Meet Me in Venice

by Suzanne Ma

  —Tang Dynasty poem “Returning Home”

  Pei often dreamed about going home. Every migrant does. Sometimes, in the dream, they return to grand countryside estates where hearty soups, succulent dumplings, and fatty pork are laid out before them. Their loved ones gather around the table in welcome. Other times, the dream is a nightmare. They arrive in their villages and walk the dusty streets alone. Family members and old friends stroll by, but not one of them stops. They have become strangers in their own hometowns. Over time this nightmare may evolve. It’s not only that friends and family don’t recognize them. After so many years abroad, after so much upheaval and change, the migrants themselves can’t recognize their villages. Living outside of China has changed them at the core.

  “I am thinking of quitting school,” Chen Junwei told his wife during one of their weekly long-distance phone calls from China to Italy. “I want to find a job.” He was continuing his Italian lessons at Teacher Xu’s school in Qingtian, but still there was no news on the visa front. Hearing her voice had always brought him closer to her. But that day she felt as distant as the bayberry yangmei harvest in the winter. “I sit in class every day in a room full of women. I am one of the few men there,” Chen continued. “People will start talking. They’ll say, ‘His wife is out there working so hard for their family and he is in a classroom with no job!’ This can’t go on.” Chen’s wife knew her husband was an eternal optimist. This was simply a rare moment of weakness. She spoke patiently and once again stressed the importance of learning Italian. “You will be ahead of everyone else if you figure out the language,” she said to him. “It is the single most important thing for a migrant.”

  More than half a year had passed since they had started the family reunification process. During that time, Chen watched many of his friends have their visas approved. He congratulated them personally, attended their farewell parties, and wished them happiness and prosperity on their new adventure. Meanwhile, his own passage to Italy remained elusive. Chen suspected a complicated family history had been slowing the process. A decade ago, his wife gave birth to their son while she was a migrant worker in French Guiana—a tiny country of pristine rainforests on the northeastern tip of South America. When their son was born, Chen was thousands of miles away in China. Because he wasn’t there and because Chen and his wife were not yet legally married, the baby was registered under the mother’s surname: Lin. Chen’s wife had remained in French Guiana to work but had arranged for their son to be brought back to China when he was a year old. Chen remembers picking the toddler up at the airport and watching him sleep as they traveled back to Qingtian. “Poor kid,” he thought at that time. “I’m going to be a good father to this boy.” As Chen watched his son grow up without his mother, he spent a lot of time dreaming about the family he and his wife would one day raise together. Chen had even hoped to have another child. “A daughter will be better behaved,” he said. “She would listen to her parents more.” But now that dream seemed an impossibility. They had lived apart for nearly a decade; their son barely recognized his own mother. Was it all worth it? Chen heard himself uttering an ultimatum: “If I don’t get my visa this year, you have to come back to China. Your son thinks of you as a stranger. We have been apart for nearly ten years. This is not the kind of life I want.” He had never been so forceful. Over the years, he had tried to be supportive. He had strived to be a good father and a good husband. Most of all, he believed steadfastly in the sacrifice necessary to achieve the emigrant dream. But now he was losing hope. Chen wanted desperately for his wife to say she would come home to China to be with him and their son. When he finished speaking, she was silent for a moment. Then she said: “But I do not want to come back to China.”

  As the migrants continued to share their stories with me, I realized the terms immigrant and emigrant are misleading. They imply a one-off event, that people leave one place to settle permanently in another. In truth, an emigrant’s life is a transient one. They uproot themselves again and again in search of opportunity. Migration is temporary, repetitious, or circular. Migrants typically have their feet in two places, connecting China to the world and the world to China. Chen’s wife may not have wanted to return to China, but the economic crisis in Europe was forcing out many migrants, willingly or not. Indeed, a reverse migration was under way. Restaurants weren’t breaking even. Stores weren’t selling enough stock. Real estate prices had tanked. The Eurozone crisis, which ballooned into a combined problem of banking, government debt, and competitive growth, was not entirely understood by the people in Qingtian. The grandmothers who gathered daily in front of the banks in town, eyes trained on the digital boards displaying foreign currency rates, spotted it first. They had organized an informal bureau de change, trading euros for yuan on the street, calling out like hawkers in front of a baseball stadium: Euros, euros, want to change your euros? When the red digits of the euro dipped but then seemed to recover, the women weren’t sure what to make of it all. The clearest, surest sign that something was terribly wrong in Europe was when the migrants started returning home.

