Meet Me in Venice

by Suzanne Ma

  The Qingtian County clan association in Paris had reserved a seat for me at the Meili Cheng restaurant. I sat at a table with a dozen Chinese businessmen feasting on a twelve-course meal that included Peking duck, shark fin soup (which I politely declined), and lobster sautéed with ginger and scallions. The men lit cigarettes in between each course and stood up to greet others who came from other tables to make toasts. Then the speeches began. One after another, Chinese men took to the stage and spoke with bravado into the microphone about a man named Zhong Shaowu. They praised Zhong’s bravery and said he had become a model for the overseas Chinese in France. The speakers pumped their fists in the air, their voices rising in crescendo, ushering the audience to erupt into applause. Finally, the man of the hour took the stage. Zhong Shaowu was a short man dressed in a pink shirt and gray tie. He held a glass of red wine in one hand, and his face was flushed from an evening of toasts and cheers. In a shaky voice, he thanked the crowd for coming to dinner, said he was grateful to come home, then quickly took his seat. I turned to the man sitting next to me, a Qingtian businessman who ran a sushi restaurant in the city, and asked: “Just what did this Zhong Shaowu do exactly?”

  “Mr. Zhong just got out of jail,” he replied.

  Okay, not what I expected to hear. “In jail? What for?”

  “For shooting a man!”

  My eyes widened. “What? He shot a man? Did the man die?”

  “No, no, he didn’t die. Mr. Zhong shot him in the leg.”

  There was a lot of back and forth before I was able to piece everything together. One night in June of 2010, Zhong was leaving a wedding celebration in Belleville with a number of other guests when they were confronted by a band of robbers. The robbers were said to be North African immigrants who wanted their money. When the Chinese said they had no money on them, the robbers knew better than to believe them—the Chinese often carry a lot of cash with them, especially at weddings. Everyone was getting ready to hand things over when Zhong pulled out a gun. He fired one bullet in the air as a warning shot, but the robbers didn’t budge. So he fired again, this time hitting one man in the leg. Although police concluded Zhong acted in self-defense, he ended up going to jail because his gun was not registered. But to the Chinese, Zhong was a hero—someone who chose to protect himself in the face of escalating violence in Belleville. A few weeks later, thousands of Chinese immigrants poured out onto the streets, calling for Paris police to enforce a safer neighborhood and demanding Zhong’s release. It was all coming together now: Zhong’s arrest in early June of 2010, the massive protest a few weeks later, and now, more than a year later, his homecoming.

  In France, I continued to pursue my research to discover more about the Chinese Labor Corps. I wanted to know about the 140,000 Chinese men who were recruited by the Allies during the First World War, and I was eager to find hard evidence of the 2,000 men who were supposedly recruited from Qingtian. I asked members of the Qingtian clan association that night in Belleville if they had any leads, but they said most of the members of the Labor Corps had married French women and the clan had lost all contact with their descendants. I knew if I wanted to learn more about the Corps, I had to travel to the northwest coast of France and to Belgium, where there are two thousand Chinese graves spread out across seventeen cemeteries.

  The historic Belgian city of Ypres was the center of intense battles between German and Allied forces during World War I. Today, the city’s main central square is surrounded by gabled guild houses that are now mostly occupied by restaurants and hotels. At the western end of the Grote Markt square is the magnificent gothic Lakenhalle (cloth hall), which was one of the largest commercial buildings in the Middle Ages and served as a main market and warehouse for the city’s prosperous cloth industry. The original cloth hall was constructed between 1250 and 1304 but was blown to bits during World War I. It took decades of painstaking construction to restore the hall to its former glory. The first floor is occupied by wool and cloth exhibits while the second floor houses the In Flanders Fields Museum, where I met a Belgian sinologist who was an expert on the Chinese Labor Corps. Philip Vanhaelemeersch was in the midst of translating a memoir written by a Chinese schoolteacher who had come to Europe as a member of the Corps. “In the West, the laborers were no war heroes. They fought no battles; they had no share in any of the great victories during the war,” Philip said. “Their presence in Europe during the war was, at best, a footnote in the history books on the war.” In addition to being fluent in English and Flemish, Philip was an authority on Chinese language and history. And at six feet four inches tall, he had a body that was all limbs. I was surprised when Philip brought me to his car, a compact two-door Volkswagen Golf. He pushed his seat as far back as it could go, and when he climbed in behind the wheel, his knees came right up to the steering wheel. “There is much to see,” Philip said as we left the city limits in his little car, the landscape transforming into an idyllic countryside where cows and sheep grazed in green pastures next to fields of potatoes and yellow blooms of hop flowers. Then we started seeing the signs for the cemeteries.

