by Suzanne Ma
No one knows exactly how many ethnic Chinese live outside of China today, but it is estimated there are about sixty million out there. Collectively they make up the largest diaspora in the world. Wherever the Chinese have gone, they have gained a reputation for their kuli. Even today, at least seven in ten Americans describe the Chinese as hardworking, competitive, and inventive, according to the Pew Research Center. In the early days, migrants set off with the promise to work so hard they would spit blood from their beating hearts. They pledged to send money home to care for their families and to one day return dressed in silk robes. While they sweat and toiled overseas, their hearts remained in China. This passionate attachment to the homeland was rooted in the idea of filial piety—revering parents while they were alive—and ancestor worship—honoring their spirits when they were dead. The Chinese kept detailed genealogical records, and wherever they went, they maintained an intense preoccupation with origins and identity. Far away from home, this preoccupation only intensified and manifested itself in “Chinatowns” that sprang up all around the world. No matter how far they ventured, China remained the center of the universe. China, zhong guo, literally means “the central nation” or “the middle kingdom.” And when children like Ye Pei studied maps in school, China was always at the center of the atlas, with the Americas to the east and Europe to the west.
Ye Pei’s father earned no more than a few dollars an hour working at the leather shoe factory some forty miles from Qingtian. This was a typical wage for a factory worker in China, but it was a fraction of what Shen’s neighbors and friends were earning in Europe. When he returned home to see Fen and the kids, he was besieged with reminders of wealth that could be earned if he dared to venture abroad. The migrants no longer sent money home to build houses made of stone and wood. Now they built modern apartment buildings for their extended families and commissioned massive hillside tombs to honor their ancestors. They dressed their loved ones in name-brand clothes and cruised around Qingtian in luxury cars. In China, great importance is placed on one’s “face” or mianzi. When talking about mianzi, the Chinese are not referring to a face that can be washed or shaved, but to a face that can be “lost” and “fought for” and even “granted.” To lose face is to be disgraced; to fight for face is to find a way to preserve your dignity; and to grant face is to give someone a chance to regain his lost honor.
Shen did what any respectable Chinese man would do. He fought for his mianzi and decided he too would go abroad. He set his hopes on Italy, where he planned to work in a factory doing what he did best—stitching leather shoes. There were ample employment opportunities for unskilled workers in the country’s textile industry, and everyone in Qingtian was talking about it. Yidali was a place where you could “get rich quickly.” Shen submitted an application for a worker’s visa to the Italian consulate in Shanghai and expected to hear back soon. Weeks turned into months, months into a half-year. Still, he received no reply. Shen grew impatient. On a whim, he asked his wife to put in an application. “Just to see what happens,” he said at the time. It took just two months for Fen’s application to be approved. She spent the next few days crying at home. The pounding in her chest refused to go away as she thought about leaving her husband and her children behind. She would be moving to a strange country where she did not speak the language and where she knew no one. “My heart is not prepared for this,” she told Shen, who held onto his wife’s cold hands, feeling perhaps just as awful as she. Shen had never planned on his wife going to Yidali alone. After all he was the man of the house, the breadwinner, the one who always took care of the family. Why would the consulate approve one visa and reject another? Emigrants are never given an answer to this question. The people in Qingtian hold fate accountable. It makes leaving more bearable, as if it was never your decision to make in the first place. If you are born in Qingtian, you are destined to leave. But everyone leaves in their own time, whether they are ready or not.
