by Suzanne Ma
3
East Meets West
Very soon I will leave this home. This word home doesn’t mean much to me anymore. I can so easily leave one place and move to another. Hard to believe, isn’t it?
In a crowd of white faces stood a Chinese woman in the arrivals hall of Milan’s international airport. She had pale skin and small feet, two physical traits the Chinese consider a sign of beauty. In another life her dainty figure and complexion might have indicated stature and wealth—but not in this life. In her hair, which was thicker and more textured than the average Chinese woman, she clipped a jeweled brooch. She did this whenever she had somewhere to go—to distinguish the occasion from days spent in the factory or the farm. At home in China people had always pointed at her thick, wavy hair and accused her of being a foreigner. Chinese women typically had straight and silky hair. Only foreigners had curls. “Such a trait must have come from outside of the country!” the gossiping Aunties chuckled among themselves. But as far as Fen knew, her ancestors had lived in Qingtian for generations. Now, outside of the homeland, her waves and her curls—once the subject of much speculation and debate—went unnoticed. In fact, her hair was exceedingly plain compared to the embellished hairdos all around her. Fen knew the lao wai spent hundreds of euros at the salon. She didn’t have that kind of money, and even if she did, she would never spend it on her hair. Most days her hair was matted down with sweat, tucked under a blue hairnet. Fen considered hair salons to be a lao wai extravagance. After five years in Italy, that’s still what she called the Italians. Lao wai. Foreigners. Except they weren’t the foreigners on this soil—she was.
Fen thought back to the time when she first stepped foot in this airport. Coming off a long flight from China, her eyes bleary and her thick hair tangled, she searched the crowd for a flicker of a familiar face but did not find anyone waiting for her. Travelers coursed by, some striding confidently toward the terminal’s sliding doors, others pausing briefly before dashing toward a pair of open, outstretched arms. Fen stood alone in the bustle of it all, and it quickly became apparent how completely and utterly useless she was in this new land. She couldn’t read the script on the menu at a nearby café. She couldn’t even ask where the nearest toilet was. It was this feeling of utter helplessness that she vowed to overcome. She would work day and night so that she could one day be independent and free of all obligations—free of waiting for bosses that didn’t show, free to find whatever job suited her, free to gain some kind of control over her own fate. At the same time, Fen acknowledged there were many who endured much worse than she had. She knew many migrants who paid snakeheads to smuggle them out of China. She heard all the horror stories: dozens of people packed into safe houses like animals, stuffed into the trunks of cars, herded into the back of vans, loaded onto small boats to cross borders over hushed waves in the dead of night. Some migrants were essentially sold into slavery—their families threatened by bullies and goons back home if they did not continue to work like a slave to pay off their debts.
Fen was left alone with her thoughts for hours before the restaurateur finally arrived at the airport to pick her up. He did not apologize for making her wait, and then he told her she would have to start looking for work because he did not have a job for her at his restaurant. Fen’s fingers smudged the black ink of Chinese newsprint as she scoured through the classifieds and found mostly garment factory jobs. They all said the same thing: Sewing in garment factory. Paid per piece. Room and board provided. She bounced around from factory to factory before finally finding one that suited her. The factory boss was from Zhejiang and so were many of her co-workers. Together, they cooked familiar foods and spoke the language of their own soil. With few connections in this new life (none that would help her anyway) and without the ability to speak Italian, working for a garment workshop was the only job Fen could find. A Chinese boss didn’t mean the job was a good one or that the boss was reliable. Fen knew that already, having been burned by the Chinese restaurateur who took her money and didn’t give her the job she was promised. But it was still better to work for someone she could at least communicate with. At the factory, Fen was pleased when she was given a more clerical kind of job, keeping track of numbers, boxes, shipments, and deliveries. It was much better than spending her days hunched over a sewing machine. And she was relieved she wouldn’t be forced to find work in Prato, a place she was urged to avoid.
Many migrants spoke about Prato with dread. Prato was a place where the rhythm of your life was chained to the frantic pulse of a sewing machine. A place where, behind a veil of curtained darkness, you often lost track of the sun and didn’t know whether it was day or night. Where your worth was measured by the number of garments you could sew in a day. They told one another to avoid Prato, yet so many Chinese migrants inevitably found themselves there. Tuscany’s second-largest city is just west of Florence and about an hour’s drive from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In the shadow of such prominent attractions, Prato is lesser known to most tourists, though it has long been famous around the world for its textile production. The city has been producing silk and fine wools, which traditional artisans have crafted into high-end clothing, since the Middle Ages. When the first Chinese immigrants arrived in the late 1980s, they began sewing for local Italian companies. They had no particular skills or connections but could offer two guarantees—that the orders would be completed quickly and delivered at the lowest possible price. Those two guarantees would soon become essential as the Italian economy began to slow and show signs of strain.
