Meet Me in Venice

by Suzanne Ma

  7

  The Farm

  Nothing can be gained with your fingers in the dirt.

  Every time I planned to visit Ye Pei, I worried I wouldn’t be able to find her. When I did find her, she was always in a new town, working a new job, and already thinking about her next move or imagining life someplace else. In between visits, we kept in touch mostly by long-distance phone. Each time I dialed her number and listened for the tones, ringing once, twice, a third time, I wondered if I would one day find her cell phone disconnected, her number changed, our close yet tenuous connection severed. Later, as Pei started to go online more often, we were able to send e-mails and instant messages. I could track Pei’s life through her micro-blog. But like most of us who use social media, Pei only posted snippets of her life—her dinner at the local kebab store one evening, a meal she proudly cooked for her family, a new haircut. On the phone, Pei was often too exhausted to chat for too long. Late in 2012, more than a year after Pei first arrived in Italy, I found out she had moved back to her mother’s house and started working on the mushroom farm. I was happy to hear she could finally rejoin her family again. But I wondered what happened to her goal of one day opening her own bar. Was working at the mushroom farm going to help her family become more financially stable? Would she continue to learn Italian? Was she happy?

  I arrived in Rimini in the dead of winter. A thick fog rolled off the Adriatic Sea, shrouding the empty beachfront resorts and blanketing the hilly Romagna countryside in a spooky glow. Pei was meeting me in the evening, so that afternoon I made plans to visit an immigrant services group near the train station. The association spokesperson, a fifty-six-year-old woman named Shio Mien, had came to Italy two decades ago as a student from Taiwan. She leaned back in her leather chair and pressed her fingers together as she spoke Chinese with an educated air. At the end of every sentence, she would smile and sprinkle Italian words as she spoke—ecco, allora, bene—in between sips of sweetened instant cappuccino. For a fee, the organization provided a number of essential services such as language classes, translation and notarization of documents, and counseling on workers’ rights. Most of the immigrants that used their services worked either in garment factories scattered along the coast or on nearby farms. I perked up when Shio Mien said “farm.” Did she know any of the Chinese workers on a nearby mushroom farm?

  “Ye is the family name,” I said.

  “Ye,” she repeated, looking upward in thought. “Ah, yes. Of course, they all work on the mushroom farm. A mother, father, and young girl, all members of our organization.”

  “Are there many Chinese people at the farm?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Shio Mien said. “Without the Chinese, the farm would not have been able to survive.”

  It seemed odd to me that migrants left China to escape rural poverty only to end up on a farm. I knew other immigrant groups were working in the agricultural sector. Every year thousands of migrants from Africa and Eastern Europe flock to the fields and orchards of southern Italy to harvest tomatoes that are processed into pastes and purees and exported across Europe and around the world. In the parched countryside where temperatures can reach over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, they also pick grapes, lemons, olives, and oranges. They live in slums without electricity or running water and are paid less than $30 for ten- and twelve-hour workdays. Human rights campaigners call them “Europe’s tomato slaves,” but authorities continue to turn a blind eye. Without these migrant workers, Italy would be lacking in wine and tomato sauce. In the north, tens of thousands of Sikhs from India work in cheese farms in Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Mantova, and Bologna, preserving the centuries-old tradition of Italian fromaggio that nearly collapsed in the late 1980s when young Italian dairy farmers left for white-collar jobs elsewhere. In desperation, the Italian government gave undocumented Sikhs wholesale amnesty. Making Parmesan cheese is a smelly, sweaty, and labor-intensive process, but these are conditions some Sikh immigrants are willing to endure.

  “Obviously working in the countryside is not ideal. Most of these families came from China’s countryside and the last thing they want is to be toiling in the soil,” Shio Mien said, explaining how the Chinese turned to the farms after work at the garment factories slowed as a result of the economic crisis. “But the jobs on the farm were stable, at least more stable than factory jobs, and the Italian bosses followed the rules, at least much more than Chinese bosses usually do.” Shio Mien showed little sympathy for immigrants who chose to work for abusive Chinese bosses. They “knowingly walk into a trap,” she said. “Then they come to me asking for help, complaining about the long hours, and I say to them, ‘It’s your responsibility to get out of it.’” Shio Mien said immigrants had a duty to adapt to the lay of the land, to the Italian way of life. In order to do that properly, they had to learn the language. “Only then can you have a prosperous life.” Shio Mien praised the mandatory language exam Pei and all non-European immigrants were forced to take in order to gain residency. “The government is paying for classes so you can learn their language. This is a privilege, not a millstone,” she said. Shio Mien said she was good friends with the owner of the mushroom farm and had even taught Italian to the Chinese workers before the current teacher, Lia, took over. I asked if she could help me get in touch with the mushroom farm and act as a translator. Shio Mien said she could, for a fee. At the end of our interview, she offered to have someone drive me to Ye Pei’s home. “Of course, you must cover the cost of the driver’s gas. And it must be for his round trip,” she said. I thanked her but declined. Then I made my way back to the train station to wait for Pei.