  I arrived back at our apartment in Qingtian one day to find a man pacing in Grandmother’s living room. He had friendly eyes and pursed lips and bore a striking resemblance to my father-in-law. From the living room I heard the clang of a spatula hitting the steel wok—Waipo was in the kitchen whipping up lunch for our guest. I soon learned the man in the living room was indeed related to the family. He was my father-in-law’s cousin, and he had just arrived back from Portugal. In the complicated kinship system, there’s a special relationship name for everyone you are related to, based on generation, maternal or paternal lineage, relative age, and gender. A mother’s brother and a father’s brother, for example, are different “uncles” and that name also changes depending on whether that brother is an older or younger brother. Your brothers-in-law are called different relationship names depending on if they are older or younger than your husband and which side of the family they’re on. For simplicity’s sake I called the man from Portugal, Shushu, which is a catch-all polite term that means “younger brother of my father.”

  “Business is terrible, just terrible,” Shushu said, shaking his head. “Things in Portugal are very bad.” He had been living in Portugal since 1990 and owned a Chinese restaurant in Lisbon for several years before moving south to Portimão, a town on the country’s southern coast. There, he ran a wholesale store selling household goods made both in China and Portugal. Back in Qingtian, he was scouting business opportunities in the hopes he could move his family—a wife and three kids—back to China. “It’s time we leave Portugal,” he said. “There is nothing there for us anymore.”

  My cell phone rang the next morning. It was Shushu. “I am going fishing and will be at your place at a horse’s speed,” he said, using the Chinese phrase “mashang” which means “immediately.” The Chinese use this term rather liberally, and for some reason, the stated immediacy is never quite fulfilled. I sprang out of bed, threw on some clothes, and then, of course, waited nearly an hour for Shushu to arrive. We drove to a rocky spot on the banks of the Ou River just outside of town where half a dozen men had planted modern fishing poles in the ground, their long lines floating in the gray-green waters rushing by. A white-hot sun beat down as we approached one of the men. He wore tall rubber boots and his bronze skin was crinkled like a paper bag. Shushu introduced him as his Shushu—and I respectfully called him by the same title. I opened up my pink umbrella and held it over my head as I sat down next to the two Shushus who stared out into the waters waiting for the fishing lines to move. Shushu from Portugal began to talk. He had left Qingtian when he was twenty years old, traveling north, past Beijing, to the province of Heilongjiang. From there, he took a boat to Russia and made his way to the Czech Republic, and with the help of smugglers, he scaled snow-capped mountains on foot crossing the border to Germany.

  “Hold on,” I said. “You had to climb over mountains
to get to Germany? That’s pretty incredible. Was it treacherous?”

  “Treacherous? No, it was a lot of fun!” Shushu said. “I remember doing cartwheels on top of the mountain.” From Germany, Shushu went to Holland where he worked as a cook in a Chinese restaurant. He learned how to make Chinese-Indonesian specialties including nasi (fried rice), bami (fried noodles), and loempias (spring rolls), and he spent hours carving carrots into intricate flower shapes that garnished every entrée. In Italy, he worked in a garment factory learning to stitch leather bags. The Chinese in Europe move restlessly from one country to another. At first, undocumented immigrants seeking legal residency flock to countries providing amnesties. In the last decade before the economic crisis, Spain and Italy were granting frequent amnesties. Later, they move again, this time in search of wealth and opportunity. “The Chinese see Europe as a chess board of opportunity,” says sinologist Antonella Ceccagno. “European national boundaries present no barrier to them. The migrants move around fluidly and are connected through strong family networks, shared dialects, and places of origins.” In Belgium, Shushu was thrown into jail when he was caught using a false passport en route to France.

