by Suzanne Ma
Right-wing, anti-immigrant politicians in Italy have experienced a surge of support as fears rise over the flow of asylum seekers and migrants have been made scapegoats for the country’s economic woes. The Northern League political party even unleashed a series of xenophobic posters, one of them depicting a Native American wearing a traditional feather headdress with the headline: “They underwent immigration. Now they live on reservations. Think about it.” Just over a million foreigners were living in Italy in 1990—2 percent of the country’s entire population. Today, there are more than four million foreigners here—that’s 7.5 percent, and this number doesn’t even take into account the children of immigrants born in Italy. A national Catholic charity recently projected the country’s foreign-born population will make up 23 percent of Italy’s population by 2063. Italy was once a country people left behind. Now, it is overwhelmed with newcomers. With a shrinking economy and relentless recession, immigration is a difficult reality to swallow for most of Italy—especially in a place like Prato.
Less than forty-eight hours after she landed in Tuscany, Carina Chen was finished with her pronto moda orders. I wanted more time to explore Prato, so as Carina caught a flight back to Barcelona on Sunday evening, Marc and I booked a hotel room in the center of the old city. Before Carina left, I asked for some advice. Had she been to the old city before? Where should we go and what should we see? “I’m not really sure,” she said. “I’ve just been to Via Pistoiese . . . ” Though she took weekly trips to Prato, she had just enough time to visit the warehouses in Macrolotto and have quick meals in Chinatown. She also made sure to drop by a shopping mall near her hotel and buy a bag of cantucci, a type of biscotti studded with roasted almonds, for her two young children. But she had never explored the old city. Not even once.
Our Lonely Planet guide advised us to visit the city’s famous textile museum. Housed in a converted mill right in the center of town, it is described as a symbol of the local textile manufacturing industry. Inside, precious textiles are on display, recovered from burial chambers dating back to the third century CE. There are sacred velvets and damasks from the thirteenth century, Italian embroideries from the fifteenth to twentieth century, ancient texts documenting the development of the local industry over the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and a gallery of Italian hand looms, spinning wheels, spoolers, and warping machines. There’s also a smattering of contemporary textiles and film costumes made from locally produced textiles. I learned that following World War II, Prato’s textile industry was booming. And that by the early 1980s, the area was considered a “model industrial district.” The museum acknowledged that Prato was forced to abandon its traditional wool businesses to compete in a new and changing global market. Today’s factories are smaller enterprises that have shifted their operations to producing specially designed textiles such as cotton, viscose, linen, silk, yarns, and knitwear. We left the museum brimming with knowledge about the rich history of this textile town, yet I couldn’t help but notice the absence of recent history in the exhibitions. Nowhere in the textile museum did I see the words pronto moda, nor did I see one exhibit mentioning the Chinese presence. As soon as we exited the museum, we looked west toward the crumbling city walls that were built during the Renaissance. Today, it is a barrier that divides the Chinese world from the Italian one, and I came to a realization: while Prato is home to the highest percentage of Chinese in Europe, reaching nearly 50,000 in a city of 190,000, and has attracted the largest concentration of Chinese-run industry in the continent, the Chinese in Prato are literally living outside the walls of mainstream society. The tension in this city is apparent, with many locals bitterly accusing the Chinese of destroying their home and ruining the “Made in Italy” brand. The Chinese in Prato argue they have helped rescue the city from total economic irrelevance. If it weren’t for the Chinese, some say, there would be no pronto moda. The Chinese didn’t take jobs away from Italians; the Chinese saved Prato.
