Excerpt from Street of Eternal Happiness by Rob Schmitz, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The system had turned out exactly as CK's father had explained it to him as a boy: it was there to restrain and control you, rather than to enable you to learn and grow. But as his father got older, he began to realize the importance of money, and the stability that the system provided. "When I started working at Pearl River, he suddenly embraced the system. I didn't know how to talk to him about escaping it."

The private sector may have helped fuel China's remarkable economic growth, but jobs there seemed risky to the one-child generation. Most Chinese I knew in their twenties and thirties still longed for jobs in a big state-owned firm.  Such jobs were seen as recession-proof, and their benefits were second-to-none. In 2013, more than two-thirds of Chinese college graduates couldn't find a job that paid more than $300 a month – less than what a typical factory worker makes. Part of the problem was an oversupply of labor. The Chinese university system had quadrupled in size in the past decade, and it was producing far too many graduates for the country's marketplace to absorb. The jobs available – construction or manufacturing – were not what graduates wanted, and the work they envisioned wasn't yet available in an economy that was still in an early stage of development.

CK took the job with Polverini and left for Shanghai. His new roommate – a middle-aged Italian engineer – also happened to be his new boss. The two shared a passion for tinkering. As boys, each had spent afternoons taking things apart and piecing them back together, and now they would get paid to do it. At Polverini's cramped factory on the outskirts of Shanghai, their mission was to modify the brand's classic accordion to bring its price down. Chinese accordion players tend to either drop thousands of dollars on an expensive Italian instrument, or penny-pinch to buy the cheapest Chinese brand they could find. An accordion between the two price points did not yet exist. CK's mission was an affordable Polverini, tailored for China's rising middle class.

CK spent months on the assembly line, learning about every part of the instrument. In Italy, his boss designed Ferraris. An accordion was an even more complicated machine, he told CK.

"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. "You must have a good understanding of chemicals, wood, steel, how they interact inside the machine, and the sounds they create."

            Within a year at Polverini, CK had mastered every step. In the years to come, CK's boss encouraged him to learn more, and CK became a jack-of-all-trades. "I was a manager, a translator, a supply chain point person, a customer service agent, I made the prototypes, I was in charge of sound QC, and by the end, I could build an accordion from scratch."

Within four years, CK went from making $400 a month to $4000, jumping from the average salary in China to that in the United States. For the first time, Shanghai – with its fancy cars, scenic tree-lined boulevards and international appeal – began to feel like home.

"Can you play something else?" I asked.

It was 11 o'clock in the morning and CK had been playing for over half an hour. 2nd Floor Your Sandwich had been empty all morning. The lunch hour was approaching though, and soon the tower across the street would spew hundreds of hungry office workers onto the sidewalks of the Street of Eternal Happiness. CK checked the clock, paused, and then nodded, his hands expanding the instrument, letting it breathe.

"I wrote this for a girl I once loved. It's called '2-27.' That's the date we met."

It began with a sustained note in the minor key, and then another, and another, haunting tones patiently repeating like the deep breaths of someone fast asleep. Then, a playful melody arose, unpolished at parts, like a boy strolling down the street without a care in the world, whistling to himself.

Excerpted from Street of Eternal Happiness by Rob Schmitz. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.