  I waited for hours. To pass the time, I waded through the station’s small bookstore and perused the panini selection at the station café. At one point, I noticed a surprising number of Chinese immigrants getting on and off trains. They wafted through the drafty station hall gripping flimsy plastic bags that stretched thinly over their fingers, ready to tear at any moment. I could see blocks of tofu resting at the bottom of those bags and the tips of leafy greens peeking out the top. Chinese grocery stores were still uncommon in these parts, but Rimini had a couple of places where immigrants could pick up familiar ingredients that helped them replicate the flavors of home. I sat on a steel bench and watched the clock. But as the sky turned dark and the temperatures dipped, my thighs turned icy cold. So I dragged my luggage to one corner of the station and paced back and forth, allowing my paranoia to resurface once again. What was taking Pei so long? Did she change her mind about meeting me this time around? In my experience, Chinese people don’t like to say no to your face. It’s considered rude and not very tactful. Instead, they often come up with a myriad of vague excuses, the most typical one I encountered was: Wo you dian shi. “Something’s coming up.” Maybe it’s the journalist in me, but vague answers only compel me ask more questions, and I was always miffed when I heard, “Wo you dian shi.”

  When Pei finally came through the front doors of the train station, I recognized her right away, but I also noticed how much she had changed. Relieved that she hadn’t changed her mind about meeting me, we exchanged quick hugs. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I nearly got on the wrong bus, and when I finally found the right one, we were stuck in rush hour traffic all the way here.” Pei’s hair was now longer than her shoulders, and she had dyed it a lighter brown. She wore a pink skirt and knee-high suede boots. We left the station and immediately began walking toward the car rental office, Pei chattering away about the farm and about Li Jie. They were continuing their long-distance relationship with weekly phone calls and messages. We also talked about Shio Mien. “She offered to help you, right? For a price?” Pei asked. I nodded and we giggled. We talked about her time in Falconara and why she left the bar so suddenly after the residency exam. “I was losing my temper with the customers a lot,” she said. “Uncle Luigi said I had a sour look on my face on many days.”

  “Well, it isn’t your fault,”
I said, trying to console her. “It’s hard to deal with drunks all day.”

  “Yes, but in the end, the customer is always right.”

  “Even when they pinch your bottom?” I challenged. Pei sighed.

  I picked up my rental car—a compact Ford Focus that I paid double for because it was an automatic—and as I drove, Pei told me she was hoping to get her driver’s license soon. She had enrolled in classroom sessions to prepare for a multiple-choice theory exam. If she passed the exam, which had to be completed in Italian, she could obtain a foglio rosa, a learner’s permit. Then she could start taking road lessons. “That’s one of the main reasons why I moved home,” she said. “Life is so isolating without a car. In Italy, if you do not have a car, it’s as if you don’t have legs.”

  The rice cooker Pei brought in her luggage all the way from China was the first to stir in the still of the morning. A timer went off and steam began to rise from its vents as early as 4:30 a.m., signaling the start of another long day. Pei’s cell phone alarm rang shortly afterward at 5 a.m. Most of the time her parents were already awake, shouting through the thin walls of the house to make sure both Pei and Mao were up. Mao needed to catch an early bus to school, so the entire family ate breakfast together, warming their cold hands against steaming rice bowls. To save money, the family did not turn on the radiators even when the temperatures outside dipped well below freezing. Many other migrants told me they did the same. In Pei’s house, everyone was always bundled up in multiple layers including winter jackets. During those frigid winter months, the family huddled around the old cast-iron wood-burning stove in the kitchen—the only warm place in the entire house.

