by Suzanne Ma
“What kind of language do they speak in Mei Guo?” one boy said from the back of the room. Mei Guo. America. The Beautiful Country.
“They speak Mei Guo hua!” Another boy replied confidently. They speak American!
“Ben dan!” said one girl, spinning around in her chair. No, stupid. “They speak English in America.”
Suddenly, someone spoke out in English. “Hah-low!” the girl said. She straightened up in her chair and grinned at me. “How arrrr you? I am fine-ah! Sank you!” she giggled, completing the rudimentary English conversation all by herself.
“Hi, everyone,” I finally said in English, when there was a moment to speak. “I am a Canadian who went to school in America. And in America, you’re right, we speak English.”
Stunned, the three dozen students were now eyeing my lips. My lips that betrayed me every time I spoke in China. The lips that told the Chinese that while I looked like them, I was a foreigner. My lips that spoke perfect American English. I switched into Chinese then, a language I had worked hard on improving the past few years.
“I have come to Qingtian to learn about the overseas Chinese,” I said. “I am very happy to know you.”
“Hands up,” Teacher Qiu called out. “How many of you here have parents who are abroad?” Hands crept up slowly, fingers first, reaching toward the ceiling. In all, we counted more than two dozen hands. Teacher Qiu chose a few at random and ushered them out of the classroom. I interviewed many teenagers at the Qingtian County Vocational High School that spring. Most told me they had not seen their parents in years and that they had been raised by grandparents for as long as they could remember. Their parents were busy working in the kitchens of Chinese restaurants in the Netherlands, while others were dabbling in the wholesale trade in Spain. Many students told me their parents were in Italy, sewing clothes and handbags and stitching leather shoes in Chinese-run factories.
“Mama spent nearly five years in a factory in Italy,” said the sixteen-year-old girl with the face of a doll. She had gleeful eyes and she spoke a little too quickly, but I liked how straightforward she was and how she wasn’t afraid to speak her mind. Pei talked about the day her mother left for the airport, how her mother had cried when her visa was approved, how her father ended up staying behind to raise both her and her younger brother. And how, at the end of the summer, the three of them would finally be reuniting with her mother in Italy. Then the girl rested her chubby cheek in the palm of her hand and spoke dreamily about Venice, the wondrous city on the water.
It was Pei’s last summer in China, and she spent much of her time practicing her eight-teeth smile. For days she gripped a chopstick sideways between her teeth until her cheeks quivered and her jaw grew sore. “I feel like someone is holding a gun to my head and telling me to smile,” she grumbled. “I look like a mindless automaton.” But this meticulous smile—which revealed exactly eight teeth—was expected of the fuwuyuan, the Chinese server. Pei practiced as much as she could. Her teachers at the vocational high school emphasized that no matter her mood, no matter how foul a day she was having, the most insufferable customer was always right—and always entitled to the perfect smile. It was advice Pei would remember months later when she started working at the bar in Italy.
Her summer internship at the four-star hotel in Qingtian’s urban center sent her scurrying across the glossy tiles of the hotel’s exclusive restaurant, tending to hungry patrons who hollered, “FU-WU-YUAN!” whenever they needed more tea or wanted their dirty dishes taken away or if they wished to complain about the food, which they often did. During her internship, Pei put her high school lessons to use, remembering precisely not only how she should smile, but also how she was to stand, walk, sit, and squat like a lady in the event she dropped something on the floor and had to find an elegant way to bend down to retrieve it. Though the school curriculum had included some basic English lessons and chapters in her Chinese-language textbook covered such topics like “What is American Express?” and “Touring Hangzhou’s Famous West Lake,” her teachers “basically prepared me to be a world class fuwuyuan,” Pei told me that summer, rolling her eyes. Still, she took her job very seriously. She dressed neatly in a bright red top and black trousers and was tasked with laying out the china and placing bottles of beer and wine on large round tables. When the busboys brought food out from the kitchen to the server’s station, Pei learned to balance the heavy platters on one hand. She looked taller at work, probably because she was careful to maintain her posture. She straightened her back, elongated her neck, sucked in her tummy, and carefully folded her hands one on top of the other in front of her stomach. When she flashed her perfect eight-teeth smile, she looked stiff yet refined. Pei earned 800 yuan a month, the equivalent of about $120, and she felt privileged to be spending her final days in China in such luxurious surroundings. What made her job even more fun was that Li Jie had also landed an internship at the very same restaurant in the very same four-star hotel.
