Uncle Feng and Auntie Fu

Michael Kerr relishes a vision of Shanghai that explores the hopes and fears of an intriguing cast of characters

in which an American reporter, charged with explaining the Chinese economy, talks to the people along his road who help to make it tick. The result is educational and entertaining, engaged and dispassionate.

Rob Schmitz first visited China to teach English as a Peace Corps volunteer at the turn of the millennium. Fifteen years later, he returned as a correspondent in Shanghai for American Public Media’s Marketplace, a programme with more than 10 million listeners a week. Coverage of China, he feels, focuses too much on the government or the economy, which is now the second largest in the world. If you make an effort to understand the hopes, dreams and fears of the people, he argues, you can have a better understanding of the country as a whole.

That’s what he set out to do over four years or so from 2010, among the residents of Changle Lu, or Long Happiness Road, which he took to calling the Street of Eternal Happiness. The people he features are not just ciphers, chosen to illustrate some aspect of the economy and identified by name, address and age. They are fully rounded characters, whose stories emerge in chat after chat, chapter after chapter, so we feel we are getting to know them as the writer does.

The book, which started life as a radio series, is rich with voices. Among them are those of “Uncle Feng” and “Auntie Fu”, who serve up the best scallion pancakes in the district. He’s a man who was conned by party propaganda in his teens and is determined not to be fooled again; she wants to be rich, and falls victim to one investment scam after another. Here’s a couple who have been bickering since the days of Mao and, because they can’t even agree on what to watch, have two television sets in their bedroom.

One of the youngest characters is Chen Kai, an entrepreneur in his 30s who likes to be known as “CK”. He survived an abusive childhood in an industrial part of the country to prosper at school, and makes a good living from selling accordions and running a sandwich shop, but he comes to feel that his life is

Rob Schmitz, below, has spent many years in Shanghai, right