by Suzanne Ma
“Next time I go to China, I’ll bring you with me,” one man teased, leaning over the bar counter.
Pei played along and nodded her head enthusiastically at the offer. “Sì signore,” she said. “Mi piace.” I like. A few customers even coaxed Pei into giving them her mobile phone number. When the old men called her, Pei flipped open her pink cell phone and put the receiver to her ear, rolling her eyes and speaking broken Italian: “Uuuh? Sì, sì . . . Uuuh? Domani. Sì, sì, sì.” Even though she seemed annoyed by the frequent phone calls, the minute-long exchanges left Pei feeling needed or even missed.
Everyone back home in China warned Pei about the foreigners. The lao wai. “Those lao wai bosses can’t be trusted,” they said. “You will be cheated out of your wages and you won’t even know it!” But Pei’s experiences in Italy told her otherwise. A few weeks after she first arrived from China, she found herself adrift in a crowded train station. Passengers brushed past her, lugging suitcases and enormous backpacks. Sweat beaded on her forehead as she approached a few stationary travelers, her train ticket crumpled in her clammy hand. All she could hear was the sound of her own hammering heart when she plucked up the courage to step forward and speak: “Padua? Padua?” It was the only Italian word she could muster in that moment—the name of the city she needed to head toward. Pei was surprised when the Italians pointed her in the direction of the right platform. “Even if you can’t speak the language, the Italians are very smart. They can figure out what you want,” she said. Then there was the time Pei went into a government office to pick up her newly minted ID card.
“Buongiorno signora, how can I help you?” the clerk asked. Dry mouthed, Pei blinked. Thoughts scrambled around in her brain and a choking sensation clogged her throat. The clerk saw the panic in her eyes, turned to his computer, and accessed an online translation website. His fingers moved swiftly across the keyboard, and within seconds his sentence was translated into a string of Chinese characters. Pei heaved a sigh of relief. She leaned closer, nodded her head, then typed a few Chinese characters in response. With the click of a mouse, the Italian translation appeared a few seconds later. It was almost instant communication. “I think the Italians are very nice and have excellent manners,” she said. “They go out of their way to help you.”
Pei discovered Italians weren’t as bad as they were made out to be. Sometimes, it was her fellow Chinese emigrants she needed to be wary of. An extensive and powerful network helped a newcomer like Pei find a job in a bad economy. But her working arrangement—typical for new emigrants arriving from China—left her completely dependent on her employer. Pei called her boss Ayi. It means Auntie and it is an affectionate, respectful title given to female relatives or close friends of the family. Ayi hailed from the same mountainous county Pei and her family came from, Qingtian. To come from the same hometown meant that you were automatically friends, neighbors, comrades, even family. Pei lived with Ayi, ate meals with her, and worked side by side with her every day at the bar, but Ayi was not her friend and certainly not her family. It seemed nothing she did was right in Ayi’s eyes. There were many rules and Pei tried in vain to follow them.
“Stop making that strange sound with your tongue!” Ayi chided when she overheard Pei rolling her Rs.
“Use both hands when carrying the tray!”
“Do not mop the bathroom floors until the last customer leaves!” Ayi scolded one night. But the next day, as Pei waited for the bar to empty out, Ayi was furious. “Why are you not cleaning the floors?”
“I am sorry, Ayi,” she apologized, grabbing the mop. But she made a mental note: “When I am my own boss, I will remember what it was like to be a worker,” she thought. “I will treat my workers as partners. People I can work with, not people who work under me.” As a chilly fog descended upon the town in late November, Pei shivered when she went outside to put the patio furniture away. As she stacked the chairs one on top of the other, her raw hands made contact with the frigid steel. Her blisters tingled like the prick of a hundred needles. Soon after that, Pei began wearing gloves to work. Ayi spoke up in an exasperated tone: “Child, surely it isn’t that cold outside!” Pei said nothing, but after stumbling home one night at the end of another long shift, she wrote it all down in her diary: “This kind of life lets me profoundly feel what Mama experienced those five years when she was all by herself in a foreign country. What an isolating life!”
Pei’s isolation was compounded by feelings of deference and gratitude, especially when Ayi reminded her that she was doing her a favor. “We did not have to take you in,” she said. “It was only because your mother called me so many times that I agreed to hire you.” Pei’s mother was the first to come to Italy. She found work in a garment factory near the city of Padua where she met Ayi. Now Pei’s mother worked on a mushroom farm one hundred miles away. She wasn’t able to get her daughter a job at the farm, and she didn’t want Pei working for a stranger. She remembered her friend from the factory. Maybe she needed a pair of extra hands at the bar in Solesino? At the time, it seemed like a good place for her Pei. In many ways, the Chinese aren’t so different from the Italians. Both communities rely on raccomandazione—personal connections. In Chinese, it’s called guan xi, and such relationships pave a smoother path for emigrants like Pei. Guan xi helped her find a job and a place to stay. Guan xi can get you a loan in order to kick-start a new business venture. Guan xi can introduce you to your future husband or wife, if matchmaking is what you need. In other words, guan xi can hook you up in more ways than one. No doubt guan xi can get you far, but it can also make life more difficult for you. Workers who wish to maintain good guan xi with their bosses might be afraid to say no to an extra shift or to ask for a raise. Pei was entitled to a day off and, after a month’s work, to a 50 euro raise. But she said nothing. She didn’t want to sour her guan xi with Ayi. A new emigrant often knowingly entered into such working arrangements. Pei insisted it wasn’t exploitation. It was an opportunity, she said. A chance to acquire new skills and gain better prospects. During those hard months in Solesino, Pei learned to hold her tongue and tried to be thankful for her job. That’s what it is like to be raised Chinese, she said. You are taught to desire nothing, to accept everything, and most importantly, to eat your own bitterness. “I am learning to keep my grievances in my heart,” she wrote in her diary. “No one will hear my pain. I must swallow my tears. When I one day leave this bar, I will be grateful to them for the experience!”
