Meet Me in Venice

by Suzanne Ma

  “But what good is that?” Jiajia asked. “I’m unemployed.” Across China, there were too many graduates and not enough jobs. There were six times the number of graduates than there were a decade ago, and China’s job market hadn’t evolved fast enough to absorb all six million of them. The Chinese economy was providing greater opportunities than ever before, but “tough competition makes it a real challenge to find a good job,” Jiajia said. Even with her degree, Jiajia’s salary in China would be meager compared to what she could earn washing dishes in Hungary. “It’s one euro to every nine yuan,” she reminded me. “That’s the reality.” I met several other girls in class that day who were in similar situations. They had graduated from university and were either unemployed or unhappily employed. All of them were hoping to forge a better future somewhere else. I had expected to run into country bumpkins and high school dropouts at the cooking school. Instead, I found educated young women willing to drop their diplomas and their pride to make fried rice in a foreign country. It made me think of all the dish washers and servers and cooks I’d seen working in Chinese restaurants in the West. I thought of the girls who served me stir-fried vermicelli in Barcelona and the man who wrapped dumplings in Bordeaux. I thought sheepishly about the Chinese delivery guy in New York who brought me my General Tso’s chicken through rain, snow, and sleet. Most of these emigrants probably didn’t go to college—but then again, what did I know? I never asked and they never told. How much do we really know about the people who cook for us, serve us, and clean up after us? Every one of them has a unique story about leaving home. It made me stop and think—what are these people giving up to pursue the emigrant dream?

  The next morning, students at the cooking school sat behind old wooden desks lined up in front of a faded blackboard. Du Lirong, director of the Exit the Country Chef Training Center, stood waiting. Like most of the men in Qingtian, he was not tall, but he held his ground with strong features: a set of bushy eyebrows, greasy black hair, and a gruff voice. Director Du cleared his throat and began: “This is serious,” he said. “This is a national test. You cannot be late. The older students will have no problem getting up. It is the younger ones I am worried about.” Director Du began to pace. “You, young people, are always on the Internet until three or four in the morning. There are always one or two of you who do not show up on time.” He stopped pacing and stared hard at the young man seated near him before moving on. He emphasized cleanliness and reminded everyone to bring a towel to the exam. He told the women to tie up their hair, take off all jewelry, and remove fake nails and nail polish. No sandals and no high heels. Jiajia took note. And the men? No dyed hair. “You walk in with yellow and green hair, looking like a panda,” he growled. “People don’t like that. You’ll make the examiners uncomfortable and you will look like a hooligan.” Director Du took a breath and then continued. “All right, now let’s talk about Shanghai.” If students passed the cooking exam and the rest of their papers were in order, they could submit a visa application to the appropriate consulate in Shanghai. The final hurdle was a face-to-face meeting with a consulate official. For many hopeful emigrants, this is where things can go wrong. Director Du told story after story of failure:

  “When the embassy asks how long you trained, make sure you tell them one to three months. If you say anything less than that, they’ll tell you to go back and study some more.”

  “Once, the embassy official asked a student, ‘What can you cook?’ The student replied: ‘Nothing.’ The official asked: ‘Not even egg fried rice?’ ‘Nope,’ said the student. So the embassy sent him home. You don’t want this to happen to you.”

  “Another student was once asked by the embassy: ‘How much are you paying people to bring you out?’ ‘$20,000 to go to Sweden,’ the student replied. He was finished. The correct answer is: ‘I’m going to work for relatives. Their restaurant is busy and they need workers. I didn’t pay anyone to bring me out.’”