Li Jie had never kissed a girl before Pei. He had never even held a girl’s hand before she had grabbed his for the first time that spring. Li Jie welcomed Pei’s advances, was smitten by her bubbly, outgoing personality, and liked to listen to her ramble on about her day, telling story after story without ever taking a breath in between. Pei was more seasoned than he. She had recently broken up with another boy and admitted that she only latched onto Li Jie “because of his height.” He was six feet—an entire head taller than her—and she liked the fact that she could wear high heels and still raise her chin to look into his eyes. When they kissed, she pressed her toes into the ground to reach him. It wasn’t long before she began to notice Li Jie’s other good traits. For one, he had a nice smile and later she decided that he was a good person. He didn’t particularly know how to be a good boyfriend. When Pei’s friends weren’t feeling well, their boyfriends brought them hot soups and medicine. Li Jie never did that. And it annoyed her when other girls flirted with him in front of her face. Li Jie didn’t flirt back, but he never did anything to stop them from hooking arms with him or resting their heads on his shoulder. The entire class knew about their relationship—Pei made sure of that—but around her father and grandparents, she kept him a secret. She relinquished Li Jie’s hand if they saw an Auntie rounding the street corner, and she darted out of the room and dropped her voice to a whisper if he happened to call her when she was with family. More than once, her father eyed her suspiciously and asked, “You don’t have a boyfriend, do you?”
“No, Ah Ba, of course not,” she always said, quickly changing the topic.
Every night, when Qingtian’s urban center flickered to life, the two drifted in and out of shops and stopped to snack at the food carts. Pei felt carefree and in love. From the rooftops of the newest buildings, laser beams cut through the evening fog and colorful LED lights lit up each floor, smearing bright colors in the dark waters of the Ou River. The archways on the county’s biggest bridge lit up too, and alongside the river, glowing red characters spelled out the county’s official slogan: Build a harmonious, prosperous new overseas Chinese town. Pei and Li Jie took it all in, their faces brightened by the neon glow. For decades now, emigrants were pouring money into their home county. They opened shops with foreign names. France Bordeaux sold imported red wine. There was lasagna and Spanish jamon at La Fite restaurant. And Verona café served authentic Italian espresso. The coolest hangout was J.J. Bar, but Pei had never gone inside. She said the prices were too high, and a bar like that was no place for a respectable sixteen-year-old. “Generally, when people think of a bar, negative associations like drunkenness and loose women come to mind,” Pei explained to me. “After a few years in Italy, maybe I can save up enough money and return to China to open a bar here in Qingtian,” she said. “But if it is my own bar, it will be a place to eat and drink. Nothing more.”
There was nothing scandalous about J.J. Bar—except perhaps the notoriously flirtatious but harmless
owner, James Xu. James was a thirty-five-year-old bachelor with a passion for rock and roll and a knack for sweet talking. His J.J. Bar was an oddity in Qingtian: housed in a beautiful loft of exposed red brick, it looked like it belonged in New York, with its mismatched furniture, worn wooden floors, and tarnished taps in the unisex bathroom. On Fridays, the bar hosted open-mic nights and the kitchen made amazing calamari. Above the bar, the names of beers, wines, and cocktails were spelled out with pastel chalk in perfect English, a rarity in a country famous for its Chinglish—nonsensical English in Chinese contexts. At Qingtian’s illustrious Prague Impression Restaurant, I encountered some of the finest examples of Chinglish on the menu: Sizzling secret makes tofu. The pickle pseudoscianena polyactis. Unique flavor wax gourd. And, my favorite, Mei dish of burning flesh.
J.J Bar’s cool atmosphere and English menus had me convinced James was an emigrant who had spent time abroad, maybe in the United States. When I met him in his office, which looked something like an Apple Store, he was standing next to a stainless steel coffee machine swiping a newly purchased iPad 2. He had a small belly, the kind that told you he enjoyed his food, and he wore a white chef’s jacket that he casually left unbuttoned. He had a soft, smooth voice, and he liked to use a little English as he spoke to me, adding “very good,” “OK,” and “yes” at the end of his sentences. I soon learned that the look and feel of J.J. Bar was entirely inspired by James’s obsession with American pop culture. He had never been to Europe or to North America, but drew inspiration from the hundreds of American movies he had seen over the years.
