Yesterday – the morning after the Brexit vote – it was too painful to think about what had happened. I’m horrified by the outcome. At least for my train journal I had a completely absorbing book to read. It’s Rob Schmitz’s [amazon_link id=”1444791052″ target=”_blank” ]Street of Eternal Happiness: Big city dreams along a Shanghai road[/amazon_link]. Schmitz is the China correspondent for Marketplace, a speaker of Mandarin and has spent many years living in the country.

[amazon_image id=”1444791052″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Street of Eternal Happiness: Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road[/amazon_image]

The book uses stories about different characters living on or near the street to illustrate some broader themes. The owner of a not-very-successful sandwich bar opens up the aspirations and culture of young people whose life experience has been so different from that of their parents, who suffered the Cultural Revolution, grew up with siblings, above all conformed. A flower seller has lived the rural-urban migration to work in a factory story, before setting up her small business and bringing her sons to Shanghai. An elderly couple scraping by on pension and a street food stall are victims of a fraudulent pyramid scheme.

The themes are familiar, but here are woven into the fabric of everyday life, and made human. I’ve only been to China once (Beijing) & would love to return, although am not at all sure I’d want to live there as Rob Schmitz has. It’s pretty clear now that America is in its post-imperial decline, the European dream is disintegrating, and the next century will be the Chinese one. Anyway, I really enjoyed reading [amazon_link id=”1444791052″ target=”_blank” ]Street of Eternal Happiness[/amazon_link] and if it could keep me from brooding over the UK’s historical (not in a good way) decision, that’s real testament to how interesting it is.