Meet Me in Venice

by Suzanne Ma

  Sometimes I think I shouldn’t complain. If I leave this job and take another job, it might be even worse. Then I’ll really know the true meaning of “bad.”

  The sky was turning indigo blue and Pei got in some last minute shopping before heading back to the train station. She bought a slice of pizza and sat on a bench on the platform to wait for her train. It never came. Ten minutes after her train’s scheduled departure, Pei ran to a digital screen and saw to her dismay that her train had been rerouted to another platform at the last minute. It was gone now and that meant she was going to miss her last bus home. Pei bit her lip and took out her phone. Reluctantly, she punched in Ayi’s phone number.

  “Ayi, I am sorry; I have missed the train.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Still in Venice.”

  Ayi sighed. “When is the next train?”

  “In half an hour.”

  “OK. I will pick you up at the train station closest to Solesino.”

  Pei was furious at herself for missing the train and annoyed that she had to rely on Ayi to rescue her. “When I turn eighteen, I am going to get my driver’s license,” she told me. “Then I will be free to come and go whenever I please.”

  The next day, above the burble and clatter of the espresso machine, Ayi’s daughter asked Pei about her day in Venice.

  “It was wonderful,” Pei breathed. “So much fun.”

  “I’ve been there before,” Ayi’s daughter said. “It’s just an old city. Not very interesting at all. I wouldn’t go back.” Pei's eyes fell, hoping her face didn’t show how much she disagreed. I often heard Chinese immigrants in Italy speak this way. The Italy we know as tourists—the leisurely lunches, the bustling piazzas, Renaissance art—and the Italy we have come to read about in books like Under the Tuscan Sun and Eat Pray Love; that’s not the Italy Chinese immigrants see. They are unimpressed with the country’s villas and medieval towns. A Chinese woman in Milan told me she thought the city’s duomo was “just a pile of rocks.” Rome’s coliseum was “crumbling and old.” She was instead wowed by sparkling new structures that, to her, signified wealth: glitzy shopping malls, sports stadiums, and towering skyscrapers.

  “In Venice, I had a really good Italian dessert in one of the cafés,” Pei said to Ayi’s daughter, describing a fluffy, layered cake that had a nip of espresso and liqueur and an after bite of chocolate.

  “Oh, yes, it’s called tiramisu,” she replied. “But it’s not Italian. It’s a dessert from Spain.” Pei, not knowing any better, simply nodded.

  Still enlivened from her Venetian adventure, Pei gathered up her courage to call the young woman she had met on the bus. She was excited to travel to Padua and help out at the bar. Once she learned how to make a proper cappuccino, she could find a job elsewhere and escape from Bar Girasole. It took many rings before someone finally answered the phone.

  “Wei?”

  “Wei? It’s me, Ye Pei. The girl you met on the bus a few weeks ago. The one working in Solesino.”

  “Oh, ni hao . . . ” The young woman sounded distant. Pei pushed on, asking her when she could come to Padua next, but the woman cut her off.

  “It’s not convenient,” she said. Bu fang bian.

  “Then when?” Pei blurted, knowing she had asked one question too many.

  “I’ll . . . call you and let you know.”

  Pei hung up the phone and remembered her mother’s words: “Don’t believe everything people tell you.” Skepticism didn’t come naturally to her. Pei liked to believe there were people who did keep their promises, people who genuinely wanted to help others. There had to be another way. She remembered Ayi saying there was another Chinese family in town. It didn’t take long for Pei to find their bar, which was just three blocks from Bar Girasole. Through the front door, she saw a skinny Chinese man behind the bar. He looked to be in his thirties, with hair that grew well below his ears in the Italian style.

  “Ni hao,” Pei said politely as soon as she entered.

  “Ni hao,” the man said, eyeing her curiously.

  “I work at Bar Girasole, the one over that way,” Pei said, gesturing with her hand.

  “Yes, I know it.”