  “Jail?!”

  “The bus was stopped for a passport check,” Shushu explained. “I was traveling with a friend’s passport. The officer looked at the photo and said, ‘You don’t look like the man on this passport.’”

  Shushu played dumb. “No, officer, it really is me. Look again.”

  The officer gazed at the photo. “No,” he said firmly. “It’s not you.”

  Shushu knew he was in trouble then. “OK, OK,” he said, his mind racing to coming up with another lie. “I found the passport on the floor of a public bathroom and just picked it up.” Shushu laughed about it now. He was locked up in a detention center, but instead of talking about the fear and uncertainty that must have weighed down on him, Shushu told me how he spent his days playing poker with a Russian inmate. Detainees were given daily rations of butter so they could cook their own meals. With no access to money, cigarettes, or beer, the men gambled with sticks of butter and Shushu was proclaimed the “butter champion.” After twenty-eight days in detention, he was set free.

  “That must have been really tough, to be locked away for so long,” I said.

  “Nah,” Shushu said. “Well . . . ” He paused, appearing to change his mind. “It was pretty tough. The worst part was having to go without beer or cigarettes for a month. Now that was unbearable!”

  After his release, Shushu made his way down to Lisbon where his sister had a Chinese restaurant. He worked for her as a cook before opening his own restaurant a year and a half later. As soon as he gained legal residency in Portugal, he sent for his wife and son in China, whom he hadn’t seen in years.

  “Why did you sell your restaurant in Lisbon?” I asked.

  “I went down south and I thought, ‘The weather is really nice here,’” Shushu said. “There were very few Chinese entrepreneurs in the area at the time. I thought a wholesale business might be a good opportunity.”

  I saw Shushu a few more times after that. He dropped off his catch after yet another afternoon of fishing, and he brought me to an isolated village nestled in the mountains to pick red bayberries during the summer yangmei harvest. During these outings, he mentioned several businesses opportunities he was looking into. Among them was opening a seafood restaurant and marketing a top-secret Chinese medicine elixir. He claimed only he and a handful of other men had the recipe.

  “Would it be a difficult transition coming back to China?"

  “Not for me. This is my home,” Shushu said.

  “I mean for your family. Your wife and kids.”

  “Nah, we come back to China for vacation and my kids love it.”

  Shushu had literally scaled mountains, spent a month in jail, and worked a dozen different jobs across Europe. Now, he was willing to start over again. A month later Shushu stopped coming around. Waipo told me he had returned to Portugal. Half a year later, when I traveled to Portimão to see him, Shushu told me it was his wife and children who had summoned him back.

  “My youngest son called and begged me to come home,” he said, inviting me into his wholesale store where dozens of plastic Christmas trees—classic green ones, white frosted ones, and tinsel-blue ones—were displayed up near the front. Just one or two customers were browsing the store that afternoon. Shushu sighed. “There is no market. The Portuguese aren’t spending!” He rang up an old woman’s purchase—one plastic water gun and a few other small toys. “All these Christmas trees and decorations here. No one is buying them! I have hundreds of them in the back. Usually by this time of the year, I can sell everything.” Shushu walked me up and down long, shiny aisles where his merchandise was stacked neatly on white shelves. “Take anything you like,” he said. I picked a small black-and-red figurine of the rooster of Barcelos, a common emblem of Portugal. Generous as always, Shushu brought me out for lunch where he ordered clams dunked in a garlic and white wine broth and succulent jumbo prawns seasoned with nothing but sea salt. That day, his wife told me she preferred to stay in Portugal. Having lived abroad for so many years, she was unaccustomed to life in China. The children also felt the same way. They didn’t mind visiting China for a week or two, she said, but didn’t want to move back. And already Shushu had another destination in mind.