Fen looked her children in the eye and told them she would be home in a few years. Pei and Mao nodded solemnly, not realizing how much they would grow and change by the time they saw her again in Italy. Fen’s visa was arranged by a Qingtian man who ran a Chinese restaurant near Venice. On paper, he hired her to be a cook in his kitchen. Off the record, she paid him $19,000 for his “help.” Fen asked for many favors and borrowed as much as she could from family and friends. But when she arrived in Italy, the restaurateur took the money and told her there was no work. She scoured the classifieds in the local Chinese-language newspaper and found a job in a Chinese-run factory in Padua, a city thirty miles west of Venice. She worked thirteen hours a day, but she didn’t have to sew. She took a notepad and pen and went around the factory keeping track of the merchandise and stock. The factory’s main task was to remove “Made in China” labels on clothes and replace them with “Made in Italy” tags. Fen did not tell her children about the Chinese restaurant owner who took her money without offering her the employment he promised. Nor did she tell them about how frightened she was when she first arrived, unable to speak a word of Italian. She didn’t tell them how she had bounced from factory to factory before she was able to find steady work. And because Ye Pei wouldn’t have known where the city of Padua was, when Fen first telephoned home, she told her daughter she was calling from Venice.
“That’s the water city, isn’t it?” Pei asked. “There are lots of bridges and when you open the door, there is water everywhere. The water comes right up to your doorstep, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” her mother said. “It is very beautiful. There are gondolas everywhere.” Pei remembered reading about Venice in a schoolbook. Now, hearing her mother’s voice through a garbled phone connection, she longed to be there with her. Together, they could wander across those crescent-moon bridges, roam through narrow alleyways, and watch Venetians ride their sleek, black boats to run even the simplest of errands, like going to the grocery store. She wasn’t sure if she would be brave enough to get on a gondola herself. She didn’t know how to swim and was deathly afraid of water. “You have to listen to your father from now on,” her mother said. “I’ll be home in two years.”
“At first, I believed her,” Pei told me when we first met one spring day in 2011. “But it has been five years now and she has not been back to China since.”
In Qingtian, meeting people who dreamed of a life abroad was easy. Getting them to open up about their dreams was not. I was looking to meet migrants who were talkative and candid, honest and open-minded. While the Chinese people can be extremely straightforward about some things—“What’s your age?” “How much money do you make?” “Why aren’t you married yet? You’re so old!”—it was difficult to find people who were completely truthful about their feelings. During my first month in Qingtian, I encountered at least one or two potential migrants every day. A young man, who told me he wanted to go to Spain, washed my hair at a salon. A sales rep, who dreamed of going to Holland, tried to sell me a gym membership. One young woman, considering going to Italy, helped me with my China Mobile phone plan when I first arrived in Qingtian. Zhan Junjun was dressed like a stewardess in a navy blue pantsuit with a matching handkerchief tied around her neck. She was nineteen years old, professional and courteous, and during our brief conversation, she told me she was planning to go to Yidali—Italy.
“Why Italy?” I asked.
“My sister is already there,” she said.
“Where does your sister live?”
“Rome . . . I think.”
“And why are you motivated to go abroad?”
“Well, everyone’s doing it,” Junjun replied with a shrug. And then, because I was asking her so many questions, Junjun got suspicious. She leaned forward, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Are you one of those people who . . . you know . . . ” She trailed off and I leaned forward, waiting to hear the end of her question. “You know . . . ” I met her gaze and raised my eyebrow. She tried again: �
�One of those who . . . ” Finally, she gathered enough courage to spit it out: “Someone who brings people out?” Brings people out. It took me a few seconds to understand what she meant. Then I felt my cheeks burn. Junjun was asking if I was she tou, a snakehead, the Chinese word for human smuggler! I shook my head and bashfully told her no. Like the coyotes who smuggle people across the U.S.-Mexico border, snakeheads are Chinese gang members who smuggle people out of China to other countries. They often use stolen or altered passports and improperly obtain visas. Sometimes they form bogus business delegations and tour groups as a way of evading immigration controls. Smuggling is different from human trafficking, where people are bought and sold into forced labor and sexual slavery. Those who are smuggled willfully agree to being illegally transported into another country.