While a new Qingtian was being forged, with its bars and fancy restaurants, old Qingtian continued to flourish. In narrow alleyways, women sold freshly steamed tofu and bare-chested men hawked vegetables from old wicker baskets balanced on spindly shoulders. Bicycle rickshaws stirred dust when they rolled past idling luxury sedans. And every morning, I could hear the frantic squeals of a pig being slaughtered. Just two blocks from the four-star hotel, a man in a dirty apron laid out bloody stumps—chops, tenderloin, trotters, ears, and snout—on a stained wooden board attached to the back of his motor bike. He tied a plastic bag to the end of a wooden stick and waved it lazily over the meat to keep the flies away.
The four-star hotel was the tallest building in all of Qingtian, with its revolving front door, high-ceiling lobby, sprawling ballroom and conference facilities, massage center, and restaurant. An entire floor was dedicated to karaoke, called KTV in China. The people who came to dine at the hotel restaurant were emigrants who had returned to China from abroad. Pei noticed their diamond rings and Louis Vuitton handbags. The men wore Italian loafers and Paul Shark polo shirts. And they were always doling out gifts to friends and family—boxes of Marlboro cigarettes, Ferrero Rocher chocolates, and wads of cash tucked inside red envelopes. With these gifts, they were proving to everyone that they had “made it” in the West. As sixteen-year-old Pei stood there in the four-star hotel restaurant, hands carefully placed one on top of the other and flashing her eight-teeth smile, she could only imagine what opulence awaited her in Europe. The possibility to make a true fortune! She imagined returning home, her luggage crammed full of gifts from Italy—wine, chocolates, and leather shoes—and treating her friends and family out to a sumptuous dinner and a night of karaoke. They might someday even be guests at this very hotel, she thought. Not every migrant found success overseas. Pei understood that. Only the successful ones could afford to come back to China every year. The emigrants who hadn’t quite made it yet—emigrants like her mother—didn’t come home. It wasn’t that she couldn’t afford the plane ticket. What she couldn’t afford were the gifts and the red pockets and the dinners that friends and family expected of her. She couldn’t afford to show off. Pei hoped to one day be the kind of emigrant that could come home to China as often as possible. She wanted to clutch a designer handbag and eat at the most expensive places in town, too. As a student, she rarely had the chance to splurge on a meal. But when she did, Pei found the spaghetti at one particular restaurant especially delightful. Most teens her age were preoccupied with maintaining an abnormally small waistline, but Pei was a girl who liked to eat. Lalacomte Beef and Coffee was one of the newer places in town, despite the menu claiming “153 years of family ownership” and the ancient-looking decor. There were velvety pillows and gilded armchairs, ornamental mirrors, faux-marble busts, and fake oil paintings. Steak was served Chinese-style—a well-done piece of beef sizzling on an iron platter, smothered in black bean sauce and topped with an egg cooked sunny-side-up. A straw came with your knife and fork so you could poke the runny egg and suck the yolk out. It cost just a few extra yuan to add a side of yidali mian—Italian noodles—cooked way past al dente and tossed in a sauce that looked and tasted like ketchup. Pei always slurped the noodles, staining her lips red, thinking how much she might like Italy if pasta tasted like this. Pei spent most of her summer working at the hotel restaurant. Sometimes she found herself working twelve or fourteen hours a day because her manager wanted her to stay behind to help with banquets or other evening functions. Even so, she never felt tired. She always made sure her purse was stuffed full of candy. And she liked to treat herself to an extra large cup of sweet, frothy bubble tea. The sugar rush allowed her to spend many nights at the Internet café with Li Jie. The next morning, the two walked back to the four-star hotel to start another day’s work having not slept at all.
The family crammed their suitcases full of dried everything. Dried bamboo, dried river shrimps, dried squid, and dried yangmei—Qingtian’s famous crimson fruit. They packed pumpkin seeds, beef jerky, pork jerky, parched weeds, withered herbs, and wild mountain grass Pei’s grandmother plucked with her own hands and dried in the hot sun. The family even managed to fit a rice cooker in one of the suitcases. The August humidity felt as heavy as a shroud as the car rose up toward the expressway, passing under a bridge with red letters that welcomed people to Qingtian first in Chinese, then in English, Spanish, Italian, and French. Welcome! Bienvenido! Benvenuti! Bienvenue! There were no signs that bid farewell. Pei gazed out the window, watching scenery fly by like paint thrown on a canvas. The road leading out of her home was once an old two-lane highway that snaked slowly alongside the Ou River. But since the new expressway was completed in 2005, leaving Qingtian got a whole lot easier. It took just two hours to get to the city of Wenzhou, where the nearest airport was.
