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  Meet Me in Venice

  Meet Me in Venice

  A Chinese Immigrant’s Journey from the Far East to the Faraway West

  Suzanne Ma

  Rowman & Littlefield

  Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

  Published by Rowman & Littlefield

  A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

  www.rowman.com

  Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB, United Kingdom

  Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

  Copyright © 2015 by Suzanne Ma

  All photos © 2015 by Suzanne Ma

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ma, Suzanne.

  Meet me in Venice : a Chinese immigrant’s journey from the far East to the faraway West / Suzanne Ma.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-4422-3936-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-3937-1 (electronic) 1. Chinese—Italy—Venice—Case studies. 2. Venice (Italy)—Emigration and immigration—Case studies. 3. China (Italy)—Emigration and immigration—Case studies. I. Title.

  DG457.C47M3 2015

  305.48'8951045311092—dc23

  [B]

  2014027473

  ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Mom and Dad, for all the opportunities,

  and to Marc, for all the possibilities.

  I left home as a youth and as an old man returned

  My accent unchanged but my temples turned grey

  The children see me but don’t know who I am

  Smiling, they ask: “Stranger, where do you come from?”

  “Returning Home”

  Tang Dynasty poet Zhang Zhi

  44 CE

  Contents

  Contents

  A Note about Pronunciations and Spellings

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: The Bar

  Chapter 2: Leaving China

  Chapter 3: East Meets West

  Chapter 4: Chinatown

  Chapter 5: La Dolce Vita

  Chapter 6: Shifting Tides

  Chapter 7: The Farm

  Chapter 8: A New Year

  Epilogue

  Sources

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  A Note about Pronunciations and Spellings

  China’s standard romanization system—hanyu pinyin—uses the letter “X” for words that make a “sh” sound and “Q” for words that sound like “ch” in English. Thus, Qingtian is pronounced Ching’ ti-enne.

  Prologue

  When my husband’s grandfather died, we returned to his ancestral home in eastern China and burned spirit money at his grave. The saffron flames devoured pastel fake euros. Faux American greenbacks were consumed whole. And gold paper ingots glowed like a sunset before they turned black and crumbled to ash. It was important for Grandfather to have foreign currency in the afterlife. For even in death, the dream of making it rich overseas was still very much alive.

  In Zhejiang province, not far from the East China Sea, there is a county shaped by the collective belief that emigration brings wealth and prosperity. Emigration is so common that locals often say: “If you are born in Qingtian, you are destined to leave.” People started leaving Qingtian in the seventeenth century when, according to local lore, some of the earliest globe-trotters trekked across Siberia to get to Europe. Today, this is a story that continues to inspire generations to leave. In the beginning people were desperate to escape. Qingtian literally means “green fields,” but the county’s name was betrayed by a barren, mountainous landscape. With so little fertile land in the region, people were starving and isolated with no roads and little infrastructure. Rugged cliffs carved lines into the horizon, closing in on towns and villages like an army of unmovable stone warriors. The migrants first made their way to other regions in China. Some traveled to Japan and other parts of Southeast Asia. Eventually, they boarded ships and then planes bound for every corner of the globe. The habit of migration spread to surrounding regions. Soon, hundreds of thousands were leaving Zhejiang province, fanning out to more than 120 countries around the world. But they were particularly drawn to Europe.

  Qingtian is not the kind of place the average tourist visits. It’s a small and isolated county, three hundred miles south of Shanghai and nearly forty miles from the coast, and so seemingly unimportant that it wasn’t even visible on Google Maps until a few years ago. But this is my husband’s ancestral home—a place with a long history of emigration to the outside world. What inspired so many people to leave this landlocked county? How did my husband’s family end up spread out across Europe, in Holland, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal; and why would people from Qingtian continue to leave, as China booms and Europe grapples with a debilitating debt crisis and rising unemployment? I moved to Qingtian in January of 2011 to find the answers to these questions.

  My husband, Marc, came with me, and together we discovered a place where people were obsessed with the dream of a life in Europe. To prepare, people enroll in English, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese lessons. Jewelers melt down 50-cent euro coins to make lucky pendants and bracelets. Grandmothers gather outside banks and pass the time watching digits on the giant electronic boards rise and fall as exchange rates fluctuate day to day. On the streets, they swap euros for yuan and discuss the latest unemployment figures in Spain as if the news was just another tidbit of small-town gossip. I encounter the children of emigrants, born in Europe but sent back to Qingtian to be raised by relatives while their parents work long hours overseas. They run around town shouting, “Hola!” and “Buongiorno!” Aged grandparents chase after them, greeting others on the street with the familiar Chinese salutation: Ni chi le ma? Have you eaten yet?

