by Suzanne Ma
Carina knew many who survived Prato’s notorious garment workshops. Her friend Jimmy Xu was forced to spend years in one when he was indebted to an uncle who helped arrange his passage from China to Italy. With the help of snakeheads and a set of false papers, Jimmy left his home in Qingtian and traveled first to Switzerland then through Belgium to Italy before finally arriving in Prato where he worked at his uncle’s workshop. Inside, living and working spaces were one and the same. The fragrance of stir-fry lingered in the air that tasted of hot glue and metal. Wet laundry hung from the ceiling, and a portable gas-powered stove was pushed into one corner of the room while some workers slept in cardboard cubicles not far away. Jimmy spent at least twelve hours a day bent over a sewing machine, his small hands racing to feed reams of cloth past a shuddering needle. Mountains of half-finished garments piled on the floor next to him. Such atrocious working conditions were no secret among the Chinese, and Jimmy had heard all the horror stories. Still, tens of thousands of migrants like him continued to make the journey from China to Italy. Why did they come? Because for many, while Prato was harsh and renumeration was poor, salaries still equaled ten times the average worker’s wage in China. And amid the tales of isolation, hard work, long hours, and unbearable living conditions emerged stories of success: migrants who managed to save and borrow and make the right connections so they could escape Prato and open a business of their own.
To pay off his debt of nearly $15,000, Jimmy sometimes worked fifteen hours a day. It didn’t take him long to regret leaving China, but going back home wasn’t an option. “I was very poor and very tired, but I didn’t say anything,” he said. “I didn’t want my family to worry about me.” Jimmy learned to sew quickly and in silence. His uncle had a vile temper and often chastised workers if he caught them talking to one another. “We would work all day and not exchange one word,” Jimmy recalled years later. “I was a robot without a mind.” In the beginning, he earned just 500 euros each month. Later, when he learned to sew quickly, he could earn double that. “The only time I was happy was pay day,” he said, “but then I had to give it all back.” He shared a bedroom with seven other workers and rarely ventured outside the workshop except to wander up and down Via Pistoiese, the heart of Prato’s Chinatown. It’s a short walk beyond the city’s medieval walls, past the cathedral with the stunning Renaissance frescoes; an area the local Italians have nicknamed San Pechino—Saint Beijing. Here, the Italian bakeries and cappuccino bars have disappeared and given way to storefronts with Chinese signs. There are travel agencies, money-wiring shops, immigration consultants, and Internet cafés—shops and services devoted to maintaining the link between migrant hometowns in China and the diaspora. Outside a supermarket selling Chinese groceries is an electronic job board flashing the latest garment industry jobs. Every day dozens gather on the sidewalk, puff on their cigarettes, and stare at the listings that crawl across the board.
Decades before the Chinese came, Via Pistoiese was a street occupied entirely by Italian artisans. Agnese Morganti’s family is one of the few Italian families that still live and work here today. Since 1973 the Morgantis have been a retailer of spare parts for industrial machinery. Like a traditional Italian business, and not unlike a Chinese one, all family members are actively involved in the business. “The building itself is not only a shop and a warehouse but also a home,” she explained. Agnese remembers she was just a child when the first Chinese family moved into the house next door. The year was 1992. “My grandparents made friends with them. They would help my granny if she locked herself out and even gave us Christmas hampers filled with Chinese foods. The presence of the Chinese in the area was still barely noticeable. Still, you would see a couple of lanterns here and there hung by the entrance of the very first Chinese restaurants.” Agnese said she often overheard people in the neighborhood complaining about the Chinese. There were jokes about the newcomers stealing pets and cooking them in smoky kitchens and quite a few laughs about those migrants who, try as they might, could not roll their Rs. “Such comments never won me over. For a kid, it was all so fascinating,” Agnese said. “I just found it fancy, exotic, and extravagant.”
Not everyone sees the birth of Italy’s Chinatowns the same way. The Italian-language press regularly publishes stories perpetuating a “yellow peril”—a term used widely in America one hundred years ago—and local governments try to stem what they characterize as an “Asian invasion.” In Treviso, just outside of Venice, politicians outlawed the hanging of red lanterns in front of stores. “It’s spoiling the appearance of the city,” the head of the council’s town planning department told a daily newspaper. “The Chinese put up all sorts of stuff: lanterns, lions, dragons, there’s even one [establishment] that did its whole front in Oriental style.” The city’s deputy mayor agreed: “Treviso is a city of Veneto and Padania; it’s certainly not an Oriental city,” he said. In Forte dei Marmi, a resort town on the Tuscan coast, the local government slapped a ban on the opening of kebab shops, Chinese takeaways, Indian restaurants, and other purveyors of “ethnic food.” “This measure has nothing to do with xenophobia. It is about protecting and valuing our culture,” said Forte dei Marmi’s mayor, Umberto Buratti. And in Milan, a school was closed because there were “too many foreigners” enrolled according to a law set by then-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi that proclaimed foreign children could not make up more than 30 percent of a class. Thankfully, the law was abolished by a new education minister the following year, and the school, now considered a model of integration in Italy, was reopened. The bans and decrees are just the latest expression of nationalism that has been sweeping across the country as Italians struggle to hold onto their traditions in the face of globalization. Fears about immigration and the economy have heightened as the recession drags on and the wealth of Italian families has plunged. To some Italians, the Chinese seem to have only gotten richer—not just in Italy but in China and all around the world—and their tendency to flaunt their newfound wealth with luxury cars, flashy clothes, and designer handbags has only made things worse. In Prato, part of the resentment has indeed been cultural, but what seems to vex most is how the Chinese are beating the Italians at their own game. The immigrants have managed to navigate Italy’s notoriously complex bureaucracy and build a flourishing, if underground, sector while many Italians have gone out of business. “The Chinese are very clever and very well organized,” a police officer, who regularly deals with Chinese immigrants near the city of Bologna, told me. “To avoid the authorities, they have created their own rules, they solve their own problems, and they operate in their own little world. And they deliberately choose to stay silent, so the newspapers don’t write about them and the police ignore them.”