  Row upon row, the white headstones were visible from the road. At nearly every turn there was a sign for a cemetery. More than three hundred thousand Allied troops died here. Today, Ypres’s population is only thirty-five thousand. From a distance, the graves at the Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery on the outskirts of Ypres all look the same. But when I looked a little more closely, I started to notice the differences. The tombstones with rounded tops belong to British soldiers, the squared stones are German, and crosses mark the French graves. The stones with Chinese script belong to the Chinese laborers. Most of these men died between 1918 and 1919 from the Spanish Flu; others died from wounds and injuries received during the course of their duties; and some lost their lives during German air raids. As I walked past each tombstone, I saw that many of the men had come from Shandong Province or the city of Tianjin, north of Beijing. I didn’t see any stones listing Zhejiang Province as a hometown. I asked Philip if he knew anything about the two thousand men who were said to have been recruited from Qingtian. I was unable to find any mention of them in the historical documents I was reviewing. Philip shook his head. He too had heard the anecdotes but had not come across any solid proof. Philip said it was possible the men enlisted with the French, who did go farther south in China than the British in their recruiting efforts. But record keeping was inconsistent and incomplete during the war, and tracking bodies was difficult. Unlike the British, who buried the dead on the spot, the French sent many of the bodies back to China.

  As we continued to walk through the Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery, I saw most of the stones were marked in Chinese with the laborer’s name, some stones were unmarked, and some names had been carved onto plaques affixed on nearby stone walls—these were members of the Labor Corps whose bodies were never found. Inscribed on many of the gravestones was one of four proverbs: Faithful unto death; A noble duty bravely done; Though dead he still liveth; A good reputation endures forever.

  Next, Philip brought me through a network of deep trenches—a maze of narrow pathways dug out of the muddy hills—and talked about artifacts that were recovered from the front. There were bullet casings laborers had etched with Chinese characters reciting nostalgic poems, old photographs in which battlefield tourists posed with members of the Corps, and the trenches themselves, which as one British officer testified, the Chinese were experts at digging: “In my company I have found the Chinese laborers accomplish a greater amount of work per day in digging trenches than white laborers,” he wrote. “Chinese laborers were always in blue or terracotta blouses and flat hats, hauling logs or loading trucks, always with that inscrutable smile of the Far East upon their smooth yellow face.” As we walked through the maze, I noticed how Philip towered over the trenches, his head and shoulders rising above the muddy refuge. I looked at the muddy walls and thought of the brave men who cowered in this water-logged, ra
t-infested ditch, packed with rotting carcasses and reeking of death.

  The sun was beginning to set and Philip told me there were still a few spots he wanted me to see. He drove farther into the countryside and onto a broken road when he suddenly stopped the car and told me to get out. Next to a farmer’s field, Philip whipped out a device in his wide palm. I peered at the quivering red hand and realized it was a compass. Philip pointed to the top of a sloping field that overlooked a small, running creek. A number of Chinese laborers were once buried here, but their bodies have since been moved. “Very good feng shui in these parts,” Philip said. “They were buried with their feet facing the water.” We got back into his car and drove up to a house where an older woman invited us into her kitchen for a drink. Philip and I had been conversing in English the entire day, but upon entering this woman’s house, he took on a completely different persona. The tall, bespectacled professor brimming with dates and names and histories became a tall, swaggering Belgian who began speaking in a dialect of Flemish that was completely unintelligible even to Marc, who spoke fluent Dutch. The woman filled our glasses with a foamy, golden beer, and Philip leaned his long arms over the table, casually asking the woman a few questions to start. As the woman answered, Philip noticed that I had stopped scribbling in my notepad. He turned to me and whispered: “Ting bu dong?” I looked at him and burst out laughing. Philip had asked me a very simple question in Chinese: “Can’t you understand?” It was an incredible moment when I realized I was sipping beer in Ypres with a woman who spoke an unintelligible dialect of Flemish and a seven-foot-tall Belgian sinologist who spoke better Chinese than I did.

  I listened to the woman talk as Philip translated. Like many of the locals in the area, she grew up hearing many wartime stories from her parents and grandparents. One night in November of 1917, five hundred Chinese laborers passed through the area and set up camp in the field just outside their home, which is now chock-full of Brussels sprouts. When one of the laborers came out of his tent to light a cigarette, the flame attracted the attention of a German pilot in an airplane overhead. A bomb was dropped, killing thirteen Chinese men. “Although forgotten soon after the war, the laborers remain present in the collective memory of the local population,” Philip said. “If you pay attention to the small details of the changing landscape, you can still detect the Chinese presence here.”

  It was dark when Philip dropped me back in front of the Lakenhalle where we had met earlier in the day. My mind was brimming with facts, figures, and dates and blanketed with vistas of green fields and white tombstones. Not only had I finally visited Ypres, a place I had spent so many years reading about in history textbooks, but I had also learned a whole other story about the war—one left out of those very same books. Still, one thing continued to bother me. I had come to Ypres to learn about the Chinese Labor Corps, a group that represented a major wave of migration from China to Europe, but I had also hoped to find a solid link to Qingtian, my husband’s ancestral hometown and Pei’s home in China. I had an hour or so before the nightly remembrance ceremony at nearby Menin Gate—a barrel-vaulted limestone archway dedicated to British and Commonwealth soldiers whose bodies have never been found—and so I looked around the Grote Markt square for dinner options. Across the way, I saw a red sign that read “New Shanghai City.”

