About the Author

Rob Schmitz is the Shanghai correspondent for National Public Radio. Previously he was the China correspondent for American Public Media'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 in China in 1996 as a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Sichuan province. This is his first book.

Reviews

A marvel of place-based reporting. Rob Schmitz begins on a street in Shanghai, winning the trust of residents, until this single road leads him deep into the provinces and the distant past, illuminating the complexities, contradictions, and funny wonder of today's China . . . Like so much of the best documentary work on China, this book is really about family - the most eternal force on any street in the country - Peter Hessler, author of River TownAt last, an intimate look at daily life in contemporary, convivial Shanghai. Longtime resident Rob Schmitz delves deep into his neighborhood to uncover the twists and turns of recent history that most correspondents, tourists and locals pass by without noticing, even as it is reduced to rubble around them. 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 ManchuriaIn Street of Eternal Happiness, Rob Schmitz peels back the layers of a single Shanghai street to discover ambition, reinvention, faith, corruption, murder, trauma, and heartbreak. Schmitz has taken the time to get to know the people he writes about, to win their trust, to see them struggling to improve their lives, and to follow them to interesting and surprising places, from a remote Buddhist temple to a recruitment meeting for pyramid schemes to a rural matchmaking session gone wrong. 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 GirlsThis is a beautifully conceived and written book that 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 this book, and years from now people will turn to it to understand the China of this era - James FallowsRob 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 AmbitionA poignant microcosm . . . coursing under even the bleakest stories is a sense of optimism that tomorrow will be better - The EconomistEnjoyable and illuminating . . . Rob Schmitz writes with great affection - Guardian