Meet Me in Venice

by Suzanne Ma

  The young women wore high heels and qipaos, a body-hugging one-piece Chinese dress with a stand-up collar and high slits. They had perfect eight-teeth smiles, and I tried not to stare when they bowed as soon as the elevator doors slid open. I stepped out into a hallway overwhelmed with crystal and brass. The young women, called xiaojie, were numbered with gold tags pinned to their chests. Their official responsibilities were to pour drinks and make conversation with the guests, according to the job postings, but I often saw drunken xiaojie or “misses” outside karaoke bars late at night, clinging onto their customers like young girls who had fallen asleep on their father’s shoulders. The four-star hotel’s new karaoke club had only recently opened for business when I was invited to tour the facilities with one of the club’s overseas investors. Wang Yucheng didn’t look like a local. He wore glasses that were tinted purple, and he was light-skinned, a little pudgy, and taller than most of the other men around town. He ran several successful Chinese restaurants in Berlin. Wang told me he was just eighteen years old when he and his mother opened their first restaurant in Germany. “We couldn’t even afford a fridge,” he recalled. “We cut up the meat and put it outside. Thankfully the weather had already turned cold.” Wang said business was so good that within one week of opening, he made enough money to properly equip his kitchen. Now, the teenager who at one time couldn’t afford a refrigerator was a high-rolling businessman who shuttled back and forth from Europe to China. One night of karaoke could cost $500. VIPs, who reserved the finest rooms and booked the most expensive xiaojies, sometimes paid as much as $1,000. Even more valuable was the priceless opportunity to show off.

  Wang hollered for a server. Two busboys shuffled in, bowed to us as they took our orders, and then shuffled back out. Within minutes, they returned with bowls of fruit and platters stocked with chicken feet and marinated duck tongues. We were seated in a VIP room that looked more like an office, with a mahogany desk at the center of the room and several leather couches. A giant painting hung on the wall: a man in an enormous red cloak, gripping the reins of his steed with one hand, rearing the animal up on its hind legs and pointing his other hand dramatically up into the air. Like the copper statue that stood in Qingtian’s riverside park, here was yet another rendition of the famous nineteenth century painting of Napoleon crossing the Alps.

  We continued through several more gilded rooms. Marc’s cousin, who came on the tour with us, stopped at one karaoke machine and punched in his favorite Chinese pop song. The flat-screen TV lit up with scenes from a melancholic music video. Leo Chen grabbed the microphone and began to sing. He was twenty-six years old and loved karaoke more than anyone else I knew. Leo had a bit of a nerdy look, with his pale skin, short black hair, and eyeglasses, but it was his mischievous grin that revealed just how clever and ambitious he was. He had always been a favorite cousin of mine because he was chatty, free-spirited, and generous. Though Leo lived in Italy for more than a decade, it was always his dream to return to Qingtian and open a business of his own. Whenever he visited, he introduced us to his childhood haunts. He brought us down to a smoky basement pool hall where I learned to pocket 8-balls. He showed us a street-side stand where we huddled in between a leaning stack of bamboo steamers and devoured fluffy meat buns. Leo was the one who brought me to the coolest bar in town—J.J. Bar—where I got to know the owner who spoke English slang he learned from American movies. At night, we rarely saw him because that was when Leo was busy scouting out business opportunities. This usually involved smoking and consuming large amounts of baijiu rice wine in order to pound out those good relations and guan xi needed with potential partners and investors.

  When his mother first went abroad, he was just a child and Leo says he was excited when she promised to send for him as soon as she could. But as the years passed and Leo grew into his teens, his excitement turned into dread. Leo often says he left China at the worst possible time—when he had many friends and when he was happiest. Leo was fifteen when he left for Italy, and though he desperately missed his friends in China, he was enchanted by the picturesque port town of Cesenatico where his parents had found work in a Chinese restaurant. The vibrant sails and beautifully painted hulls of old fishing vessels were moored in the town’s canal, which, residents proudly point out, was surveyed by Leonardo da Vinci himself. Leo said he was grateful to the local school for assigning an Italian-language tutor to him. He was also indebted to an older cousin, who brought him to the salon jockey arcade, to the disco, and to the local Chinese school to scout out pretty girls. In the summer, they went swimming in the Adriatic Sea, suntanning on the beach, and hunting for oysters and mussels on local reefs in between the pounding surf.

