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

Whenever I pedal my bike along the Street of Eternal Happiness, I need all the luck I can get. The narrow street is one of the neighborhood's few two-way thoroughfares. Taxis often use it to escape the traffic of the nearby expressway, but they must contend with droves of electric motor scooters that seem to pour into every open space. Scooter drivers often barrel down the wrong side of the road in packs against oncoming traffic, dispersing just in time to make way for cars cutting through the hordes, horns blaring, headlights flashing. Survival is the rule of the road, and the right-of-way cedes to the biggest, most aggressive vehicles. City buses sit at the top of the food chain. They command respect from scooter and car drivers who pull over to make way for the behemoths, a survival instinct akin to diving out of the way of a rampaging elephant. All this activity leaves bicyclists to fend for themselves near the curbs or on the sidewalks, where riders often take out their frustrations by plowing through pedestrian traffic.

I choose to ride with the electric scooters. I can usually pedal my bike fast enough to keep up with them, and their riding habits –traveling as an integrated unit like a peloton in the Tour de France – helps protect me. Each morning's ride requires a constant awareness of my surroundings. The fact that most everyone else is in the same state of mind means that –despite the appearance of vehicular pandemonium – many drivers possess a conditioned athlete's mental focus, behaving according to the unspoken rules of the road. They move in concert with one another as they speed and swerve down the Street of Eternal Happiness, a system disguised as chaos.



On a cold day in the winter of 2012 I ascended 2nd Floor Your Sandwich's spiral stairway to warm up with a cup a coffee in a corner booth. The branches of the Plane trees lining the Street of Eternal Happiness were nude, brittle chopsticks, pointing in all directions, making scraping sounds across the second floor windows whenever a freezing wind came swirling down the street.

On a shelf in the middle of the sunny dining room sat CK's accordion, a massive black instrument with Polverini engraved across the front in elegant cursive. The shop was empty that day, so CK heaved it off the shelf, slumped into a booth bathed in the morning sunlight, bowed his head, and pressed the air release button, slowly opening the bellows. The instrument exhaled, a sigh so deep it seemed to be coming from CK himself. The day before, his head chef had quit in a fury, taking half the wait staff with him. If any customers arrived today, CK and his partner Max were on their own.

He paused for a moment, and then launched into a furious, fast-paced ballad, his fingers racing across the keyboard. He closed his eyes as the melody took shape, expanding and contracting the instrument with a fluid motion, his fingers moving so quickly they seemed to have minds of their own. It was a patriotic song from his childhood, and as his head bobbed back and forth, memories suddenly came to him, driving the song forward, faster and faster.

CK was eleven years old when it dawned on him: killing himself wasn't going to be easy. For two straight months, he had explored his options each day after school. Swallowing sleeping pills should be the most comfortable way to do it, he thought, but the pharmacist wouldn't sell them to him. "You're too young," she said. Walking off the roof of his family's apartment building was a possibility. Nah, he concluded: too painful. "I realized I didn't have the courage to jump," he said.

There was another problem. He rarely had a moment alone. The boy was an only child with overbearing parents and a nai nai – his maternal grandma – who left his side only when he used the toilet. Each day he ate a porridge breakfast seated inches from them. At the school down the dirt road from his family's rural home, teachers took over. After that, it was back home with nai nai and his parents for homework, music lessons and a vegetables-and-rice dinner. He couldn't even steal a minute alone at night in his bedroom: nai nai slept on a thin bamboo-matted bed beside him.

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.