Loss and redemption on the Street of Eternal Happiness

....

Later, when a historian showed me an old browned map of the neighborhood from the 1940s, I noticed a maze of alleyways snaking south from the Street of Eternal Happiness down through dense rows of tiny residential plots where my high-rise apartment building now stood. I peered closer and counted well over a hundred structures inside one square block. I thought about the hundreds of families who had lived where my family now slept. Where did they go?