  Leo struggled to keep up in school and eventually dropped out to help his parents in the restaurant. He started off washing dishes and chopping vegetables and very quickly climbed his way up to become a chef. They opened their own takeaway and called it La Muraglia, the Great Wall. But Leo said the restaurant never really caught on with Italians, who seemed to prefer their own local cuisine. Leo says he understands why this was so. One of his favorite street-side snacks is the dabing—which literally means “big biscuit.” It’s a large pancake that is stuffed with a meat and vegetable filling. In Qingtian, one dabing costs just three yuan (less than fifty cents), and when the vendor angles it out from the depths of the oven, the dough is crispy on the outside while the insides are steamy and delightfully savory. “I know why the Italians prefer their own food,” Leo said. “It’s sort of like this: if there are two dabing street vendors and one is from Qingtian and the other from Wenzhou, then of course I would buy from the Qingtian vendor! I would do that, even if his dabing was inferior, just out of loyalty to my own home county!” La Muraglia’s business plummeted in 2003 coinciding with the outbreak of SARS, the viral respiratory disease that claimed nearly 650 lives in Hong Kong and China. There were no reported cases or deaths in Italy, but Leo says Chinese enterprises, particularly restaurants, were stigmatized and suffered as a result. They sold the restaurant, and for a few years, Leo tried his hand as a retailer. He set up shop near the beach and sold women’s fashions made in Prato. In my closet today, I still have the brown knit sweater Leo gave me just before he closed that store and left sunny Cesenatico for the western city of Turin, where he and his parents began a new venture—running a bar. The bar was beautifully renovated, with a smooth wooden bar and a lattice shelf extending across a wall displaying an impressive collection of wines. To prepare for his new gig as a bar owner, Leo watched YouTube videos that taught him how to mix drinks. Determined to keep loyal customers happy, he made sure peanut bowls were topped up and that bite-sized portions of bruschetta flowed from the kitchen to the bar counter. On the nights when Turin’s local soccer league was playing, he projected the game on a big white screen for all to see. The bar was located in a rough part of town, however, and people were always running off without paying and many of the “loyal” customers kept long-running tabs that often went unpaid. Leo’s mother was afraid to keep the bar open in the late evening hours. They struggled to keep the business afloat for two years, before Leo made another trip back to China to hunt around for more lucrative business opportunities in Asia. In the spring of 2014, he finally settled on a cafeteria in a Shanghai food court. He sold the bar in Turin and brought his mother and father back to China with him. At the cafeteria, they serve mostly Chinese food, but Leo also cooks up spaghetti and lasagna once in a while. Life in modern-day Shanghai is fast-paced and exciting, and Leo says he doesn’t miss Italy one bit.

  At the Longjin Road Foreign Languages Center where Chen Junwei was learning Italian, Teacher Xu let me use her classroom to give English lessons even though there weren’t too many people interested in learning. There were migrants who had gone to the United States, the UK, and Canada, but it was difficult and expensive to apply for visas in those countries. Most of the migrants from southern Zhejiang had settled in continental Europe, and that was wher
e the connections remained the strongest. Still, as soon as Teacher Xu posted ads all around the county advertising that “a foreigner” was teaching at her school, we received quite a few inquiries. Most of my students were either born in Europe to Chinese migrants or had migrated to Europe as children. They had come back to China for summer vacation and were looking for something to do during those long, hot days.

  My first student was a sixteen-year-old boy named Jianyong Wu, who had spent half his life in China and the other half in Spain. Everything about Jianyong drooped. He had floppy cheeks, and he slouched like a sulky teenager; his eyes stayed trained on the floor as if he were searching for cockroaches in the old classroom. When he spoke, he breathed his words hesitantly and quietly as if he had a bad case of asthma. Jianyong was born in Qingtian, but left for Spain at the age of eight. The family settled in a city south of Barcelona, where his father built up a small empire: he owned five Chinese restaurants, and at the height of Spain’s construction boom, he bought some land and built thirty-seven homes—homes he was not able to sell after the economic crisis hit Europe and Spain’s construction bubble burst in 2008.