  “I heard there was another Chinese family here in town. Where are you from?”

  “Wencheng,” the man said, naming Qingtian’s neighboring county. “And you?”

  “Qingtian,” Pei said proudly.

  “When did you come out?”

  “Just three months ago.”

  A woman with pretty eyes came out from the bar’s back room and stood next to the bar owner.

  “My wife,” the man said.

  Pei greeted the woman and then asked: “How long have you been here?”

  “In Italy? More than ten years,” the man said.

  “So you must speak Italian well.”

  “Yes.”

  “I am so jealous! I find it so hard to learn.”

  “Oh, it will come in time,” the man said. Pei thought he seemed kind. She decided to keep talking.

  “The bar I work at belongs to my mother’s friend,” she explained. “But she doesn’t let me operate the cappuccino machine. I was wondering . . . would it be all right if I came over here during my time off to practice?”

  The man looked at his wife, who replied: “Sure, of course. Come anytime to play.” Pei could not stop thanking them.

  The average Italian drinks about six hundred cups of coffee in one year. Pei noticed the same people came to the bar every day, sometimes several times in one day, for their coffee fix. She herself had never tasted Italian coffee before. Every morning, she watched Ayi’s daughter brew a cappuccino for breakfast, and she had formed the opinion that such an addictive drink had to be delicious. Her chance to have an authentic Italian breakfast finally came when she arrived at the bar one morning and learned that Ayi had accidentally brewed one extra cappuccino for a customer. The cup was hers, if she wanted it. Pei tried to hide her excitement as she wrapped her fingers around the tiny white handle, picking up the teeny cup up as elegantly as her blistered hands would allow. One quick sip led to a stunning revelation: coffee was not her cup of tea. What she had thirsted for was not so delicious after all. That night, she wrote in her diary: “I think I am happy with my water. Coffee is already bitter as it is, but pair it with a piece of sweet bread and the bitterness is even more extreme. The luxuries enjoyed by others are not necessarily the luxuries you want for yourself.”

  Images of the baby lying in a bed of hay next to barn animals appeared everywhere. She saw the baby on the lawns in front of people’s homes, in store windows, and in the center of town. Pei learned Natale—Italian for Christmas—was fast approaching. She had never celebrated Christmas before, but in China more and more people were taking part in the Western holiday. She saw many pictures of the sheng dan lao ren, the Christmas old man, dressed in red and white and sporting a fluffy white beard. But she had never seen the baby in the barn before. As Natale drew near, the bar grew busier by the day. Customers crowded in, free from work and school because of the holiday. Many of the bars closed down for Natale, but Ayi made sure Bar Girasole stayed open for as many hours as possible. They worked on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, too. A day of rest meant a day’s loss of business, after all. “We can’t fish for three days and dry the nets for two,” many immigrants often told me, using a Chinese proverb to illustrate their point. Some had come to see the wisdom in taking Sundays and holidays off—days many Italians reserved for the family, for visiting the market, for gathering at the same table for dinner, and sometimes, for going to church. “But the Chinese here have no God,” one Chinese immigrant remarked. “We only worship money.”

  From behind the bar, Pei watched snowflakes drift down from the open sky, dusting the ground like powdered sugar. She saw children leaving t
racks in that blanket of white, fathers joining them in snow fights, and mothers dragging the little ones in sleds. Pei had expected to visit her parents for Natale. Instead, the gifts she purchased in Venice sat in one corner of her bedroom. She thought about her mother and brother in the house with the peeling yellow paint, and she thought about her father who lived in another city cooking meals for Chinese factory workers. She wondered if he was joining her mother and brother for Natale. “In China, our family was split in two,” Pei said. “Now that we are abroad, my family is split in three. We called it a family reunion. But it seems to me we have only grown further apart.”

  Right now all my thoughts are dedicated to learning Italian and working at the bar. If I don’t contact you at times, please do not be upset, don’t find it strange. I haven’t changed. I just want to adapt to the European life.

