by Suzanne Ma
Pei and her mother, Fen.
The Ye Family: (left to right) Shen, Pei, Fen, and brother Mao.
5
La Dolce Vita
I smiled and told them I was adapting well. I really can’t bear to be separated from them. But in Europe, life is just like this.
There are no canals in Solesino. No crescent-shaped bridges, no sleek black gondolas, and no glittering lagoon. Venice, the water city, is more than two hours away by train. Pei learned that in order to get there, she had to get on a bus and head for the next town because there is not even a train station in Solesino. She had taken extra long to get ready that morning: weaving her dyed brown locks in and out of a loose French braid and pinning a glittery gray flower to the side of her head. Over black leggings she pulled up a pair of pretty brown boots trimmed with charcoal fur. And then she took out her long winter coat as white as snow. She never wore this coat to the bar for fear it would get dirty. But today, for the first time in ninety days, she wasn’t going to be at the bar.
A silver fog draped down over Pei’s head as she caught a bus and then a train bound for Venezia. She gazed out the window as the train sped forward, chasing the sun that eventually spilled through the sky, bathing the cabin in a morning glow. Dark blue waves unfurled on either side of the track. Pei leaned forward and pressed her face against the window, her breath fogging up the glass. Water was everywhere. Across the lagoon, she could see them now: a cluster of tall narrow houses built right on top of the water.
Pei had spent more than three months with Ayi and her family. Even so, she still didn’t know how to make a proper cappuccino. Ayi shooed her away whenever she hovered nearby, insisting Pei might upset a customer with a pathetic cup of coffee. From afar, she watched jealously as Ayi’s daughter handled the machine, pressing beans and foaming milk. Instead of becoming a professional barista, Pei had become a professional cleaning lady. She spent most of her time bent over a dirty sink, a dirty floor, and a dirty toilet bowl. It wasn’t just the issue of the cappuccino. Ayi and her family rarely spoke to her, unless it was to criticize her. One day, Pei noticed customers were glued to the television watching an Italian sitcom. The crowd laughed at the end of every punch line. Pei watched the screen and tried to follow the banter. When she chuckled along with the customers, that’s when Ayi spoke up.
“Why are you laughing? You think you can understand what they are saying?”
“I can figure it out,” said Pei, her cheeks turning red.
“Hmmph! She thinks she can figure it out . . . ” Ayi muttered under her breath just loud enough for Pei to hear. That day and on many other days, Pei promised herself she would treat her workers nicely when she one day became a boss.
“The goal of being a lao ban is not so much about making money,” she said. “I want to be a lao ban so no one can bully me.” An aftertaste more bitter than espresso lingered on Pei’s tongue as she contemplated her meager “five-hand” salary. After three months of work, she was still just making 500 euros a month. She had expected to get a raise after a month’s work, but when it didn’t happen Pei was too afraid to ask Ayi about it. She didn’t want to sour their relationship. At the end of each month, she sent most of her earnings to her mother and kept about 50 euros for herself. Did Pei regret coming to Italy? No, never. She didn’t believe in regret. Regret served no purpose. She only believed in planning for the future. Looking forward she realized if Ayi wasn’t going to teach her, she needed to seek opportunities elsewhere. One such opportunity had already presented itself on a recent bus ride when Pei was pleasantly surprised to find a young Chinese woman on board. The two struck up a conversation.
“How long have you been out?” the woman asked.
“More than three months!” Pei said. It was the first time since moving to Solesino that she was able to chat so freely with another person. Her conversations with the bar’s customers were brief and superficial, stilted by her limited Italian, and she was forced to watch her words in front of Ayi and her family. The last time Pei shared a carefree conversation was the night of her seventeenth birthday, when she had spilled all her secrets to her young friend Ying Ying. The memories of that night were already fading like a passing breath.
“I have a job at a bar, but I have not yet learned to how to make a cappuccino,” Pei said.
“Well, you should come to my uncle’s bar and learn,” the young woman offered. Pei was drawn to her openness, her eagerness to help.
“Really?”
“Yes, the bar is in Padua. Just give me a call and you can come whenever you like!”
Pei decided she would call the girl after her day in Venice. Ayi was now granting her one day off during the week. She could take the bus to Padua and work at the bar for free. She didn’t think it was important to ask for payment. An opportunity to use the cappuccino machine was compensation enough.