Pronto moda means fast fashion, and it is the Chinese claim to fame in Prato. As word spread that there were jobs to be had in Italy, thousands of poor Chinese, mostly from Wenzhou, Qingtian County, and its surrounding regions, began flooding into the region in the early 1990s. Many were smuggled in by snakeheads. All of them were seeking a better life and the chance to make a fortune. Chinese migrants soon started opening their own workshops. They rented abandoned workspaces from locals who, in a time of intensifying global competition, were happy to sell off their family businesses. The Chinese workshops were typically family-run and usually consisted of a husband and a wife and no more than ten workers. If their children were old enough, they most likely helped out in the afternoons after school. The workshops produced goods faster and cheaper, offering the flexibility and high productivity their Italian counterparts lacked. Orders were accepted even if they involved night and holiday work. Workers moved from factory to factory and stayed for days or even weeks to complete orders on time. Factory bosses covered up the windows with heavy black curtains. This prevented the workshop’s florescent lights from disturbing the neighbors at night, but the curtains also allowed the garment workers to stay hidden from the outside world. Factories with a little more experience gained contracts with some of the country’s larger and more prestigious fashion houses through Italian intermediaries. Factory bosses in Prato told me they had stitched garments for Dolce & Gabbana, Prada, and Giorgio Armani in the past. For a while, many of the workshops had their hands full with this sort of work. But high-end clothing, while lucrative, had its limitations. The workshop’s schedule and profits were ultimately determined by those fashion houses, and competition among Chinese-run workshops was fierce, with factory bosses trying to undercut each other by promising lower prices and faster turnarounds. Some workshops began to shift their focus to the medium to low-end market. They introduced a newer, cheaper, and faster production method that cut out Italian intermediaries and freed themselves from any control the fashion houses previously imposed. Garments were designed, stitched, and sold all in the same place. Pronto moda—fast fashion—was born.
Fen’s factory kept a frenetic pace and a demanding schedule, but the working conditions were not nearly as harsh as those found in Prato. Fen even grew to like her job. She enjoyed the freedom to move about the factory floor, and there was steady work despite the business operating in stealth. Occasionally the w
orkshop was shut down at a moment’s notice. Harried workers were told to gather up their things, and the sewing machines and long rolls of colorful textiles were hauled to a new location to dodge an incoming raid or police sweep. It was as steady as work got for Chinese migrants, who were used to constant change and made seemingly big decisions like switching jobs or moving to another city as swiftly as they stitched fabric together in the factory. Fen thought back to her last moments in China and remembered promising her young daughter she would return home in a few years’ time. She said it to comfort both herself and Pei, but the truth was Fen didn’t know what opportunities awaited her in Italy. It was only when she began working at the garment factory, earning ten times more than what she would earn working in China, that she knew she had to stay. Fen grew accustomed to spending her days and nights in the factory. Every month, she waited for pay day. She sent most of her earnings back to China where Pei was dreaming of gelato, gondolas, and crescent-shaped bridges.
It was two years before Ye Pei’s eighteenth birthday when Fen realized she needed to make some major changes in her life. Family reunification was a long and complicated process, and after five years in Italy, she was still nowhere close to eligibility. The first condition required Fen to have her own accommodations that could not only house her family but also pass a government health and hygiene inspection. She also needed proof of a steady income. To be eligible for family reunification, both her children had to be less than eighteen years of age. Still working at the garment factory, Fen was living in a dorm-style apartment she shared with a number of her co-workers. And though she had been working day and night for five years straight, she didn’t have a paper trail to prove it. Chinese bosses always paid in cash, and no one logged all those hours spent in the workshop. Then there was the problem of describing her job to others. She imagined filling out the visa application form for her family and going to the embassy for an interview.
“How long have you been in Italy for?” the embassy official would ask.
“Cinque anni.” Five years.
“Va bene, and what do you do for a living?”
“I cut ‘Made in China’ tags off clothing and sew on ‘Made in Italy’ labels in their place,” Fen would say with a grim smile. Her dream of bringing her husband, her son, and her daughter, Pei, to Italy was unraveling fast. First things first—she needed a new job that would prove she was legally employed, a job she wouldn’t be afraid to tell others about. Would she consider working for an Italian? It was around this time Fen received a call from a distant uncle who had emigrated to Italy years before. Relatives in China had passed Fen’s number to him, and when her cell phone rang that day, she was overjoyed to hear a familiar voice.
“I knew you had come to Italy, but I had no way of reaching you!” she exclaimed.
“It is good to hear your voice,” he said. Then he asked if she would consider working on a mushroom farm near the coast.
“Run by foreigners?” Fen asked.
“Yes, Italians,” the uncle said.
“How much is the pay?”
“800 to 1,000 [Euros]. Sometimes more. Depends how much you work.”
“How long are the hours?” Fen asked.