A few weeks after I first arrived in Qingtian, I visited the old family home in the village of Shabu. There, in the drawer of an old dresser, my husband’s great-uncle kept a book that charted six generations of family genealogy that I hoped to see. I boarded a grubby bus headed west toward the village of Shabu where more than half of the 439 households shared the same surname as my husband Marc—Guo. Great-uncle was a retired farmer who lived in a rustic two-story structure of faded timber. Holding up weathered terra-cotta roof tiles was a network of interlocking wooden supports, one of the most important elements in traditional Chinese architecture and China’s major contribution to worldwide architectural technology. Craftsmen had cut the wooden pieces to fit perfectly so that no glue, screws, or bolts were necessary to hold the roof up. Two pairs of portraits hung side by side on the old walls: photographs of Marc’s great-grandfather and great-grandmother, and drawings of Marc’s great-great-grandfather and great-great-grandmother. Like all old portraits, these ancestors watch over the house with solemn black-and-white expressions.
Great-uncle retreated to his bedroom to retrieve the tattered book from his dresser. A bare lightbulb swung from the ceiling of the room cluttered with shoe boxes and shopping bags. In the center of it all stood an antique canopy bed carved out of rosewood. The wood was now faded and worn, but I could still make out carvings of plum blossoms—which represent renewal, perseverance, and purity—and cranes—representing happiness and immortality. We stood in his open-air courtyard, sipping leafy green tea and soaking in the sunshine on that cold winter day, poring over all the dates and names that had to be read in the traditional Chinese way—vertically and from right to left. I saw a long tradition of going abroad: great-grandfathers, grandfathers, grandmothers, aunts and uncles and cousins that had settled all over Europe. They went to Holland, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Austria. Great-uncle had four children himself—his three eldest daughters all lived in Spain and the youngest child had yet to leave. His name was Guo Zhongyi, but everyone in the family called him by his nickname: Ah Dai. As I turned the thin, yellowing pages of the family book, I learned that it was my husband’s great-grandfather who first went to Holland, where he sold peanut cookies on the street. The Chinese peanut trade began in 1931 when an unemployed Chinese seaman began making and selling what the Dutch called pindakoekjes, small cookies made of peanuts and caramelized sugar. The idea spread and soon the Chinese pindaman became a familiar sight throughout the Netherlands. With the money he earned, my husband’s great-grandfather returned to China to build the house in Shabu where Marc’s great-uncle now lived. It was proof that going abroad was the only way to feed one’s family.
For as long as people have been leaving Qingtian, they have been sending money home. Remittances were first used to construct homes like the one in Shabu. Later, many families built apartment buildings that could house several generations of one family all in one building. Once they took care of the living, they turned to the dead. Massive stone graves were carved out of steep hillsides to honor the family’s ancestors. Emigrants then sent money home to help pave new roads and mountain paths, to renovate temples, and eventually to build new bridges over the rivers linking one town to the next. They erected statues in local parks: a sculpture of Napoleon Bonaparte on his horse was a gift from French migrants, a figure of Johann Strauss wielding his gold violin was bankrolled by migrants in Austria, and migrants in Italy paid for a not-so-accurate replica of Michelangelo’s David. In Florence, the renaissance masterpiece is fully nude and carved out of marble. In Qingtian, David was forged out of copper and the censors had stepped in—covering David’s groin with a large copper leaf. Remittances also went toward new schools and later toward funding local businesses like hotels, coffee shops, and karaoke clubs. Qingtian, once a quiet backwater county, was consumed with development, rapt in the clamor of jackhammers and drills.
For a long time, Ah Dai wanted to go abroad. The timing, however, was never right. When he was younger, everyone urged him to stay home and study. Life overseas was too xinku, too bitter on the heart, the family said. So Ah Dai stayed in school, but like many children in Qingtian, he struggled to find incentives to study hard. If he was destined to leave, why did grades even matter? Ah Dai managed to finish high school and then he prepared to go abroad. But that year, the European economy took a turn for the worse. As many as one million emigrants—a third of all foreigners in the country—lost their jobs when Spain’s construction bubble burst in 2008. Ah Dai would have to wait for the economy to recover. Not far from his home, he found a job in a factory where he drilled screws into electricity meters. He earned less than $250 a month. In 2010, even though the situation in Spain continued to look grim, Ah Dai’s family began the paperwork to get him a visa anyway. He knew nothing about Spain and had no intention of learning Spanish before he made his way abroad. He had never heard of tapas or sangria and couldn’t name a single Spanish delicacy. When I asked him where he was going to stay, he thought for a second, then turned and shouted to his mother, who was in the kitchen across the old courtyard: “Mama, where does my older sister live?”