The water city drew closer as the train galloped forward with a rhythm and energy that matched Pei’s own beating heart. She had slept only a couple hours the night before, legs tingling with excitement, unable to lie still long enough for sleep to overcome her. Restless, she rose from her bed in the middle of the night and opened her heavy Italian-Chinese dictionary, thumbing through its pages, mouthing the letters on the page, and rolling her Rs. Her tongue, which had once felt as languid and thick as polenta, now flickered nimbly, tickling the back of her teeth. Pei realized the Chinese phonetics printed in her phrasebook did more harm than good. Now she was training her eyes to follow only the Roman alphabet, paying close attention to the vowels and accents and the shape her mouth had to make in order to pronounce them. Her progress was slow, but it was the best she could do on her own. Though Ayi had promised to enroll her in a local Italian-language class for immigrants, that hadn’t happened just yet. Her interactions with customers were mostly confined to bar vocabulary: Spritz. Campari. Caffè Macchiato. Aqua Frizzante. Coca Cola. Most of the time she couldn’t understand what her customers were saying. But she learned to focus not on entire sentences but on the words she did understand. When it was truly a lost cause, she flashed her eight-teeth smile. It was the only way she could hide what she truly felt in her heart—stupid and illiterate.
She hid her feelings not only from the Italians but from her own family, too. During occasional phone calls with Li Jie, Pei told him she was doing well. Dwelling on her feelings only made her feel worse. Besides, Li Jie wouldn’t know what to say to comfort her and there wasn’t anything he could do to help her. When Pei called her grandmother in China, she was especially careful not to let on that she was unhappy. Telling the truth would only cause her to worry. She was even sparing with her complaints when talking to her parents, who telephoned her every afternoon in between her shifts to check in. Her mother called from the mushroom farm. Her father usually called a few minutes later. He had moved farther south to another city where he worked as a factory chef, cooking up meals for workers in a Chinese-run garment workshop.
The only time Pei could be honest was when she wrote in her diary every night: Amore, she wrote, using the Italian word for “my love.” I may look like I am brave and strong, but people do not know that behind this exterior, I am wishing I had an intimate friend by my side. Deception was never her forte. From the time she was a little girl, she always let the people around her know what she felt. She cried when she was sad. She screamed when she was angry. “In that way, I was very immature,” Pei said. “Now I know how to hide my feelings. This is a sign that I’ve grown up.” Indeed she was the most cheerful barista there was—making sure to greet each and every customer as soon as they entered and exited the bar, all the while maintaining that ever-perfect smile. Even when she wasn’t at the bar, she still went out of her way to be friendly. She said buongiorno to the old women walking past the laundromat, ciao to the man walking his dog, and buonasera (which means “good evening”) to the clerk in the gelato store. As she w
aited at a bus stop for me one day, one of her regular customers from the bar saw her and asked what she was doing there. “My friends come here,” she said in broken Italian. The grammar was off, her pronunciation shaky at best, but she was trying. Italians liked it when people tried to speak their language. But it wasn’t only the language that posed a problem. There were many cultural differences Pei paid special attention to. In the Chinese countryside where she grew up, people rarely adopted such formalities as saying “hello,” “good-bye,” “good morning,” and “good night.” They asked each other if they had eaten yet. Ni chi le ma? But she wasn’t in Qingtian anymore. She was making efforts to change her old habits, and she tried to change me, too. “The Italians don’t like it if you don’t say ‘hello,’” she told me after I failed to greet a couple of old ladies as they passed us on the sidewalk one night. “That’s why they think so many Chinese are rude.”
Amore, tomorrow I will start writing to you in Italian. There will be many mistakes, to be sure. And you won’t understand anyway. But if I want to learn, this is how it’s going to be. I’m tired; I have to sleep.
By the time Pei put her books away, only a few hours remained before the morning sun would rise. She made sure to tuck her Chinese-Italian phrasebook in her purse so she could rehearse a few phrases on the train the next morning. On the front cover was a photo of a bone-white church shaped like an octagon. The Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute was built out of the same Istrian stone that gave much of the city its luminous glow. For a long time now, she had envisioned standing before the lagoon and looking at this church with her own two eyes.