That evening a hotel employee recommended we try La Vecchia Cucina di Soldano, an old trattoria not far from the center of the city that served many local specialties. Still not accustomed to the Italian tradition of a late dinner, we hungrily waited until 8 p.m. for the trattoria to open. The restaurant was warm, cozy, and dimly lit, with an eclectic mix of paintings and antiques hanging on the walls. A few customers were already seated at small red-and-white-checkered tables when we entered. But as soon as we stepped through the doors, the place seemed to freeze over. Forks stopped in mid-air and all eyes were on us. On our black hair. Our faces. My Chinese eyes. A waiter rushed forward to seat us. He helped us navigate the menu and made excellent recommendations. Marc and I spoke quietly in English, and I noticed the restaurant had grown even quieter as nearby patrons listened to us speak. Dinner started off with bruschetta and spicy salami, followed by ravioli with ragu sauce, and bistecca alla fiorentina, which is steak topped with arugula, lemon, and chunky Parmesan cheese. The food was delightful indeed, but throughout the entire meal I felt as though we were being watched. An uncomfortable aura seemed to surround us. “Do you think Chinese people ever eat in that trattoria?” I asked Marc when we were back in our hotel room that night. Prato may have been home to one of Europe’s largest Chinese communities, but it occurred to me that Chinese immigrants rarely entered the old city and maybe never dined at the local Italian restaurants. For one, eating out wasn’t cheap. And the Chinese, who I know to be deeply prideful, probably preferred their own cuisine. Maybe another reason why we didn’t see immigrants within the old city walls was because, like Carina, they were all too busy working.
When news of Prato’s deadly fire fanned across the Chinese migrant network and reached Jimmy Xu, the former garment slave was not surprised to hear it. He had long since left Prato. As soon as he repaid his smuggling debt to his callous uncle, he packed his bags and traveled east, as far away from Tuscany as he could. He ended up in the coastal city of Rimini—the same Rimini where Carina grew up and where Ye Pei would soon arrive—where a cluster of Chinese factories still thrived on subcontracting work for Italian fashion houses. A friend of his had managed to open his own workshop and Jimmy went to help. “I was a changed person,” he said. “I could get a drink after work, have a beer with my friends. We talked during the day at the factory. Can you believe we were actually allowed to talk?” Four years later, he opened his own factory where he assembled clothes for high fashion companies, gaining contracts with Hugo Boss, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, and Giorgio Armani, among others.
Life was quieter in Rimini. There is no Chinatown and Chinese garment factories are scattered across the countryside. Jimmy set up his own workshop in a concrete warehouse next to a farmer’s field. On my first visit, I remember driving along a country road before taking a sudden right turn down a gravel path, past a warmly lit house where an Italian family was probably sitting down for dinner. I remember continuing down the bumpy road in complete darkness. By the time I could make out Jimmy’s workshop in the twilight, we had already pulled to a stop in front of it. The doors were closed and the windows were blacked out by dark curtains. As soon as I stepped out of the car, I could hear the whir and clatter of sewing machines. I pulled the heavy metal door to the side and a beam of white light spilled out into the darkness. I stepped into the glow and found myself in a spacious room with high ceilings, bare cement floors, and about a dozen tables each with its own sewing machines. Jimmy and a Chinese woman were bent over two of the machines, running colorful reams of fabric through them. “Welcome!” he shouted over the deafening clang. They were stitching flags that had blue, white, and red horizontal stripes and a red dragon crest.
“What country does this flag belong to?” I shouted over the noise.
“I’m not sure,” Jimmy shouted back. He’d spent the last three days stitching six thousand such flags. Recently, he was taking a lot of flag orders. He was sewing flags for a Dutch soccer team and stitched Swedish and American flags too.
The woman working by his side was his wife, a girl from Qingtian he married shortly after leaving Prato. They had two young daughters who rode around the factory on their pink tricycles as Jimmy and his wife continued to sew into the night. I visited several Chinese workshops in and around Rimini. Some made swimwear and hemmed handbags; others crafted suede stilettos and jeweled flats. All of them were hidden away in innocuous structures behind heavy metal doors and dark curtains. Every factory boss complained about the economic crisis. They said work had slowed significantly in the past few years and they didn’t receive many orders from the large fashion houses anymore. Good workers were also difficult to find because anyone with any skill opted to open their own workshop. No one wanted to work for somebody else. Many of the workers, who were often dressed in thick, puffy pajamas and slippers brought over from China, expressed a desire to find another job, but felt they didn’t have any transferable skills—they only knew how to sew and they couldn’t speak very good Italian having spent so much time in a factory among Chinese workers. As the economic crisis dragged on and subcontracting work dried up, Jimmy began taking on smaller and smaller jobs.