  A steely silence washed over the room as Director Du spoke of hopeful emigrants who had foolishly spoiled their chances of going abroad. I could hear the frantic scratching of lead on paper as students vigorously scribbled in their notebooks. Director Du picked up a stack of papers and began handing out sheets. Typed in black font were questions students could expect to encounter during the embassy interview. Sometimes an emigrant’s fate hinged on questions like:

  Q. When making rice, what is the water to rice ratio?

  A. 1:1.2

  Q. What do you need to make soya sauce?

  A. To make soya sauce, you need soya beans or soya bean cakes, wheat bran, and salt.

  Q. How long does it take to make tea-infused eggs?

  A. About an hour.

  Q. When you put an egg in boiling water, how long does it take to cook the egg?

  A. (trick question!) Put the egg in cold water first before bringing the water to a boil.

  Across China, the national cooking exam is typically held just once a year. But there is so much demand in Qingtian, the exam is held once a month. People from all over the country come to take advantage. There were forty-six students preparing for the exam that week; twelve had come from outside the county and one candidate had traveled clear across China from as far away as Yunnan, a western province sharing a border with Tibet. Later that week, Jiajia and her classmates rose early one morning and filed into an empty classroom where they answered a host of multiple-choice questions before demonstrating their cooking prowess in a test kitchen. All but one of the candidates passed. “I don’t know what happened,” sighed Director Du. “It’s as if he didn’t study at all. I don’t think he read any of the materials.” Jiajia said the exam was a cinch. She had removed all the color from her nails and tied up her long, dark hair. At one point in the test kitchen, she couldn’t remember what to do next, but she remained calm. She tilted her head to the right and eyed the person next to her for help. With the cooking certificate in hand, she was now taking her passport photos and gathering documents for notarization. But the week after the exam, Jiajia also started a new job. She was offered a position in the sales department at a local bank. In a tight white blouse and dark pants, she sat behind a smooth, dark desk in an office she shared with four other young bank employees, mulling over her new situation.

  “Now that I have this job, who knows if I will go abroad?” she said. “I’ll see how much I like working here at the bank and I’ll see how far my application to Hungary goes. I’m not sure what to do now.”

  There was so much uncertainty in a migrant’s life. Will I stay or will I go? When will I leave and where do I go? When I get there, what will it be like and will I like it? Will I ever return home to China? There were too many questions and so few answers. Some migrants, eager to somehow prepare for the journey ahead, believed the best way to ready themselves was to start with the tongue. Language was the key to success. You could be the most industrious worker there ever was, but if you couldn’t put more than two words together, you were nothing. Hard workers survived. Big talkers prospered. But how to flutter your tongue fast enough to get that R to roll? And was it possible to gather so much saliva deep in the throat for that guttural ccccht! sound necessary in so many Germanic languages? The foreign-language schools in Qingtian boasted a wide curriculum, offering classes in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, English, Polish, and Czech. I knew there was a good chance of meeting passionate and loquacious emigrants there.

  In big Chinese cities like Beijing and Shanghai, foreigners and foreign-language schools are commonplace. But in a small county like Qingtian, where foreigners are still rare, it was a shock to find so many posters advertising language schools and tutors. I followed a series of pink signs down a main road. At the corner where an old man sold small tanks of water brimming with goldfish, I turned right and entered an alleyway before making a quick left behind a seedy apartment building. The lane was lined with trash. I found a dark stairway and cl
imbed up to the second floor where, through an open door, I saw a man and woman sitting behind battered wooden desks in an apartment that had been converted into a classroom. I had reached the Longjin Road Foreign Language Training Center. I was looking for Xu Mengqiu, the school’s principal teacher.

  “Hi, do you know where Teacher Xu is?” I asked the two students.

  “She’s napping,” said the man. He was typical of Qingtian men—short and thin—but with a sturdy build and a hazel glow that remained with him all year round, even in the winter. He had a set of piercing eyes, the kind that paid attention to everyone and everything.

  “You’re here to learn Italian, too?” he asked, putting his hand on a beige book that I saw had both Chinese characters and Italian words printed on its pages.

  “No, I’m researching a book about the overseas Chinese from Qingtian,” I told him. “Maybe I can interview you sometime?”

  He was quick to answer. “But I’m not an overseas migrant.”