If the people of Qingtian are known for their tales of migration and soapstone sculptures, then the people of Wenzhou are known for their ambitious entrepreneurs. Isolated by the mountainous terrain and far from Beijing where Chinese leaders bickered about private business and free markets, the Wenzhounese began forming informal credit networks in the 1980s and early 1990s that allowed businesses to grow without the help of state-owned banks. As private enterprise flourished, the people of Wenzhou became famous across China for their cunning sensibilities and flair for business. Along the way they picked up a rather peculiar nickname: the Chinese Jews. Wenzhou bookstores are stocked with publications like Fierce Wenzhou People: The Jews of the East and Their Money-Earning Knowledge; Study the Secrets of Enterprise and Wealth with the Wenzhou People; and Jews of China: The Zhejiang Business Legend. Other titles like The Feared Wenzhou People and Wenzhou’s Property Stir-fryers paint a more loathsome picture, describing how speculators have pursued quick returns with aggressive forays into a number of different industries including coal, cotton, oil, and real estate, pushing up property prices in cities like Hong Kong, New York, and Vancouver. The people of Qingtian, with their distinct history and culture, tend to distinguish themselves from their Wenzhounese brothers and like to consider themselves to be nicer and less aggressive counterparts. But no one can deny the connections between the two peoples: a combination of Wenzhou business sense and Qingtian’s migration networks have leveraged the people of southern Zhejiang both abroad, as traveling migrants, and at home, where dusty hamlets along the Ou River have been transforme
d into booming factory towns.
The best way to see those factory towns is driving along the Jinliwen expressway. Eight family members accompanied Pei and her family as they sped past lush valleys and deep gorges. Every few minutes, the wind howled as they plunged into the dark insides of a mountain. There were twenty-nine tunnels in all, the longest one stretching for over two miles. Soon, factories emerged below the expressway. Giant billboards appeared by the side of the road, first for buttons, then zippers, then jungle gyms, trampolines, slides, and swing sets. The factories started off as small family-run workshops that focused on manufacturing things that didn’t require much technology or investment. The factories quickly increased in size and production but continued to churn out small and simple objects. They made playing cards in Wuyi, neckties in Shengzhou, and billions of socks were produced every year in Datang. One-quarter of all shoes bought in China were made in Wenzhou, where Shen had worked all those years. Southern Zhejiang province had become an ocean of small commodities, with every spot along the Ou River developing an export niche—even Qingtian. But the county didn’t export things. For hundreds of years, Qingtian’s biggest export has been people.
Inside the terminal, behind a wall of glass, Pei peered at the white bulbous nose, triangular wings, and long, narrow tube marked with tiny, round windows, like the portholes of an ocean liner. The plane looked smaller than she had imagined, but when she stepped on board, she was surprised to see so many little seats packed inside. More family members had come to the airport to say good-bye. She counted at least fifteen people. There were aunts, uncles, cousins, Pei’s grandfather from her father’s side, and her grandmother from her mother’s side. “When will we see each other again?” her grandmother had asked, grabbing Pei’s hands in hers, a steady flow of tears running down her cheeks. “Or will you be like your mother? And not return home for years?” Pei bit back the urge to cry and instead forced a smile to spread across her face. Hiding her emotions to protect her grandmother, she replied: “Of course not.” But she knew it was a lie. In truth, it would be a long time before she could return to China. The plane shuddered as its engines thundered to life, roaring as it charged down the runway and lifted off. Pei’s heart alternated between excitement and trepidation. They were served breakfast, a watery rice porridge made with green beans. Pei scooped two spoonfuls into her mouth before unbuckling her seatbelt so she could run to the little room at the front of the plane where she vomited in the small, steel toilet bowl. They stopped at the Shanghai international airport for a layover, where father and son snacked on grapes, oranges, and spicy duck necks. Pei stole away to sneak a phone call to Li Jie. “I’m in Shanghai,” she whispered. Li Jie was silent on the other end, and she knew that he was crying. They wept quietly together, sniffling into the receivers of their cell phones. “Wait for me; I will come back,” she told him. Fen had uttered similar words to her husband, when they said good-bye five years before. An ocean away, she rubbed her small, pale hands together and waited anxiously to see her husband and their two children again.