2
Leaving China
By a stream and a hill is a little town
With narrow streets and small houses
There are not many shops but I have bought cakes
And one can buy wine at the New Year
By a stream and a hill I have a brother
This little town is my home
—Chinese coolie song
She was only twelve years old, but she remembers watching the clock that cold February morning. The skies were gray, and the clouds gathered up in tight bales, ready to burst with rain. Ye Pei watched her breath waft out in front of her like incense blowing off candle sticks. Ten minutes past seven. That was when her mother left for the airport. She was not allowed to go with her, and Pei remembers being sent off to school instead. Gasping for breath in between sobs, she grabbed her book bag as tears flowed down her red face. Leaving China was her father’s idea, not her mother’s. But it was her mother’s visa that came through in the end, and she was forced to pack her bags and head to Italy alone. Pei’s mother, Fen, had absolutely no interest in going abroad. Fen was a stay-at-home mom—the one who took care of the kids while her husband worked on the assembly line, stitching leather shoes in a factory about forty miles away. The couple often spent months at a time apart. Even so, their feelings for each other remained strong. Her husband, Shen, was a strong man with a tanned, pudgy face and kind, oval eyes. Physically, he was the exact opposite of Fen, who was just five
feet tall, with pale skin that wrapped tightly around small bones. The two had known each other since childhood and for the longest time, Shen called Fen his tutu, his “little rabbit.” When he came home to visit after his many months in the factory, he cupped his thick hands to his round face and called to his wife in a high-pitched coo: “Tooooo-tooooooo!” Fen was just twenty years old when she married Shen. A year later Pei was born. While many families in China are bound by the one-child policy, rural families are allowed to have a second child if the first is a girl. And so two years later Ye Mao, a boy, was born. It was Shen who always wanted to go abroad. He earned the equivalent of just a few dollars an hour working at the leather shoe factory, and like everyone else from Qingtian, he had heard about the riches he could make in Europe.
They say the people of Qingtian have been leaving the barren mountains behind for three hundred years for a chance to make it rich elsewhere. The rocky terrain left too little fertile land for farming and made it difficult to support any sort of major industry, except one. Rocks were mined from the cliffs, and some young men apprenticed as soapstone carvers, spending months inside dusty workshops transforming uncarved blocks of semiprecious rock into stunning sceneries and landscapes. Shen hadn’t dabbled in rock sculpting in his youth, as many of the other local men had done. His stubby hands were not designed for such careful and fine sculpting. But he had grown up hearing the stories of famed Qingtian stone carvers said to be the county’s first migrants. They walked across Siberia to get to Europe, where they peddled those beautiful hand-carved soapstones on the street. There was the tale of one particular rock carver who had traveled from Qingtian all the way to the land of windmills and wooden clogs. The lucky man had a chance encounter with the Dutch queen, and when he presented her with his most exquisite sculpture depicting two lions playing with an oversized pearl, the queen praised its beauty. Her public admiration sent Dutch aristocrats rushing to the streets to offer Chinese peddlers large sums of money in exchange for stones. Then there was the other famed sculptor who had the chance to display his work at an island in the East China Sea where a band of foreign tourists purchased some of his carvings. The sale inspired him and a small group of carvers and traders to embark for Europe on a French boat leaving from Vietnam. By the early 1900s, it is said enough Qingtian natives were making the trip for one of them to operate a hotel in Marseilles to accommodate new arrivals and run a parallel business recruiting sailors for European shipping companies. Whether these stories are true or not, they inspired generations of people to emigrate, fueling the belief that Europe was a gold mine for opportunity and fortune.