All migrants, not just Chinese migrants, look for a place where they can plug into the diaspora. For many people, that starting point is their own ethnic group—people they know or people with whom they share a common language. When migrants cluster together to form these immigrant communities, it can put native populations on edge. To them, these enclaves are alien and threatening, denounced as dirty and disease ridden, and condemned as permanent and irredeemable slums. But the contrasting truth is this: these neighborhoods are a nucleus of entrepreneurship, ambition, and social organization, providing migrants with cheap housing, jobs, and informal loans to help kick-start businesses. The people here are not all passive victims; many of them are opportunists who work hard to forge a better future for their families and hope their children will enter mainstream society and one day leave Chinatown behind. In this way, these neighborhoods are the most effective pathway to social and economic integration.
The Chinese are the fourth-largest immigrant group in Italy behind the Romanians, Albanians, and Moroccans, but they seem especially numerous because they tend to cluster in their Chinatowns. Rumors and misgivings have spread quickly. During my time in Italy, aside from the allegations that Chinese kitchens were making dog soup and perceptions tha
t all Chinese people look alike, I heard whispers suggesting immigrants were agents and spies for the Chinese Communist Party, bent on world domination, and this: I cinesi non muoiono mai. “The Chinese never die.” In the opening chapter of Gomorrah, a nonfiction account of the decline of Naples under the rule of one of Italy’s most notorious organized crime networks, journalist Roberto Saviano describes a horrific scene: dead bodies spilling out of a shipping container bound for China.
The hatches, which had been improperly closed, suddenly sprang open, and dozens of bodies started raining down. They looked like mannequins. But when they hit the ground, their heads split open, as if their skulls were real. And they were. Men, women, even a few children, came tumbling out of the container. All dead. Frozen, stacked one on top of another, packed like sardines. These were the Chinese who never die. The eternal ones, who trade identity papers among themselves.
A port crane operator in Naples described the scene for Saviano. He saw the bodies fall—bodies that were being sent back to China so they could be buried in their hometowns. But why is it said that the Chinese never die? Some believe the visas and identification papers belonging to the deceased are passed onto undocumented immigrants who assume a new identity in order to stay in Italy. A third party is believed to profit from such transactions—perhaps the Neapolitan mafia known as the Camorra or the Chinese triads, which follow the diaspora wherever they go. The idea that “the Chinese never die” is so pervasive in Italian society that even those who are more open-minded about issues of immigration are unsure what to think. “Of course we don’t believe these rumors are true,” one Italian university professor told me, “but I can’t help but wonder why is it that I have never witnessed a Chinese funeral before.”
If these Italians visited the mountains in Qingtian County, they would have found their answer. They would have seen the enormous stone graves, and they would have witnessed families burn paper euros and perform the ritual kowtows. Many Chinese migrants still consider themselves sojourners whose wish is to be buried in their own native soil. Today in Qingtian the graves have grown so numerous and so large, the local government has outlawed traditional hillside tombs and encourages people to bury their dead on small plots of land in Western-style cemeteries. But the people in Qingtian have continued to build the tombs anyway, and the government has responded by sending crews out in the middle of the night to inflict the greatest dishonor on the dead—extinguishing incense sticks, knocking over altars, overturning rocks, and spray-painting tombstones. To protect the graves, families try to make new tombs look old by covering them in brush. I saw many of these old-looking new graves in the mountains not far from where Marc’s grandfather is buried. His family always said how lucky they were to have purchased a plot years before the ban came into effect.