  Marc’s grandmother, whom we call Waipo, still lives in Qingtian. She is more than eighty years old, and every morning before dawn, she climbs the mountain behind the family home, stopping near the top to do her morning exercises. She punches her fists in the air, kicks her legs high until her knees almost touch her forehead. Then, just as the sun peeks out from between the verdant hills, she heads back down, stopping at home to fetch her shopping bags. When Marc and I moved to Qingtian, we lived in the empty apartment above Waipo’s place. A decade ago, the family built a seven-story concrete apartment building, tall enough to accommodate Waipo and all six of her children and their families. But with most of the family living overseas, many of the floors remain empty. Other homes in Qingtian were like that, too. When I peered through the windows of such homes, I saw no people, just dry kitchen sinks, flat-screen TVs sealed in plastic wrap, and furniture draped in faded bedsheets. Qingtian was not always this way. For most of her life, Waipo lived in a rustic, two-story adobe house. As her children migrated one by one to Europe, they sent money back home to help build the seven-story concrete apartment, a home f
or each son and daughter who had left to Europe and who would probably never return.

  After her morning hike, Waipo walks downhill toward the center of town and crosses a narrow intersection to get to the market where she buys slabs of fatty pork, leafy greens, and long noodles hand-pulled by a man covered head to toe in flour. The road outside the central market was once a dusty trail lined with hawkers and bicycle pedicabs. Today the hawkers and pedicabs are still there, but they must negotiate the space with luxury sedans, trucks, and motorcycles that honk their horns and stir up dirt and dust. Crossing the narrow intersection can be dangerous, but Waipo, with her sharp brown eyes and her short gray hair curled tight, remains bold and perhaps a little stubborn. “Fear what? This road has and always will be for the people,” she declares, remembering a time when she never had to look both ways before crossing the street. Without hesitation, she traipses between the symphony of horns and rumbling engines and emerges on the other side of the road unscathed. I could never do what she did. I once witnessed a car knock a young woman to the ground at that very intersection. She crumbled like tissue paper on the pavement, and when a police officer came to her aid, he took a look at the driver, gave him a smile and a wave, and then told the young woman to get up. She stood up slowly, bare legs shaking with dust, and limped up the hill past an old man who slaughtered white-feathered pigeons in the shadow of an idling Mercedes Benz.

  Whenever Marc and I are in Qingtian, one of the first places we visit is the rugged mountain behind his family home. There, we line up for our three ritual kowtows before massive stone tombs carved out of the rock; watching threads of ash swirl around my feet, I think about my in-laws’ migration story: how my husband’s great-grandfather traveled to Holland by boat and sold peanut candy on the street. The Dutch called such men pindaman—peanut men. But in China, he would have been called a rich man. With the Dutch guilders he earned, he returned home to Qingtian to build his family a new house: a two-story structure with an open-air courtyard and several bedrooms held up by strong wooden beams. This house, which still stands today, was built more than seventy years ago. Listening to the old stories can be inspiring and heart wrenching at the same time. I imagine how Great-grandfather must have braved the rough seas for months before finally arriving at the port in Marseilles. I think about how he survived in a foreign land, where people spoke a language he did not understand, ate food he had never tasted before, and looked oddly extraterrestrial with their green and blue eyes and blond hair. It is a tale of first contact and first encounters—a narrative shared by immigrants all around the world, even today. There are now more than 232 million international migrants worldwide. That means one out of every thirty-three persons in the world today is a migrant. If all the migrants gathered in one place, they would form the fifth most populous country in the world. Nearly half of all international migrants are women.

  In America we understand, perhaps better than anyone, what it is like to leave your home and start someplace new. Why do people migrate? What attracts or repels migrants? Who wins and who loses with migration? Is it true that immigrants steal jobs away from local workers? Or do they provide fresh labor and talent for ailing economies? What happens to the home countries emigrants leave behind? Immigration is one of the most talked about issues in the world, a testy subject that is taking on an increasingly negative tone in light of the global economic downturn. European governments have only recently started to take multiculturalism and minorities seriously. And with the arrival of so many newcomers, far-right political parties are gaining momentum in immigrant-receiving nations. More than two dozen parties across the European continent have denounced immigrants as invaders, a drain on finite resources, and a threat to already scarce jobs in the workplace. This rhetoric is also heard in America, despite our continent’s heritage of immigration, where laws deny undocumented immigrants basic human rights. Still, migrants today will continue to seek opportunities in places they aren’t always welcome. Why?

  I have always liked writing stories about people on the move. I am drawn to characters who seem a little out of place, and I like talking to people who are searching for something. But getting them to talk is not always easy. The Chinese tend to be wary of strangers, and though I am of Chinese heritage and my husband’s family is from southern Zhejiang, I was a stranger in Qingtian. To make things even more difficult, I found many Chinese people shied away from telling their own stories. It can take months and even years to get a person to talk freely, often because they are intensely private and deeply modest. Many of them asked: “Why me? You should interview a famous migrant, someone who has already made it.” But I remembered the words of author Peter Hessler who has written extensively about China: “The everyday matters just as much as the exceptional.” Eventually, I found those who loved telling their own stories. But they often had an agenda to push and an ego to stroke. During my talks with migrants, I discovered many of them withheld important details—but not always on purpose. After so many years, they had simply forgotten what had happened. And so, asking Chinese migrants to recall their stories of going abroad was like talking to someone with selective amnesia. I realized nothing could replace firsthand observation. I wanted to witness emigration myself. What would it be like to watch a migrant’s tale unfold? To see someone prepare to leave home for the first time and travel to a faraway land? What kind of life awaits a Chinese emigrant on a continent that was once the major source of emigration to the Americas? When she finally arrives, what surprises await her? I hoped to be an emigrant’s shadow, to experience the fear, the loneliness, and the courage needed to leave home and go someplace new. But could I meet someone who was willing to share her story with me? Days before the 2011 Lunar New Year, I arrived in Qingtian to find out.