  The days crawled by and Pei began dragging her feet on her way to the bar every morning. Ayi’s home was just one block away, but her legs felt sluggish and heavy, and her chest pulled tight with dread. Her feelings oscillated between anxiety and eagerness—anxiety whenever she heard Ayi’s cold criticisms and eagerness to appear useful under her watchful eyes. She didn’t end up going to Padua to help out at that bar. The woman she met on the bus never did call her back. And though the other Chinese bar owner and his wife in Solesino encouraged Pei to drop in whenever she liked, Pei stopped going there after they kept asking her how Bar Girasole priced their drinks—one way business owners try to undermine the competition. Pei decided it was better not to hang out at the other bar, realizing if Ayi ever found out she would get in real trouble.

  It was February when Pei called her mother with an important question. She had been working at the bar for six months and things were not getting easier. Pei asked her mother if she could come home. She didn’t know if she would try to get another job and if that job would be in a bar. All she knew was that she needed to rest. Pei’s mother agreed and the next day, Pei told Ayi that week would be her last. Ayi said nothing, only grunting in acknowledgment. Pei left the bar on a Friday, exhausted and bitter, fighting her own thoughts that urged her to remain grateful for the experience. She boarded a bus, then a train, then another bus that brought her close to the mushroom farm. From there, she plodded up toward her mother’s house on the hill. Once there, Pei gave her mother the earrings she purchased in Venice so many months before. Then she mostly stayed in bed and slept.

  Most of Falconara was still asleep when Ye Pei crossed the main square every morning on her way to her uncle’s bar. She had already been entrusted with the keys, even though she had just started working for her Uncle Luigi that month. As soon as she turned the locks and cast the tanned wooden doors open at 8 a.m., customers started trickling in, most of them ordering their morning cappuccinos. Pei usually wore jeans and a tight-fitting long-sleeved shirt to work. She stood behind the bar, which was painted neon orange, next to pink plastic roses that leaned on one another in a tall, dusty vase. A beaded curtain swung about behind her, and about twenty nearly-empty bottles of liqueur lined the shelves. In Solesino, Pei had spent months watching Ayi and her daughter make cappuccinos. On the rare occasion she could touch the machine, she tried her best to replicate the sacred thirds. Here in Falconara, Uncle Luigi happily demonstrated the trickiest maneuver: creating the frothy milk. Now, the wooden handle of the brass portafilter felt like an extension of Pei’s hand as she pressed the coffee grounds to ensure a dark brew. She turned her attention to the milk: a jolt of steam pushed through the stainless steel wand making a loud pssssssst! sound. Pei expertly lowered the wand into a stainless steel pitcher filled with pearly white milk and listened for a steady ch-ch-ch before swirling the pitcher to create a thick whirlpool. The milk stretched to fill half of the pitcher. Then she poured the frothy liquid into a small cup of dark espresso creating a golden crema. She smiled, wishing Ayi could see her now. Brewing cappuccinos all by herself, running a bar all by herself! Pei had spent about a month feeling sorry for herself as she stayed at her mother’s house with the peeling yellow paint. “Half a year at the bar in Solesino and still unable to make a proper cappuccino!” Pei had scolded herself. “How much Italian did I really learn? Not much at all.” And when would her family be able to purchase a bar for themselves? Not anytime soon. At that time, Pei had said she felt wu nai—the word meant helpless, but it literally translated to “unable to endure.” Then she learned about a distant uncle who was looking for some help at his bar. Luigi was not Pei’s direct uncle, but a distant relation—the son of a cousin of Pei’s grandmother. Over the phone, he suggested Pei come visit for a few days. If she liked it, they could talk about her staying. She boarded a train and headed south. Romagna’s vineyards gave way to a beautiful coastline. The waters of the Adriatic Sea were calm and blue.