When my friend Sun Wen-Long hears “the Chinese never die,” his normally cheerful face turns a solemn white. Wen was born and raised in Italy and speaks with a thick Bolognese accent. Italians say his accent is so good that if they close their eyes they are sure he must be a native of Bologna (which he is), but when they open their eyes they are surprised to see a young Chinese man with long black hair in a typical Italian style. His Italian name is Valentino, which I think is a fabulous name, but Wen thinks it sounds too feminine and prefers to go by his Chinese name. Wen is a college student in Bologna and a volunteer for ASSOCINA, a group of second-generation Italian-born Chinese dedicated to creating dialogue and bridging the gap between Italian and Chinese cultures. When Wen hears “the Chinese never die,” he will tell you how he recently lost his mother to cancer and how she is buried in a family plot just outside of Bologna. He will tell you how his grandfather, who came to Italy more than sixty years ago, purchased graves for the entire family. “They could easily have decided to stay in China and have a tomb there in the mountains of Qingtian, but they chose to stay in Bologna where their children, grandchildren, and friends spend their evenings playing mahjong, where they had built a life,” he said. “My grandfather Joseph knew that his tomb in China would have fresh flowers just once a year. Here in Italy, I can honor him when I want to, because this is where my family has put down roots.” Wen says he’s not alone. “In Italy there are so many kids and so many families of Chinese origin who despite all the problems, despite the economic crisis, despite the difficulties of integrating into Italian society, have chosen to live and work in Italy, and chosen to die here.” Yet Wen grows ever more frustrated with the country he calls home. For more than five years he has been part of a battle to reform Italy’s citizenship law, joining an alliance of twenty-two civil society organizations that are campaigning for citizenship to be based more on “soil” than on “blood.” Their slogan: L’Italia sono anch’io. I am also Italian.
In Italy, the children of immigrants are not granted Italian citizenship at birth. Instead they are forced to adopt the citizenship of their parents. For eighteen years, Wen was considered a citizen of China, and he remembers, as a young teen, trying to sign up for something as simple as a local soccer league. In order for him to join, he was told it was necessary to request a document from the government of China certifying that he wasn’t playing in a Chinese sports league—that of course would be a conflict of interest. It didn’t matter that Wen had never even been to China or that he couldn’t even speak Chinese very well. It took six months to get the right documents before he was finally allowed to play. The experience showed him that he was an outsider in his own home. Wen became eligible to apply for Italian citizenship on his eighteenth birthday. “I waited eighteen years to officially be Italian, but I have felt Italian all my life,” he said. Though Wen feels this way, many Italians don’t see him in the same light. That young man with the perfect Bolognese accent and the long Italian hair that whips around his face as he plays soccer with his friends on a weekday night? He can’t be a real Italian. No, he will always be Chinese. In recent years Wen has started to see himself that way, too.
The woman spearheading reform to Italy’s citizenship law was Cecile Kyenge, a Congolese-Italian politician who was appointed Italy’s first black cabinet minister in 2013. During her short ten-month tenure, she faced a torrent of abuse from Italy’s right-wing Northern League party and its anti-immigrant supporters. She had bananas thrown at her while she was standing at a podium during a political rally. She endured racist taunts like “Congolese monkey,” “Zulu,” and “the black anti-Italian.” One of the League’s most senior figures likened her to an orangutan, another accused of her wanting to impose “tribal traditions” on Italy, and a councilor with the League, a woman, even called for her to be raped. Meanwhile, Kyenge has kept up her mantra that Italy is a tolerant country. “I have never said Italy is racist. Every country needs to start building awareness of immigration and Italy has simply arrived very late,” she said.
For a century, Italians left their homeland in droves. An estimated twenty-six million Italians migrated elsewhere from 1876 to 1976. Chronic unemployment, low wages, worsening agricultural conditions, and a turbulent history were just some of the reasons why. In the beginning, men left their families behind and moved from one province to another in search of seasonal work as agricultural laborers. Even within their own country, these workers faced intense discrimination. When employment opportunities within Italy dried up, they traveled afar, scattering across Western Europe. Others journeyed to Canada, the United States, Brazil, and Australia. In their new homes, they endured what almost all migrants must face—miserable living conditions and the hardships of adapting culturally and linguistically in a new land. They sent money home, and those remittances helped keep Italy’s economy afloat. Then the tides began to turn.
Migrants began showing up on Italy’s shores in the 1970s. Truckloads of Albanians arrived half-starved and hopeful for another chance at life. Then came migrants from Romania, the Ukraine, Bangladesh, and China. In recent years, Italy has also borne the brunt of an influx of asylum seekers attempting t
o cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe. Many of the migrants are men, women, and children fleeing conflicts in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East. Packed into rickety and rusted fishing boats that are hardly seaworthy, they wash up near the closest Italian territory to North Africa: a rocky island called Lampedusa that has become synonymous with death and despair. Italy has repeatedly requested aid from the European Union in managing refugees, but has been turned down. In 2011, at the height of the influx when more than sixty-two thousand migrants arrived in Italy, boats carrying hundreds and even thousands of people were arriving in Lampedusa every day. Today the flow has slowed, although not by much. In 2013, more than forty thousand migrants came to Italy via Lampedusa, and thousands more have drowned in shipwrecks near the island’s coast. Next to orange buoys and fishing nets, blue body bags perpetually line Lampedusa’s sandy harbor.