  For the first few lessons, Jianyong refused to look up from his notebook. Despite my efforts to coax him out of his silence, he hunched over the little desk, eyes downcast and demure. His cursive script was barely legible, but it was clear he was more comfortable expressing himself on paper than with the spoken word. I had him fill out a “Tell Me About Yourself” form in English, where I learned, squinting at his scribbles, that his favorite subject in school was math, his favorite color was blue, and that he liked playing badminton and eating spaghetti. Over time, I learned more and more about him. I discovered that while he slouched and wore a blank expression on his face, he was, in fact, having fun. Most importantly, he was learning. Homework was usually done on time, and he remembered many of the new words and sentence structures we learned from week to week. A few months into our lessons, there was a homework assignment in which he had to write about the “Things I Like.” Jianyong revealed that he “liked learning English.”

  On the hottest summer days, I waited for the sun to fall from the sky, dipping below the mountains and casting long shadows over the town. At last, some relief from the oppressive heat. All day, everyone had been trapped indoors, and when the mugginess finally lifted, people emerged from their homes in old plastic slippers and tank tops, fanning themselves in the streets. They set up lawn chairs on the pavement and sat with neighbors to enjoy the evening breeze. One night, I called Jianyong and told him to meet me in the town square to play some badminton. As soon as it grew dark, and the signs outside the karaoke bars and restaurants and coffee shops had flickered on, giant speakers in the square began to vibrate, the steady beat of old Chinese folk tunes reverberating through the town. The music drew hundreds of people—mostly older women—to the expansive cement park where they lined up under the glare of towering lamp posts and began to dance. Every step, every turn, every pivot and chassé followed a sequence and kept to the beat. Line dancing is a popular pastime in many parks and squares across China, and an aunt once tried to explain to me why she thought this was so: “We are a communal society,” she said. “The Chinese like to do things altogether. As long as no one steps out of line, everything stays harmonious. No one feels isolated; no one is embarrassed.”

  On the other side of the square, a younger crowd volleyed feather birdies back and forth. And nearby, merchants set up little tables and chairs for children to paint. There were also inflatable pools filled with goldfish. Kids took little green nets and scooped the fish into blue buckets for fun. The first few times Jianyong came out to play, he kept a straight face as he lunged and returned shot after shot. I was a screamer, howling when I missed a good opportunity to smash the birdie and grunting as I raced across the pavement in pursuit of a falling shuttle. Night after night Jianyong remained emotionless until finally, one day, he broke. During our match, he smashed the birdie down hard and dropped sneaky shots at the net. A sweaty, panting Jianyong finally broke into a smile. We played round-robin tournaments that night until my legs trembled with exhaustion. Then we took a rest on nearby benches, sipping bottled water and watching the women twist into a grapevine and wave their arms in the air, swaying side to side in the moonlight.

  Every class started off with a question in English: “How are you?” Jianyong loathed hearing this question. I had been teaching him English for months and he was learning quickly. He still struggled with pronouncing vowels correctly, but he had a decent understanding of the grammar and could read pretty smoothly. When it came to common greetings, however, Jianyong just couldn’t do it. It wasn’t so much a language problem but a shyness problem. Whenever we met for badminton, he never said “hello” to me. He would just show up and sit down on a nearby bench, eyes averted, waiting silently for his turn to play. One day he sat in class waiting for me, looking a little more sullen than usual.

  “How are you?” I said, with a big smile. My student was silent.

  “Jianyong,” I repeated. “How are you . . . ?”

  He took a shaky, short breath. “I am . . . I am . . . ” There was a few seconds’ pause, and my student switched to Chinese. “How do you say I’m feeling ‘disorderly’ in English?”

  “Well, why don’t you tell me what happened . . . ”

  Immediately, he began speaking in rapid-fire Mandarin. “My father called me today and said he is moving back to China. He’s selling all his restaurants and bringing the entire family back to Qingtian.”