“Once I received an order for two hundred flags,” Jimmy said. “The company told me it was a Chinese flag, but I had never seen it before.” The flag was brightly colored, with six red rays of light radiating from a golden sun in the sky and a pair of white and green lions spinning a circular yin-yang symbol. Weeks later, Jimmy was watching television one night when he saw the flags featured on a local news report. A group of Tibetans brandished them during a protest. “Tah-mah-de!” Jimmy cried out, cursing in Chinese when he saw the flags fluttering across the screen. He hadn’t recognized the Tibetan Independence flags because the flags are banned in mainland China. Jimmy often reminisced about better days when he was stitching pants for Dolce & Gabbana and earning at least $8 a pair. Now he made just 14 cents a flag. Even so, he vowed never to return to Prato no matter how hard things got.
Europe’s first Chinatowns were established in the early nineteenth century when Chinese sailors jumped ship in Liverpool, Hamburg, Marseilles, and Amsterdam. Like the Chinatowns in America, these early sojourners were Cantonese men who sailed from China’s southeastern Guangdong Province. And like the early American Chinatowns, these men took to cooking and laundering—jobs they were familiar with from a life at sea. Setting up in these European port cities was a strategic move; migrants could easily stay in touch this way and have convenient access to trade and shipping routes. Though early Chinatowns in Europe were dominated by Cantonese migrants, peppered throughout Europe were hundreds of migrants from Qingtian County who had made their way to the continent by sea and, as legend had it, by land via Siberia. The Qingtian migrants spread out all over the continent peddling soapstones and hawking trinkets in small towns and villages, preferring to avoid the cities where the Cantonese held sway.
As I traveled across the continent, I visited Chinese communities in six different European countries. During each visit I dined in Chinese restaurants, went shopping in Chinese-run stores, and met with local characters who showed me how every Chinatown had its own distinct history and flavor. The Chinatowns in northern Europe—in the UK, Belgium, and Holland—were much older and continued to be dominated by Cantonese immigrants. The Chinatowns in southern Europe—Spain, Portugal, Italy—were relatively new and had been built up by immigrants from southern Zhejiang. The largest Chinatown in Europe can be found in Paris. The first Chinese neighborhood, which was established near the Gare de Lyon train station, has long since vanished. But a thriving Chinatown, sometimes called Petite Asie or Little Asia, exists today in the south of Paris and is home to some fifty thousand people who have come not only from China, but also from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and other parts of Southeast Asia. In the 1980s a second Chinatown in Paris emerged in the eastern district of Belleville. Here, the Quartier Chinois or Chinese Quarter was established mostly by emigrants from Qingtian and Wenzhou.
I had heard a lot about Paris’s Chinese Quarter before I actually got there. I remember the news reports describing more than eight thousand Chinese immigrants marching through Belleville in the largest protest ever organized by the Chinese community in France after a number of Chinese immigrants were violently attacked and robbed in the area. The Chinese felt they were being victimized. They said criminals were targeting shopkeepers and business owners who were known to carry cash home at the end of the day. They said Chinese women, who criminals deemed too weak to fight back, were being mugged. The violence seemed to be escalating because many of the immigrants were reluctant to report crimes to the police either because of a language barrier or because they didn’t have legal working papers and feared deportation. Violence in Chinatown wasn’t a problem only in France. I heard similar concerns in nearly every Chinese community I visited in Europe including Rome, where emotions were running high after a Chinese shopkeeper and his baby daughter were killed by two thieves in a botched robbery. The bullet passed through the baby’s head and then struck her father in the heart, killing them both.
