitz encounters the ghosts of China's troubled past, the hard
working yet wistful dreamers of today, and those whose sights and
visions are firmly fixed on China's, and their own, future."
--Paul French, author of Midnight in Peking and Fat China "Rob
Schmitz has crafted a deeply empathetic marvel of a book.
Alternately poignant and humorous, it has much to offer anyone who
has been to Shanghai, thought about going there but not made it
yet, or simply wants to get a better feel for the rhythms of life
in twenty-first century China."
--Jeffrey Wasserstrom, editor of the Oxford Illustrated History of
Modern China and author of China in the 21st Century "Authentic,
boisterous, convincing, dynamic, energizing, the street stretching
on, each window a non-fictional tale more fantastic than the
fictional in the dramatic, almost unbelievable transformation of
the Chinese society in its contemporary history, narrating with an
Ezra Pound-like multiple cultural perspectives and linguistic
sensibilities, and leading, eventually, to overwhelming questions.
The reading of Street of Eternal Happiness cannot but compel a
Shanghai-born Shanghainese like me into another trip back to the
city in this global age."
--Qiu Xiaolong, author of Death of a Red Heroine and Shanghai
Redemption "What a treat to follow Rob Schmitz's journey into the
epic lives of people living in the shadow of China's most storied
city. Their heartache and hope spill from this small corner of
Shanghai to the far reaches of modern Chinese history and
geography. I've walked down this street a hundred times. I'll never
see it the same way again. Schmitz has found a brilliant way to
illuminate the big price little people pay for the profound changes
reshaping the world's most populous country."
--Ching-Ching Ni, former Los Angeles Times Shanghai Bureau Chief,
current editor-in-chief of The New York Times Chinese website
"[Schmitz's] web of characters speaks to his time in the country
and his exemplary journalistic abilities... Weaving a gripping
narrative peppered with historical facts, he leaves readers with an
intimate glimpse into a culture undergoing a complex
transformation."
--Publishers Weekly "In his deliberative, observant journalistic
style, Schmitz, the China correspondent for 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... With each chapter, Schmitz delves
deeply into the families' endurance through the Cultural Revolution
and famine and current drive to better themselves. Probing
human-interest stories that mine the heart of today's China."
--Kirkus Reviews "[Schmitz] gives 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...A brutally
revealing, yet unexpectedly tender, slice of Shanghai life."
--Booklist [starred]
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