  Jianyong looked every bit like his father, only chubbier and lighter skinned. But their personalities could not be more different. Youliang Wu was outspoken, confident, and extremely chatty. He was twenty-five when he paid a smuggler $15,000 to get to Yugoslavia. From there, he joined a tour group to Pisa. He overstayed his tourist visa, moving to Milan, then to the eastern resort town of Rimini, and then onto Bologna. He got by working odd jobs, like sweeping the floors of a clothing factory run by Chinese emigrants. Sometimes he sold trinkets to tourists on the streets, something many other Chinese men did in those days, wandering from bar to bar trying to pressure young men into buying flowers for their female companions. For two years, he was on the move before he managed to get a residence permit in Spain. With an eye on the country’s booming construction industry, he decided his goal was to one day build and sell homes. He started from the bottom, working as a construction worker for a Spanish company. Two years later, he became a contractor. Two years after that, he had saved up enough money to buy some land and begin building those thirty-seven homes he was later unable to sell. Jianyong’s father once mentioned his plan to bring his two younger children, both born in Spain, back to China to receive a Chinese education while they were still young. But he never said anything about a permanent move. Now Jianyong was telling me that the decision to move the family back to China had already been made. The only question was: what was Jianyong going to do?

  “I think the word you are looking for is confused,” I said to him in Chinese and turning to the white board, I spelled out the English sentence for him: I AM CONFUSED. “You’re not quite sure what to do. You have to make a decision and . . . it’s rather complicated.” Jianyong nodded and then began thinking aloud, speaking more than I had ever heard him say in one breath.

  “I could go back to Spain by myself. I’ve been going to school there for eight years. It seems like a waste to drop out now. Our apartment isn’t far from school. And we live near some aunts and relatives, so I could eat at their place . . . ” He trailed off. “But then being there by myself I might be lonely.” Jianyong’s Chinese wasn’t good enough to follow the high school curriculum in China. If he moved back to China with his family, he would probably have to find work. “I still don’t know what kind of career I want,” he said, his train of thought suddenly switching to the reality that he may never return to Spain, his home for the past eight years. “I wo
uld miss the peacefulness there. Here, the cars and the buses, they drive like crazy. The roads are a mess.” At the end of the summer, Jianyong decided to head back to Spain while his family moved back to China. His father spent the rest of the year traveling back and forth between the two countries, after launching a new business importing red wine from Spain to China.

  Jianyong wasn’t the only one who was caught in the dizzying currents of modern-day migration. I tutored another young student named Carolina who was born in Portugal, moved to Spain as a teen, and had plans to go to North America for university. Carolina was just fifteen years old, with long black hair, big dark eyes, and a pale, moon-like face, but she seemed a lot older. She moved about with elegance and grace, and she was incredibly intelligent. I tutored her in essay writing, and she always turned in thoughtful and well-written pieces. In one of her homework assignments, she told me her father had recently relocated to Angola—China’s second-largest African trade partner behind South Africa—to start a construction business. After the summer, Carolina said her mother planned to join him there. According to the Angolan government, more than one hundred thousand Chinese people have migrated to the country to operate cranes and bulldozers, work as railway technicians, or, like Carolina’s parents, start a business. In 2012, in exchange for access to Africa’s plentiful resources, then–Chinese president Hu Jintao offered $20 billion in cheap loans to African countries for three years. I asked Carolina how she felt about her parents moving so far away. “I’m used to everyone coming and going,” she said to me in English. “That’s why I have learned not to make any close friends. What’s the point if I just end up leaving them anyway?” Today’s migrants are more mobile than ever, responding quickly to changing economic conditions. They circulate around the globe, building bridges between countries through trade and commerce. But such a nomadic life can take its toll. Chen Junwei’s son did not know his own mother, my restless Shushu from Portugal had his family to consider, and Boss Dong was having a hard time adjusting to life in the homeland despite the success of Barcelona Bar. Then there are children like Jianyong and Carolina—stuck in the middle of this back-and-forth migration and left to dangle in an intercontinental limbo. Would Ye Pei one day endure a similar fate? The young migrants I knew were neither here nor there. They straddled two countries and belonged to many worlds—and yet belonged nowhere.