Belleville means “beautiful city,” but the neighborhood does not live up to its name. It is just a few metro stops west of the Louvre, but it is a world away from Paris’s broad boulevards and blue rooftops. The area has historically been a working-class district. Over the years, many immigrants have settled here: German Jews fleeing the Third Reich in 1933, Spaniards in 1939, Algerians and Tunisian Jews in the early 1960s, and an influx of Asian immigrants in the past decade. Belleville’s avenues are crowded with Chinese restaurants and dingy supermarkets. When thousands of people flooded the streets one day in June of 2010, it was a rare and striking sight for many. The chanting protestors held signs and banners that read, “Stop the violence! Security For All!” and wore T-shirts that said “J’♥ Belleville.” Some waved Chinese flags, which gave some the impression that the protest was not about security in the neighborhood but about patriotism, but most came out to denounce what they saw as targeted violence against the Chinese. “It sometimes feels that, in the collective unconscious, everything ‘Made in China’ is worth nothing, including the human beings,” one protestor said just before the first fists flew and smoke washed over the streets of Belleville. Eyewitnesses say the fight began when a bag belonging to one of the demonstrators was stolen. A scuffle broke out between a group of demonstrators and several youths who were watching the protest, and when police moved in with their batons and handcuffs, the crowd began tossing objects at the officers. That’s when they fired the tear gas. Blind and enraged, demonstrators seized the bumpers of parked cars and overturned them, blocking traffic in the area for hours.
More than a year after the riot broke out, I arrived in Paris and jumped on the metro toward Belleville. A local contact had invited me to a gathering in the Quartier Chinois. “Most of the Chinese community will be there,” he told me over the phone. “It is a good idea to attend.” I was looking for a restaurant called Meili Cheng, which, like Belleville, means “beautiful city.” As soon as I climbed out of the subway station and saw Chinese greens piled in cardboard boxes on the sidewalks, the steamed-up windows of a noodle shop, and several DVD stores, I knew I was in the right place. I made my way up the main strip and saw a posse of four men walking in front of me. As they passed the shops and restaurants, one of the men would poke his head in and shout: “Are you coming?” A few seconds later, a man would rush out and join the group. They continued this way for several blocks until the group swelled to nearly a dozen men. I wasn’t sure where the Meili Cheng restaurant was, but I had a feeling if I followed this group they would bring me there. Each man was dressed in a dark jacket and had a cigarette in his mouth. I stayed behind them, the smoke blowing back into my face, until we made a right turn onto a small side street where I saw a large foyer illuminated by a sparkling chandelier. A cacophony of pounding drums and clashing cymbals broke out as two red-and-yellow-sequined lions danced about on the shiny floors. “Just
what kind of gathering is this?” I thought. Lion dances were usually performed during the Chinese New Year. Inside, the entire restaurant was decorated in red and more than twenty tables had been booked out for the evening’s event. A wedding? Then I saw the banner draped across the front of the room: “Welcome Home Mr. Zhong Shaowu.”
If there is one Chinese law of the universe, it is loyalty to your own people. In the homeland, the loyalties are to your family and village. Outside of China, those loyalties are extended to those from the same county, region, or even province. During the early days of Chinese migration, sojourners formed clan associations to provide welfare services to their own countrymen who had no social security to depend on. Among the most important functions that clan associations served was offering funeral services—arranging for the remains of deceased migrants to be brought back to China. Today, some clan associations have become relics of the past as Chinatowns empty out and multigenerational Chinese families become more integrated into mainstream society. But in some European countries, where unskilled and uneducated Chinese migrants continue to stream in, clan associations continue to be very relevant, serving as a contact medium between migrants and their hometown or region. Whenever I attended Qingtian County clan association meetings, I always felt as if I were attending a sort of high school reunion. The clan members always started off every meal with a toast: “To coming home,” they said, clinking small glasses filled with the potent rice wine, baijiu.