** Street of Eternal Happiness by Rob Schmitz

It seems to be chic these days to talk about the street where you live, at least if you are a foreigner. Street of Eternal Happiness: Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road tackles a Shanghai street and presents many interesting characters. There is a resourceful and ambitious flower seller, who left her small village to make a relative fortune, but was not able to give her sons the education she dreamed of because of the strict residency permit rules. There is another woman, obsessed with making money and falling into what seems to us pretty obviously fraudulous schemes. And the folks who were evicted from the traditional houses to make way for juicy redevelopment initiatives also have a history of their own. A solid story of a society in transition.