  Inside, the walls were painted a deep shade of red and furnished with modern tables and chairs. Scrolls of Chinese calligraphy hung on the walls, and the menu was printed in English, Flemish, and French. The restaurant’s owner, Leilei Ji, flitted from table to table making sure all her customers’ needs were met. Dressed in a red T-shirt and black apron, I listened as Leilei switched easily from Flemish to rudimentary Spanish to English. Leilei and her husband, Xiaogang, had owned the restaurant for more than a decade. Before leaving China, they were schoolteachers in Qingtian. From Qingtian! At this point in my travels, I shouldn’t have been surprised. I was encountering Qingtian restaurateurs in every corner of Europe. But meeting Leilei and Xiaogang was especially meaningful that day in Ypres. I learned that the couple had three young boys who were all born in Belgium. Leilei and Xiaogang were caring and conscientious parents who enrolled their children in after-school activities and didn’t pressure them to help out in the restaurant. They closed the business for a day and a half every week in order to spend time with the kids. Leilei and Xiaogang said they had no intention to return to China. Belgium was their home. I ordered off the menu, asking the kitchen to stir up some rice vermicelli and fresh vegetables for a simple home-style meal. That night I left New Shanghai City, my belly full and my search for a Qingtian connection somewhat fulfilled. I had failed to nail down any concrete evidence that two thousand men had come from Qingtian to Europe as contract laborers during World War I, but there was living proof of Qingtian people in Ypres today. I thought about the Chinese Labor Corps: the men who were lucky enough to return home to China after the war, the thousands of men who settled down in France, the men who were buried in the earth beneath my feet. Did a good reputation really endure forever? So much history is lost because migrants didn’t like talking about the past. Those who lived through the horrors of a sweatshop, the poverty of Chinatown, or the terrors of war swallowed their words and pushed those shameful memories deep into their gut, where over time, the tender ache of the past dulled and faded away. Many brought their silent stories to the grave. For who would ever want to remember eating so much bitterness? And how could such stories ever be dignified?

  So much of the Chinese immigrant experience in Europe has been lost or forgotten, partly because there really is no cohesive narrative that explains where these people came from and why. Migrants came from different corners of China at different times and for different reasons. Ye Pei once told me she was happy I chose to write her story. She was already forgetting many of her early experiences in Italy and said she hoped the book would help her look back and remember everything as it was. I wondered what legacy Ye Pei and the migrants of her generation will leave behind. Would we one day find their stories in textbooks and in museums? Or will their struggles and contributions, like those of the Chinese Labor Corps and the Chinese workers in Prato, be so easily forgotten?

  Overseas remittances have helped the people of Qingtian build newer and bigger homes above the older ones on this mountain. The peaks are reserved for hillside tombs.

  The tradition of rock sculpting continues today in Qingtian, though the young men who pursue this trade often do not have plans to go abroad. The finest pieces of Qingtian rock sculptures can go for hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars.

  A replica of Vienna’s famous gilded statue of Johann Strauss has been erected in Qingtian’s riverside park. The statue was gifted to the county by the Qingtian clan association in Vienna.

  A stark side-by-side comparison of two homes in Qingtian: the home on the left was built with the help of remittances; the home on the right was not.

  We burn spirit money and bring flowers, fruit, and incense to my husband’s grandfather’s hillside tomb during the 2011 Qingming festival, also known as Tomb Sweeping Day or Ancestors’ Day.

  Chen Junwei goes bayberry picking on a hot summer day in Qingtian. Separated from his migrant wife for close to a decade, he hopes to reunite with her in Italy.

  Much of Qingtian County is still rural. On rocky hillsides, farmers carve out small terraced rice fields where they can.

  A tombstone belonging to a member of the Chinese Labor Corps in the Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery near Ypres, Belgium.

  Ye Pei makes it to Venice on her 101st day in Italy.

  Pei working at her uncle’s bar in Falconara, Italy.

  A typical Chinese-run garment workshop in Italy. Black curtains cover the windows and the door.

  Workshop owner Jimmy Xu races to finish an order of flags due the next morning.

  The child of a garment w
orker plays inside a workshop. The worker behind her is stitching bikinis for an Italian clothing company and piling them in the nearby fruit boxes.

  Ye Pei picking white mushrooms at the farm near Riccione, Italy.

  Pei’s father, Shen, picking oyster mushrooms at the same farm.

  Maria Chiara, the nun who speaks fluent Chinese, and Father Giuseppe Tong at the church-run Chinese-Italian Center in Savignano, Italy.

  Ye Pei struggles to pass the Italian-language theory exam required to obtain her driver’s license in Italy.

  Ye Pei asks Italian-language teacher Lia Panelatti Santoro a question during weekly classes held at the mushroom farm.