  It was usually late in the morning when Luigi rolled out of bed and walked straight into his bar, his mop of hair greasy and unkempt. He greeted customers with an obligatory “buongiorno!” before walking past the bar’s bright yellow walls to the front door where he lit his morning cigarette. He wore the same clothes day after day—baggy navy slacks and a navy top—and everyone knew he was the barkeeper who slept in the back room. His single bed took up every inch of a narrow broom closet behind the bar. On a shelf nearby, in between dusty boxes of liquor, he managed to squeeze in a television and an old rice cooker. Luigi had two front teeth that stuck out in a goofy smile—a caricature of a Chinese man straight out of the racist political cartoons published so often in the Italian newspapers. But Luigi was anything but stereotypical. He was fiercely opinionated, engaging in lively debates with his customers about Italy and its corrupt politicians. His favorite subject, however, had nothing to do with domestic politics but with the politics of his homeland. “The Chinese Communist Party! What a bunch of liars! Corrupt!” he said in fluent Italian, throwing his hands up in the air as Italian men did when they berated their own government. “The gong chan dang,” Luigi spat, using the Chinese word for the Chinese Communist Party, “like to encourage the Chinese people to love China. But what they really want us to do is love the Communist Party.”

  When her Uncle Luigi went off on his long rants about the Chinese Communist Party, Pei kept her head down and busied herself with washing the dishes and wiping the counters. “China has a huge problem and that’s the one child policy,” he continued. “What other country has forced abortions?” He talked about China’s hukou system, an archaic household registration system that ties peasants to the land and deprives them of all social rights like health care, housing, and education if they were to move to the city in search of work. He spoke about Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. “Because of the Chinese Communist Party, all of the country was poor,” he said, pacing behind the bar. “We all had to emigrate; we had no choice!” Luigi’s stories were very different from the far more optimistic version of history Pei had learned in school. The Great Leap Forward and the subsequent famine were glossed over in her textbooks, the Cultural Revolution relegated to an addendum. Students are told it was a “difficult time” in China’s history, but few are able to grasp the extent of the horrors that unfolded. Pei knew there were many things she had yet to understand. After all, she was just a “child” as the Ayi in Solesino always called her. What did she know? When I asked her what she thought about Uncle Luigi’s stories, Pei only said: “Bu qing chu.” It means “it’s not clear to me” or “I don’t know.” I found young Chinese people often said this, not necessarily when they didn’t have an opinion but when they weren’t sure if their opinions mattered. In China, teachers, textbooks, and the mainstream media toe the party line and young people are taught not to question the stories shared by those who have authority to do so. Children learn history as they do their multiplication tables—by brute memorization—and teachers leave little room for debate or discussion during their lectures. That’s not to say things in China aren’t changing. Technology in the
twenty-first century has provided a platform for free speech, and many young people are disseminating news among themselves. More than five hundred million Internet users in China are finding their voices with blogs, message boards, and Twitter-like programs, giving rise to a vibrant online community of “netizens.” Many of China’s cyber citizens are now able to circumvent the country’s Internet censors and scale the so-called great firewall. For Pei, physically leaving China was her way of leaping over that barrier.

  Uncle Luigi liked to use an Italian phrase to describe himself: mezza strada. In the middle of the road. Neither here nor there. He vowed he would never return to China, but he had never considered applying for Italian citizenship either, despite living in Italy for more than two decades. “The Italians see me as Chinese. But the Chinese see me as a foreigner,” he explained. It made Pei sad to hear that her uncle had no desire to go back “home” to China, but he didn’t want her pity. “Go back to China? What for?” he scoffed. “Other than my parents, there is nothing for me there.” Uncle Luigi insisted his heart was not bound to the land of his birth and that China was not his homeland. “I have no home,” he said. But the name of his business—Bar Gru Gru—betrayed his sentimentality. “Gru” means crane in Italian and alluded to the name of Qingtian’s largest municipality: Crane Town.