“Ma-deh-lee!” she shouted back. Madrid, the country’s capital. It was a month later when the eldest of Ah Dai’s sisters, who had been in Spain since she was thirteen years old, returned to Qingtian for a short visit. Guo Wei was now thirty years old, a mother of three, and the owner of a store outside Madrid that sold small household products. When she returned home to Qingtian that year, she brought a gift for her brother. Ah Dai cradled the device, admiring its luminous screen. It would be months before the iPhone 4 would be available for sale in China. Ah Dai showed off his new toy over lunch at his house in Shabu one day. It had cost his sister about $800 to purchase it—about four months of Ah Dai’s pay at the factory—and he understood very well that it was foreign money that allowed his sister to give him such a present. I met many emigrants in those early months who, like Ah Dai, told me “getting rich” was the number one reason why they wanted to go abroad. In many ways, he was a very typical young emigrant. But I was hoping to meet someone who was a little more curious about the outside world, someone actively preparing for his or her journey overseas.
I decided to look for places where emigrants might gather. Across the county, posters were stapled onto crowded bulletin boards—all of them advertising help with going abroad.
Exit the Country visas.
Learn Italian in just 2 months.
Going Abroad? Learn to Cook.
The black-and-white poster for a cooking school caught my eye. I followed the signs to the Exit the Country Chef Training Center one morning where I found students gathered in a dimly lit commercial kitchen. They were watching a young man in a white chef’s jacket slice a cucumber and a carrot with the utmost precision. Shling! Chop! Chop! A steel blade diced and carved the vegetables, making contact with the chestnut cutting board beneath. Most of the students were young men, but there were some women too. Nearly everyone was in their twenties. One student hovered behind the chef, taking notes. Another stood right in front, capturing the action on his digital camera. The chef put down his knife and lifted a pla
te up for everyone to see. Slivers of cucumber and carrot had come together to form palm trees, a sunset, and a sandy beach. In China, people don’t ooooh and aaaah. The students expressed astonishment with a synchronous: “Waaaaaaaah!”
“The examiners will not be tasting your food. They will judge each dish by appearance only,” the chef told the class. “Just make sure everything is cooked thoroughly. You cannot present food that is raw.” The students were preparing for a national cooking exam that usually required at least a month’s worth of training. Most of the students, however, had just started attending classes at the Exit the Country Chef Training Center. The exam was scheduled for the end of the week. A pass meant you received an “Occupational Qualification Certificate” issued by China’s Ministry of Labor and Social Security. It was supposed to be hard proof that you knew your way around a kitchen. But I didn’t have much confidence in the candidates. The chef had said himself: examiners judged each dish only by how the food looked, not by how it tasted. “If you can’t remember how to make a certain dish during the exam, just watch the person next to you,” the chef went on, glancing around the room with a reassuring look. “We are all in this together.”
The cooking certificate could be used to find work in restaurants across China, but all the students at the school were planning to work overseas. Most were hoping to emigrate to the Czech Republic or Hungary. The rest had their hearts set on Finland, Romania, Spain, and Holland. I sat beside a young woman named Jiajia, who had long, dark hair and teal-colored contact lenses that made her eyes look alarmingly cat-like. She told me her plans to work in a Chinese restaurant in Budapest. The cooking certificate would bolster her visa application, Jiajia explained. “The Hungarian government favors emigrants who come with some sort of employable skill,” she said. Jiajia spoke with an airy confidence and calm that set her apart from the young girls who giggled and whispered to each other during class. I learned that she had recently graduated from university.