  “I am thinking of going to Mozambique and getting into the seafood trade. They have lobsters THIS big!” he told me, extending his hands about half a meter long. “And I heard they sell for just one euro a pound!” Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony in southeast Africa, was just one of many African countries where Chinese entrepreneurs were establishing businesses. A new wave of migrants were taking advantage of China’s increasing diplomatic and commercial clout on the continent. Chinese companies were striking giant mining deals, muscling into lucrative oil markets, and building infrastructure (railroads, highways, ports) across this new frontier. Shushu said it was his restless temperament that helped him stay healthy and energetic. “I will never stop searching for opportunities,” he said. “It is my nature. It is what keeps me young.”

  As Shushu set his sights on Africa, some migrants attempted to reestablish themselves in China. On the same street as the four-star hotel in Qingtian where Ye Pei served as a waitress during her internship, the newly opened Barcelona Bar offered authentic Spanish coffee. The owner, Dong Xueli, had jammed her suitcases with as many coffee beans as she could when she left Barcelona and returned to Qingtian after more than a decade abroad. Although Dong was just thirty-seven years old, the deep creases in her face made her look much older. She had a husky voice and the thick hands of someone who had spent years working in a kitchen. Indeed she had worked so many places and so many jobs in her life that she had a hard time remembering where she had been. She was just a teenager when she left Qingtian and traveled to other parts of China to find work: first up the coast to Jiangsu province, then into the interior to Wuhan, and later to the cities of Hangzhou and Shanghai. At twenty-six years old she made her way overseas. She traveled to the former Yugoslavia on a tourist’s visa. There she paid a smuggler to bring her to Austria via Hungary. They traveled by night and Dong recalled how she had huddled in a small boat with more than a dozen other emigrants, how her heart pounded when the boat swung to one side, almost capsizing, and how fast she had to run in order to make it across the border under a black sky. In Austria she got by washing dishes in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant and babysitting the owner’s children. Eventually, she made it to Spain where she applied for a residence permit and managed to save enough to buy a bar in Barcelona. In spite of its name, Tapas de Chinos sold nothing Chinese. It catered to Spaniards and served authentic local food like patatas bravas, bite-sized croquettes, and pickled anchovy fillets. Business, good for a few years, later slowed. Dong blamed the global economic recession and a new law banning smoking inside res
taurants and bars. She sold her business in 2011 to another Chinese immigrant, a new arrival from Fujian province.

  The only authentically Spanish item at Barcelona Bar in Qingtian was the nong ka, the Spanish espresso they served. The rest of the menu was Chinese, which appealed to returning migrants lounging in the bar’s spacious booths. They slurped up noodles and snacked on potato pancakes, small latkes pan-fried with threads of pickled cabbage. It was a local delicacy the kitchen made especially well. Cigarette smoke rose from each and every booth, blanketing the restaurant in a foggy haze. Unlike in Spain, national smoking laws were not enforced here, as in the rest of China, and Dong was perfectly happy about that. But adjusting to life in the homeland wasn’t as easy as she expected. Most of her friends had long migrated to Europe and she was lonely. Reestablishing all those important relationships necessary for running a business in China was difficult because Dong said all her guan xi was outdated. She was considering returning to Spain to open another bar in the southern city of Malaga. “I go where there is money to be made,” she said.

  In the past, returning home before you had “struck gold” was a loss of face. It meant you had failed to provide your family with a better future, that you were too weak to swallow the bitterness of a life overseas. But Qingtian’s returnees, many of whom made a living selling Made in China products abroad, were now looking to capitalize on a market hungry for Made in Europe commodities. A new breed of wealthy Chinese consumers had become obsessed with brands and bling and were acquiring a taste for some of Europe’s most famous delicacies. Across China, shops were selling Spanish olive oil, French wine, Italian cheese, and ice cream made from the milk of Dutch cows. Nearly every month, a new fancy restaurant opened with fanfare in Qingtian—some baking French baguettes, others serving Spanish jamon and brewing Italian espresso. Returning emigrants also invested in luxury hotels and karaoke clubs.