The Chinese have been leaving China for centuries, crossing land and sea in search of wealth and opportunity. One of the most famous travelers was a navy admiral in the imperial Ming Dynasty who embarked on seven epic voyages that sailed as far as Africa nearly a century before Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. Zheng He was an imperial court eunuch— kidnapped as a boy from his home in western China and ritually castrated—before he rose to the top of the imperial hierarchy, becoming a chief aide and key wartime strategist. Zheng He was eventually chosen to lead one of the most powerful naval forces ever assembled: from 1405 to 1433, he journeyed throughout Southeast Asia, to India and to the Middle East before reaching East Africa. Along the way he gifted gold, porcelain, and silk to his hosts, and in return his fleet returned to China with exotic goods like camels, zebras, giraffes, ostriches, and ivory. The voyages allowed the admiral to establish trade relations, draft practical maps, and record sailing directions. But this age of discovery did not last long. Late Ming emperors, fearing that seafarers might trade, amass wealth, and one day plot against them, began discouraging travel and overseas trading. They even decreed anyone who left and came back should be beheaded. China turned inward, and a formal ban on emigration remained in effect until 1893. Despite this, legions of Chinese people, largely merchants, traders, and laborers, continued to leave in the nineteenth century. It was never the migrant’s intention to leave the homeland permanently. No, the idea was to sojourn—temporarily migrate elsewhere, struggle and save, and then return home to China a rich man.
Not everyone could afford passage abroad. Scores of Chinese workers were kidnapped and then bought and sold on the ruins of the African slave trade. Coolies—a Hindi word used by the Portuguese to describe hired workers in India—came to mean transient laborer; in Chinese the word kuli means bitter strength. Chinese coolies rushed to California, to Canada, and to Australia to pan for gold. They worked as sailors for European shipping companies and eventually came to cluster in the port cities of London, Hamburg, Lyon, and Rotterdam. Coolies went to India, to South America, to Africa and pretty much anywhere there was a living to be made—anywhere outside of China. Migrants poured forth from the coastal Chinese provinces, faint with hunger but full of hope, eagerly searching for stability that was missing in the homeland. China was a divisive and hierarchical place prone to famine and ravaged by natural disasters, economic crises, war, and rebellion. People were desperate to get away from it all.
In the eighteenth century, when China attempted to suppress the opium trade, British warships sailed into the Pearl River Delta and violently overthrew the country’s coastal defenses, forcing the Chinese to agree to a series of humiliating treaties and concessions. The Taiping rebellion killed more than twenty million people between 1850 and 1864 when a man claiming to be Jesus’s younger brother enlisted a massive army and tried to bring about major political and religious change. The Japanese occupied the country from 1937 to 1945, pillaging cities, brutally murdering citizens, and raping and mutilating women. When the Japanese left, the Chinese turned on each other. It was the Communists who eventually triumphed over the Nationalists, and the country’s new leader, Chairman Mao Zedong, began subjecting his people to various social experiments, starting with the Great Leap Forward in 1958. Mao forced peasants into collective farms, causing mass starvation; then he kick-started the Cultural Revolution in 1966, forming a Red Army of impressionable youth who forced their college professors to work as peasants and laborers in the fields and factories. The Red Army murdered those suspected of bourgeois sympathies, and it is estimated as many as seventy million people died in the course of a decade. In recent years, China has witnessed more bloodshed, prompting more waves of migration. With such a tumultuous history, it’s not surprising why so many Chinese have sought better fortunes abroad.
The first time I heard about the Chinese Labor Corps was when a local historian in Qingtian mentioned that 140,000 Chinese men were recruited by the Allies during the First World War to fill a critical labor shortage at the Western Front. He said 2,000 men were recruited from Qingtian and that the Corps represented one of the first major waves of migration from China to Europe. I searched online and pored through history books to learn more. I discovered the Chinese Labor Corps fulfilled many duties including unloading cargo ships and trains, chopping down trees for timber, and maintaining docks, railways, roads, and airfields. Skilled mechanics repaired vehicles and worked on tanks. Some historians say they even helped dig trenches. Later, after the Armistice, the Chinese stayed behind to clean up the mess. As late as 1919, Chinese laborers remained in France and Belgium to help clear the rubble, bury the dead, and clean up the battlefields. Those who enlisted in the Chinese Labor Corps were promised daily wages, food, clothing, and medical support. Contracts drafted by British and French recruiting officers also pledged regular payments for the laborers’ families. Such rewards were tempting enough to encourage thousands of men to sign up for three years of work on the front lines of a war they knew very little about. For a country searching for a new national identity, participating in the war was a chance for China to gain a foothold in the emerging international order.
Most of the laborers recruited by the British came from the northeast provinces of Shandong and present-day Hebei. The French also recruited laborers from China’s southern provinces. So
me of the men were soldiers or former soldiers, though a large number were skilled workers like carpenters, blacksmiths, and mechanics. Recruiting officers seemed to prefer enlisting men from the north of China, who were deemed bigger and stronger than men from the south. A YMCA communiqué described the men as having “superior physique and greater endurance.” Meanwhile, a New York Times article in 1917 reported “the best selected stock” was going to France, with a “large percentage” of them six feet tall. After the war, many of the surviving Chinese laborers returned home to China but a few thousand stayed behind. They found factory jobs in France and some married French women, despite French and Chinese governments discouraging the unions. They formed the first rooted Chinese community in Paris, setting up the city’s first Chinatown around the Gare de Lyon train station. The Corps was the largest ethnic minority group to participate in the Great War, but I was surprised to discover how their contributions have been largely forgotten, their stories left out of official histories. “How many lives have vanished into obscurity?” I thought. “And how many other Chinese immigrant tales are left untold?”