Venice had so many names: the water city, the city of canals, the floating city, the serene city, the “gateway to the Orient.” Missionaries, merchants, and adventurers set off from Venice in search of new markets and travel routes as early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Marco Polo was the most famous of them all. He is said to have spent nearly two decades in Asia, traveling across raging seas, harsh deserts, and treacherous mountains to reach the splendors of China. Pei remembered his name from stories in her school textbook. Polo was about the same age as Pei when he and his uncle embarked on their fabled journey, crossing the Gobi Desert to reach western China. He traveled to the city of Hangzhou, a place he called a “paradise on earth” in his book, Il Milione:
Its streets and canals are extensive, and there are squares, or market-places, which, being necessarily proportioned in size to the prodigious concourse of people by whom they are frequented, are exceedingly spacious. It is situated between a lake of fresh and very clear water on the one side, and a river of great magnitude on the other, the waters of which, by a number of canals, large and small, are made to run through every quarter of the city.
To Pei, Polo’s description of Hangzhou sounded very much like Venice.
The train raced across a brick and stone causeway called Ponte della Liberta, the Bridge of Liberty, before pulling into the railway station. Travelers spilled out onto the platforms, and trains heaved loud sighs, resting in their tracks. The train station was a modern, low-lying structure that remained as inconspicuous as it could in the ancient city. Pei followed the crowd through a drafty main hall and into the sunshine, stunned to see boats whizzing by on a waterway just a few steps from the station. There it was: the Canal Grande! She scampered down the wide steps and approached the glassy water, bending down to dip her fingers in. The myth of Venice was real. In straw hats and striped shirts, the gondolieri were poised like sculptures on glossy black boats. She pulled out her pink cell phone to snap a few photos. It was her 101st day in Italy. One hundred and one days since she left China and started her new life. Nothing had come easily in this country, but the helplessness and frustration that were weighing down on her for months finally lifted as she stood on that bridge, staring at the homes and gardens that rose from their own reflections in the placid waters. “It was my dream to come to Venice and now that I’ve done it, I feel like I can do anything,” she said. “I can reach all my goals one by one, and really make something out of myself here in Italy.” There were times at the bar, especially when her skin began to flake off, when Pei felt like even her own two hands were failing her in this new life. But the moment her fingers touched the icy water of the Canal Grande, something stirred within her. Coming to the water city was one small victory, one small step in the right direction. It was just ten in the morning when she marched across the bridge of the barefoot monks, the Ponte degli Scalzi, and within minutes of entering the old city, she had found a gelateria where she ordered two scoops of ice cream. “Due. Nocciola e pistacchio,” she said, the words sliding off her tongue as though she had rehearsed this moment in advance. She gaped as a round ball of hazelnut was planted atop a creamy mound of pistachio. Then she gripped the cone with both hands and pressed the ice cream to her mouth, lips smeared in pastel green. “I have fulfilled two childhood dreams in just one day,” Pei said. “One dream was to visit Venice. The other dream is enjoying an ice cream cone in the middle of winter.”
It was afternoon when Pei realized she was lost in a Venice hutong. She wandered through a maze of alleyways behind the Canal Grande, passing under the long silhouette of narrow buildings, each one leaning harder into the next. Her Chinese guidebook explained that wooden stilts had been pounded into the soft bed of the lagoon and the chemical composition of the water had calcified the wood, transforming the stilts into sturdy posts. That wood was now resistant to rot and stood steadfast against the pull and push of the tides, immune to the weathering and disintegration of time. Still, Pei read on, the city was sinking. She turned the corner to find a mossy brick wall in front of her nose—a dead end. Many of the buildings in this hutong were homes, but Pei saw that most of the windows were pulled shut. Venetians were moving out of the water city in droves and settling in nearby cities that offered space, affordability, and an escape from the tourists. Pei retraced her steps, passing through a courtyard that looked vaguely familiar.