  The first time I met Ye Pei she was sixteen years old and was still in high school. I remember she had the face of a doll, pale and round with a set of gleeful eyes shaped like sunflower seeds, her chubby cheeks and rosy complexion framed by a black, boyish bob. While her face radiated innocence, she dressed like a hipster in a white T-shirt and black vest. And like all teenage girls around the world, she spoke fast. Like, very fast. Pei had a tendency to say a lot, all in one breath, jumping from story to story and topic to topic without pausing in between. Sometimes I had trouble keeping up and I would ask her to slow down. I told Pei it was so I could get everything down in my notepad, but most of the time it was because I couldn’t understand her. It didn’t take long for her to see through my lie. “Your Chinese isn’t very good, is it?” Pei said to me not long after we met. Sheepishly, I explained to her that I was born and raised in Canada and had gone to school in the United States. I had only recently come to China to brush up on my Mandarin.

  Chinese is a difficult language to learn. When I was a child, my parents enrolled me in Chinese school hoping I could pick up some Mandarin. I resented having to wake up early on a Saturday morning (while my non-Chinese friends could sleep in), and I loathed drawing out characters that didn’t make sense to me and sitting through a class where I barely understood the teacher. Both my parents immigrated to North America as students, graduated with degrees from a Canadian university, and found good professional jobs. My mother was a nurse for many years before retiring, and my father continues to work as a financial advisor for a large Canadian bank. For as long as I can remember, my mom and dad spoke English fluently, so as a child I wondered: why is it so important for me to be “Chinese”?

  I grew up in a rather “Chinese” household. During the Chinese New Year, I received red pockets stuffed with money; I ate moon cakes during the Mid-Autumn Festival; I went to dim sum on the weekend with my grandparents; and I shopped for groceries in Toronto’s satellite Chinatowns. My mother is an excellent cook, and I was lucky to grow up with the tantalizing flavors of a Cantonese kitchen. I have always relished Mom’s home-style dishes like soya sauce chicken, steamed whole fish with gingers and scallions, and minced pork patty with salte
d fish. However, while I had a great interest in Chinese food as a child, I did not have the same passion for the Chinese language.

  I was enrolled in a local Chinese school in Toronto that taught us Mandarin, which has been the official language of mainland China since 1913. There is so much diversity when it comes to the Chinese language, which is composed of four main regional language varieties—Mandarin, Wu, Yue, and Min. Some linguists refer to these varieties as separate languages, but because they share a common written form, most Chinese speakers and Chinese linguists refer to them as dialects. These dialects are not mutually intelligible, and within each dialect are hundreds of non-mutually-intelligible subvarieties. My Mom speaks Cantonese, a Yue dialect that is primarily used in southern China. A distinguishing feature of the Chinese language is tonal: Mandarin has four tones and Cantonese has seven.

  It was only in my midtwenties when I began to realize how important it was for me to learn Chinese. There was much of Chinese culture, especially the food and the festivals, that I loved. But without a good command of the Chinese language, I felt incomplete in my understanding and appreciation. A desire to better understand my roots began to take hold. I also hoped learning Chinese would give me a professional advantage. Speaking a second language would make me a more versatile journalist, and as China’s extraordinary growth dominated the headlines, learning my mother tongue became a bit of an obsession, even prompting me to take a year off work to enroll in an intensive Chinese-language program at Beijing’s Tsinghua University in 2007.

  In Qingtian people traditionally spoke a form of Wu dialect, which was completely unintelligible to me. The older people in town, like Marc’s Waipo, spoke Qingtian dialect exclusively, but people like Pei’s parents and Pei herself learned Mandarin in school. Pei looked at me with a sideways glance, curious to meet a Chinese-looking person who didn’t speak Chinese very well. What was life like in America? In China, did I consider myself a foreigner? Could I teach her English? And did I know how to speak Italian? Her mother had already been in Italy for five years. Soon, Pei said, she would be joining her. “I’m not sure exactly where Mama lives,” Pei said. “But when she first went to Italy, she told me she was in Venice.” Then she pressed the palm of her hand into her chubby, pink cheek and spoke dreamily of bridges shaped like crescent moons and a beautiful city of stone, floating atop a glittering lagoon. In Chinese, she referred to Venice as shui cheng, “the water city.” “When you open the door, there’s water everywhere. The water comes right up to your doorstep,” she explained in rapid-fire Chinese. “I read about the shui cheng in a book once. In my mind, Venice is Italy and Italy is Venice.” I told Pei to stay in touch. Three months later, she left China for Italy. But when I traveled to meet her, she was not in Venice and she was not with her mother.