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

One afternoon while his father was writing at his desk, CK took one final, determined inventory of his family's cold, bare apartment. Outside, the air was thick with the exhaust of neighboring chemical and mining equipment factories. He walked through the apartment, quietly foraging for household objects with the most promising life-ending potential. His quest ended in the only room where he had a reasonable excuse to be alone: the bathroom. He settled on a straightedge razor he discovered in his father's shaving kit. One night before turning in, he slipped the folded razor into his pajamas pocket.

It was a chilly autumn evening. Moonlight filled the room. The night was still, save for nai nai's steady breathing and the occasional train in the distance. It announced itself with a soft, sustained horn blast, followed by the soothing rumble of freight rolling along track before dissipating into the quiet night. As he waited for his grandmother to fade into deep sleep, CK thought about his family. 

 

From an early age, the boy had listened to his father talk about "the system." He was never sure what the words actually meant, but he could usually predict when his father was about to utter them. His father had a way of pausing before he said the words, pronouncing the phrase slowly and carefully, making the words stand apart from the rest of a sentence so the boy would take note.

"You see, Kai Kai, you just can't fight ….the system." The phrase was imprinted onto the boy's memory in italics.

After a difficult day at work, his father would return home and sit his son down, a ready audience for his rants. The system didn't allow him to choose his career. The system didn't reward intelligence. The system discouraged individual talent. You could never get ahead in the system. "Zhongguode guoqing buhao!" –"China's state of affairs is terrible!" his father would rage.

"My father thought he was an intellectual," CK said. "He wasn't happy with his job and the fact that he didn't choose what he wanted to be. He knew he was smarter than others. He wanted to succeed based on his talents, but he couldn't. The system wouldn't allow it. He didn't think my mother was very smart, and that frustrated him, too. He didn't like his colleagues at work, and he hated China."

When CK tried to ask questions, his father shushed him, continuing his tirade. Eventually, CK felt it made little sense to talk in a home where no one listened. So he stopped talking altogether.

CK didn't have any brothers or sisters. He was born in 1981, two years after the birth of China's one-child policy. His shared living quarters with his mother, father, and nai nai were on the top floor of a rundown four-story brick building assigned to them by the city railway bureau, his grandmother's work unit. The stairwells were littered with garbage. CK's father employed the system's propaganda of the day – Leader Deng Xiaoping's "Four Modernizations" campaign and President Jiang Zemin's "Three Represents" slogan – to describe the place. "He called it a 'three no-managements' area: nobody cleaned it, nobody administered it, and nobody cared about it."

The same could be said for the city where CK grew up. Historically, Hengyang, as far from Shanghai as New York is from Chicago, was a place to avoid. The city in the central province of Hunan made brief appearances in Chinese records beginning 1,400 years ago, when Tang Dynasty emperor Gaozong punished a rebellious assistant by banishing him to administer the city. Later, emperors used the city again and again as punishment for other dodgy high-ranking court officials, all sent to govern a far-flung city on the edge of the empire, where they were seldom heard from again.

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.