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Street of Eternal Happiness: The Winding Road to the Chinese Dream
Street of Eternal Happiness The Winding Road to the Chinese Dream Author:Rob Schmitz A narrative account profiling the ordinary men and women who live, work, and dream on the author's street in Shanghai, inspired by his enormously popular Marketplace series of the same name — Marketplace's Rob Schmitz moved to Shanghai in 2010. To gain perspective on China's new reality, he interviewed the ordinary people who lived and worked bes... more »ide him. He spoke to shop owners, young professionals, beggars, and countless others about their everyday experiences, their troubled histories, and the hopes that fuel them. Schmitz forged deep relationships with the diverse array of people who make up China?s most vibrant city, their stories connected by a single street that runs through the heart of Shanghai.
At a time when president Xi Jinping has launched a political agenda entitled "The Chinese Dream" to guide the country's 1.4 billion people, Street of Eternal Happiness sheds light upon the dreams of individual Chinese along a single street in the nation?s largest city. A humorous and at times heartrending journey through the static, mixed messages the Western world is fed about the planet's most populous nation, Schmitz treats readers to recurring characters that illuminate the distinct generations of 21st-century China. Each memorable character's story adds another layer of humanity and texture to modern China, and these portraits merge with Schmitz's personal discoveries through his work as a foreign correspondent. The result is an intimate, surprising, involving portrait of contemporary China that dispenses with the tired stereotypes of a country we think we know.« less