She had been lost once before. She had gotten off the bus one stop too soon and found herself alone and in the dark on the outskirts of Solesino. The main bus stop was usually easy to spot, even from afar. It was right next to the blue steeple that stood higher than any other building in town. But that evening, heavy fog swallowed the steeple from view. Pei wasn’t sure which way to walk, and when she peered through the fog on that deserted road, her heart skittered uncontrollably as she realized there was no one else she could ask. It took her twenty minutes to find her way back into town, and when she finally staggered back into Ayi’s apartment and into her room, she burst into tears. Now, wandering in a Venetian hutong, Pei was unafraid. She took a few more turns until at last she spied a thin sliver of sky. Then she heard a voice that lingered in her ear longer than usual. Chee-eh-zi! “Eggplant!” someone exclaimed in Chinese, just as someone in America might say “cheese.” Then the pop of a flash and the snap of a shutter. A Chinese family floated by in a long and narrow gondola, posing for a portrait. “Zhong guo ren!” Pei exclaimed under her breath. Chinese people! The familiar sounds of her mother tongue filled her with a terrible longing, and her eyes followed the family in the boat until they disappeared around the bend.
Chinese tourists are the world’s biggest-spending travelers, dropping $102 billion on foreign trips in 2013, and no place ranks higher than Europe as a vacation destination. They are the biggest-spending tourists in Italy, snapping up luxury goods and spending an average of 900 euros (more than $1200) a person. China’s nouveaux riche have developed an insatiable appetite for designer labels. Prada, Louis Vuitton, Armani, and Gucci are idolized, and in most major European cities, hotels and luxury shops have hired Mandarin-speaking staff in order to woo more Chinese customers. The influx has been both a blessing and a curse for those who work in the industry. On one hand, the ailing economy has benefited from big spenders; on the other hand, some have come to bemoan the Chinese presence. The stereotypes are num
erous: Chinese tourists don’t tip. They don’t line up. They move about in noisy groups. Many take to spitting on the ground. Chinese tour operators are notorious for bargaining down costs, booking hotels on the outskirts of the city and opting to bring their travelers to eat at ten-euro Chinese buffet restaurants. Chinese tourists were voted the second-worst behaved in the world, after Americans, in a recent survey of five countries. Pei wandered through Venice that day, turning her head at every phrase of Chinese overheard from a distance. She saw not only Chinese tourists but Chinese shopkeepers and bar owners as well. When she stepped into a local café, she was overjoyed to see a demure Chinese woman standing behind the bar.
“Where in China have you come from?” Pei asked her excitedly.
“Zhejiang,” she replied.
“Me too!” Pei said. “Where in Zhejiang?”
“It’s too small; you won’t know it.”
“I might know it; tell me.”
“Qingtian.”
“Qingtian!” Pei exclaimed. “I come from there, too!”
“Oh, really,” the woman said dully. She gave her a “so what?” kind of look. Pei left the bar a little bit embarrassed and surprised that a hometown connection didn’t provoke a warmer disposition.
She wandered along the Rialto, up the stone bridge to the central portico where she saw dozens of gondolas bobbing up and down in the waters, waiting to take tourists out on rides. The bridge itself and the streets that surround it were crammed with small shops selling precious murano glass, fine blown from spidery filaments. Delicate webs of lace were strung across the walls, and colorfully painted Carnevale masks hung side by side, displaying a range of human emotions. The faces of Harlequins, Punchinellos, and Pierrots eyed Pei as she picked out a pair of sterling silver earrings for her mother. “I don’t know if Mama had the time to even come to Venice during her five years here,” she said. “Her generation was so thrifty. All they did was save.” Pei strolled into the Piazza San Marco, the basilica’s gold and blue onion domes gleaming in the sun. She paused to see why a crowd had gathered around a display that showed a veiled woman holding a baby in her arms. Beside the woman were barn animals and piles of hay. She wondered who the baby was and why he seemed so important to Italians. Her phone rang. “Pronto? Uuuuh? Sì, domani, sì, sì. . . . Uuuh? Sì, sì, sì. Uuuuh? Venezia oggi. Venezia. Sì, domani, sì.” A customer was calling to ask where she was. “Yes, tomorrow, yes, yes,” Pei stumbled about in broken Italian. “Yes, yes, yes. Venice today. Venice. Yes, tomorrow, yes.” There were many lonely patrons at the bar eager to connect with Pei, the young and impressionable barista. But this particular customer, an elderly man, was a persistent one. He had repeatedly asked for Pei’s cell phone number until she finally relented and wrote it down for him on a napkin. He called Pei every day, asking the same thing each time: Will you be at work today? Sometimes, the old man asked Ayi if Pei, and only Pei, could be the one to make his cappuccino. Those were the only times she had the chance to practice using the machine.