  “Ah, but you will be,” I replied just as quickly. “Maybe if you have some free time one day, we could meet and uh, get a cup of coffee.” He looked at me and laughed. It wasn’t a good sign. “No need to be shy,” I continued, trying to save the conversation. “I just want to hear your story. Maybe you can tell me why you want to go abroad, what your dreams are, that sort of thing.”

  “Oh, us?” he said, turning to look at his classmate. He laughed again. “We don’t have any dreams.” I didn’t know it at the time, but when it came to dreams, this man had many. Our conversation ended as awkwardly as it began when I asked him for his contact information. He reluctantly gave me his phone number, and he wrote his name in Chinese characters and then spelled it out phonetically in pinyin: Chen Junwei. And then he said: “You can try to find me, but I don’t drink coffee.”

  I was relieved when Teacher Xu got up from her nap and wandered into her cluttered classroom. She was sixty-one years old, with permed black hair and reading glasses that sat on the tip of her nose. She spoke with an almost guttural voice that projected to the far ends of the classroom. I later learned she was quite the Chinese opera singer. Teacher Xu once taught English at a Qingtian elementary school, and though she retired nearly ten years before, she continued to teach privately and with a whole new repertoire. She taught Spanish in the mornings, Italian in the afternoons, and Portuguese in the evenings. On the weekends, she held tutorial classes for those who needed extra help. Each student paid a flat fee of less than $100, and Teacher Xu encouraged them to learn as long as they needed to. On average, students took lessons for about a month before going abroad, and she estimated that six hundred students went through her school each year. She spent a lot of time in her Italian and Spanish classes teaching students how to roll their Rs.

  “If you can’t roll your R, you can just say ‘L’—but really try to roll it if you can,” she urged in Chinese. “Stick your tongue up . . . RRRRRR . . . come on, together now. . . RRRRRR.” Teacher Xu was a grammar nut who had a good grasp of all the conjugations and tenses that European languages required. But she was unable to carry out even a simple conversation in any one of the languages she taught. This was symptomatic of many foreign-language teachers in China. They could read and write to a certain degree, but colloquial everyday dialogue was clumsy and stilted. Teacher Xu always spoke to me in Chinese. In all her sixty-one years, Teacher Xu had never been abroad. She spent her days and nights speaking the patois of so many foreign lands—lands she had once hoped to visit. She had a son in Barcelona, but he was struggling. After ten years, he hardly made ends meet running a small convenience store in the city. It didn’t look like Teacher Xu would have a chance to go over to Spain anytime soon.

  “Ge-lazie! Per il tuo regalo bellissimo!” the Italian class thundered one afternoon. Thank you for your beautiful gift.

  “Regah-lo,” Teacher Xu emphasized.

  “Regah-lo!” the students shouted back.

  “In Chinese culture, when you receive a gift, you might put it away and open it up later when you are alone,” Teacher Xu explained. “In the West, it’s rude not to open a gift in front of your guest. So you have to take the gift, graciously thank them, and open it up right then and there. Per il tuo regah-lo bellissimo!” she repeated. Chen Junwei furrowed his tan brow and gripped his pencil as he scrawled notes in the margins of his book while muttering the phrase over and over again under his breath. Per il tuo regah-lo bellissimo. Per il tuo regah-lo bellissimo. He was by far the most diligent student in the class. After the lesson was over, he often stayed behind to help other students with their homework and to look up new vocabulary in Teacher Xu’s thick Chinese-Italian dictionary. I could see that Chen was everyone’s friend. He organized social events after class and on weekends. When Teacher Xu needed to cancel or make sudden changes to the class schedule, she would often ask Chen to contact students on her behalf. So when I asked Teacher Xu to introduce me to her favorite, most outspoken students, I should not have been surprised when I arrived at the school to find Chen waiting for me.

  “We’ve met before,” I told him.

  “I know,” he said with a laugh. “You never called!”