“Not as long as in the factory.”
“And room and board?”
“No, you have to find your own home and cook your own food.” Fen did the math in her head. At the factory, despite the long hours, she still managed to save much of what she earned because her food and lodgings were provided for. How would she go about securing a place to live on her own? “The farm bosses are very helpful with that sort of thing,” her uncle said.
The chambers dripped with humidity and stank of dung. Fen edged down the aisle, reaching for creamy heads that emerged from the refuge of the warm, dark soil. Dozens of manure beds were stacked on giant metal shelves that stretched from the floor to the ceiling of each chamber, but that didn’t deter Fen, whose fast hands could gather hundreds of mushrooms in a day. She was grateful for her job at the farm, just as the farm owners were grateful for their Chinese workers. After all it was the Chinese who saved them. When the farm first opened in 1978, the goal was to provide jobs for local Italians. There was plenty of work in the summer thanks to the tourists who flocked to the nearby beach resorts. Sunbathers roasted on the sand, swimmers frolicked in the warm waters of the Adriatic Sea, and boardwalks sizzled with kebab and seafood. At night, the lights of beachfront discos danced on the loud dark waves. But come winter the sandy dunes cleared out, restaurants shuttered for the season, and the resorts went silent and dark. In 1978, seven local families decided to start an enterprise that could keep restless locals occupied through the cold winter months. They opened a twenty-five-hectare farm specializing in the cultivation of oyster mushrooms. By 1996, only two families remained in the business—the Magnanis and the Simonis. They expanded the farm to forty hectares and built a large indoor complex so they could start cultivating white and brown mushrooms. The farm’s production continued to increase, but it also became harder to find Italians willing to get their hands dirty.
It was in the 1990s when immigrants came flooding into the country and the farm owners realized these newcomers were hungry for work. The first hires were Albanians, Macedonians, and Romanians. When the first Chinese immigrants showed up a few years later, the farm owners knew they were saved. “We found the Chinese to be very good workers, willing to work weekends and willing to work hard,” said Frederico Magnani, the son of one of the farm matriarchs and a handsome twenty-two-year-old botany student who was poised to take over as soon as he was finished with his studies at the University of Bologna. Frederico grew up in the family home just meters from the farm and was just seven years old when he began growing potatoes, tomatoes, watermelons, and all sorts of lettuce greens. Frederico said he preferred the peace and quiet of the countryside, where he could breathe in the scent of the earth and hear the magpies sing. The Chinese workers said they liked Frederico’s easygoing nature, which contrasted with the benevolent yet intimidating personas of the farm matriarchs.
The first Chinese worker at the farm was a woman who spent many years working in a garment factory. She was painfully quiet and kept to herself, but she was an excellent worker. “We asked her if she knew others who needed a job and now we have more than fifty Chinese workers,” Frederico said, adding that they have since mushroomed into one of the largest fungi farms in all of Italy. “We need the Chinese and the Chinese need us.” The farm did more than provide jobs to Chinese immigrants; they also offered a solution to one of the biggest challenges migrants said they faced—finding a place to live. “We’re not like those Italian women with their immaculate homes, beautiful gardens, and spotless kitchens,” one migrant admitted. “By comparison, our homes can really be an eyesore.” The migrants planted seeds harvested from their home villages in China and grew leafy vegetables Italians had no names for. They hung wet laundry outside their homes on makeshift ropes that sent socks, panties, and hosiery flapping in the wind.
But the biggest concern was the Chinese kitchen. Standing outside a migrant’s home, the crackle of a stir-fry could be heard and smoke could be seen billowing out the windows. And so, only the oldest, most dilapidated homes were rented to the Chinese. The farm owners used their connections to find places for the workers to stay. Fen, who did not have a driver’s license or a car, needed a residence within walking distance of the farm. With their help, Fen found a house to rent and submitted an application for family reunification. Then she waited anxiously for her husband and two children to arrive. She wondered what it would be like to live with them in the same home, and she hoped they would not be disappointed with their new lives. Whenever I asked Chinese migrant mothers about reuniting with their children, they often insisted the transition would be a smooth one. “The bond between a mother and a child is very special,” they would say. “Of course I will be able to recognize my own
children!”
We sat on the plane for thirteen hours. I almost couldn’t bear to sit any longer. When we arrived in Italy I wanted to call you, but I don’t have an Italian SIM card.
Pei started every journal entry with three Chinese words: 亲爱的. Qin ai de. My Love. She wanted to share her daily experiences with Li Jie, but it was difficult with the time and distance between them. He had never left China before, and Pei felt it was impossible for him to fully understand her new life. So she began to write it all down, in the very diary Li Jie gave to her as a gift before she left China. He said the diary was to help her recall her own experiences, but Pei wrote in those pages every day in the hopes that Li Jie would read it himself when he one day joined her in Italy.