  We sat down in an empty classroom, and without the need for a cup of coffee, Chen began to tell me his story. He and his wife had been separated for nearly ten years. She was now working in a leather shoe factory near the city of Ancona, and Chen had stayed in China to care for their young son. He told me he was optimistic the entire family could reunite in Italy before the end of the year.

  “My wife said to me: ‘Language is so important. You absolutely, positively must learn the language before coming here.’ She gave me this one task to complete before I meet her in Italy. I cannot let her down,” he explained. He was probably the oldest student in the class, and sometimes he was embarrassed about his age. But he was determined to keep his promise. “I am doing this because I love my wife,” Chen said. “It is because we love each other so much that we have made this sacrifice. To be apart, for so long.” Chen was candid and sincere, and I was happy to meet a Chinese person who spoke about such intimate topics with ease, especially with a stranger. For him going abroad was not simply a habit, a xi guan, it was crucial. “I want to take my wife on vacation to Yunnan or to Anhui to see the famous Yellow Mountains because we never had a real honeymoon together,” he said. “I want to take my wife to Venice, the water city. I heard it is very beautiful.” Although Chen had never been to Europe before, he liked to imagine what Italy and what Italians were like. “I imagine Italians to be very good people, people with good moral characters,” he said, sitting up straight. “They would have manners and they are probably very courteous and very kind.” As well as caring for his son and attending Teacher Xu’s classes, Chen occasionally helped out at his brother’s shoe factory in a neighboring town. He hoped his skills would come in handy. “Italians are famous for their leather shoes so I think it is the right place for us to go,” he said. “Italy is also famous for wine. I am excited to taste their good wine. Oh, and of course noodles. What is it now?” He scratched his head. “Ssss-pa-getty!” he beamed. “I have seen that word many times in my book and I remember it. Sss-pa-getty!” Chen could not wait to see his love, to take her to Venice, and to sample pasta and Italian wine, but his ten-year-old son did not share his enthusiasm. China was the only home he had ever known. “One thing I really regret is not giving my son a home with a mother’s love,” Chen said. “I told him, ‘We are going to Italy to be with Mama.’ It is best that we are all one family again.” But to Chen’s son, Mama was just a stranger who called every so often on the telephone. Curious, excited, and motivated, Chen was the perfect emigrant to follow on his journey from China to Italy. Except for one thing: his visa application was taking unusually long to process. As the months passed, Chen watched many of his friends come to class, grinning widely with news of yet another approved visa. Chen would attend the celebratory dinne
rs and give cheerful toasts. They clinked green beer bottles together, and Chen smiled, genuinely happy for his friends and their imminent journeys, but inside he felt an awful twist in his stomach. In truth, the pain was felt several inches higher. “My heart is breaking,” he told me. “I can’t stand waiting any longer.”

  When the brown, naked trees suddenly burst to life with cherry blossoms, I knew spring had come. Winter’s gray haze gave way to a cloudless blue, and I was happy that I lived in the Chinese countryside where pollution did not choke the skies. I had been in Qingtian for more than three months and had met many who dreamed of emigration. Some were more prepared and passionate about the dream than others. Ah Dai seemed so clueless and nonchalant. Jiajia was hopeful but conflicted. And Chen, so romantic and passionate, was enduring a long, painful wait. Would I have the opportunity to follow up with any of them in Europe? Would they get their visas? Decide to go? Or end up staying in China? Meanwhile, I wanted to meet the children emigrants had left behind. I liked visiting local schools because the students were always excited to have a visitor.

  I stood in front of the classroom, moon-shaped faces staring back at me. The school’s internship co-ordinator, Qiu Guanghua, told the high school students that a visitor from abroad had come to speak to them. Now, three dozen almond-shaped eyes were trained on me. “A foreigner?” they whispered. I felt their eyes fall on my jet-black hair, on my round face and slanted eyes. I looked just like them. Chinese. Not the kind of foreigner they expected.

  “Our guest comes from America!” Teacher Qiu said excitedly.