  Pei, her mother, and her father were all working at the mushroom farm now. The three of them stepped into black rubber work boots and trundled down the cratered road with only moonlight guiding the way. During her first few days at the farm, Pei stayed close to her mother. Fen introduced her to a few co-workers in the central warehouse that hummed with the chatter of immigrants—a chorus of Chinese dialects, Turkish, Macedonian, and a little Italian. When the buzzer sounded, signaling the start of the workday, the immigrants scattered like birds. Shen went off with the men, pulling on gloves and putting on baseball caps as they headed outside to the greenhouses to harvest oyster mushrooms. Some women headed to the packaging area near the front of the central warehouse, and Pei followed her mother toward the back through enormous doors that looked like the entrance to an aircraft hangar. This was where they harvested white mushrooms.

  Gigantic metal shelves were stacked six layers high and packed with a thick, chocolate-brown mix of straw and horse dung. These manure beds were filthy but very fecund: the perfect incubator for cultivating mushrooms. The air inside the enormous rooms smelled earthy and felt as though someone had just taken a long, hot shower. The chambers were kept at a balmy 60 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit when the grains of wheat inoculated with mushroom mycelium were sowed into the beds. Tiny mushrooms emerged within two weeks, doubling in size every twenty-four hours. Within three days, they were fully grown and ready for harvesting. Fen showed Pei how to stoop low in between manure beds to pick the creamy tops emerging from the soil. They had to be careful not to remove the roots, which can sprout new mushrooms every three to five days for about three weeks after the first harvest. The medium- to large-sized mushrooms needed to be collected while the small ones were left so they could continue to grow. If they were picking brown mushrooms, Fen reminded Pei to leave a few large ones in the soil. These would eventually grow into portobello mushrooms. It was also important to arrange the mushrooms caps facing up in Styrofoam containers. The oddly shaped mushrooms went on the bottom and acted as a podium for the round and unblemished mushrooms on top.

  Fen was one of the fastest pickers on the farm. She could pick a hundred mushrooms in the same time it took Pei to pick thirty. But it annoyed Fen when co-workers and farm managers commented on this disparity. “They should stop comparing us,” Fen said. “It’s not fair. Pei is so young; she’s only a child.” Pei worked slowly, stopping to scratch her head, stretch her neck, or gasp and shake out her bare arms whenever leggy insects crawled up them. Meanwhile Fen’s hands darted from soil to Styrofoam container like a pendulum. Nothing distracted her from her tasks. Fen was considered one of the most efficient workers on the farm not only because of her lightning-fast hands but because of her reserved disposition. Workers were generally discouraged from talking with one another while they were working, but idle chitchat was often exchanged when supervisors had stepped away. Fen rarely stopped to chat with others. Even at lunch, when workers crowded in big groups around the lunchroom tables, Fen usually preferred eating with her uncle (the one who introduced her to the farm) or even alone. She kept her distance not because she was anti-social. Rather, Fen believed silence was a source of great strength. The lunchroom was reminiscent of a high school cafeteria. The Turks sat with the Turks, the Macedonians with the Macedonians, the Chinese with the Chinese.

  “Don’t talk too much,” Fen advised her daughter. “Just concentrate on your work. Do a good job.”

  Pei believed her mother had grown taciturn after spending the past five years alone in Italy. “During that time, she learned to keep things in her stomach,” said Pei, using a Chinese idiom. “Sometimes it can be hard to really know her.” Fen was quiet not only at work but also at home. When Pei and Mao were bickering or horsing around with their father, she always sat back and preferred to listen and watch. Fen may have seemed removed and detached from her family, but it was after dinner one night, when I asked Fen to recount her own migration story for me, when I discovered how much she cherished them. Fen spoke to me about the shock of getting her work visa to Italy approved, about the restaurateur who was late picking her up at the airport, and about her frantic search for a garment factory job. Then she came to the part of her story when she was waiting at the Milan airport for her husband and two children. That’s when Fen’s voice cracked, and I looked up to see her small face awash with tears, her pale cheeks blotchy and damp. Pei was sitting across the kitchen table from her mother, staring hard at the empty dinner plates when suddenly her shoulders collapsed. The tears were swift and sudden, racing down her face and dripping off her chin before she had time to wipe them away. Shen got up from his chair to sit next to his wife. He put one arm around her small frame as it trembled with each sob. Gently, I asked Fen if she was crying because she was sad.

  “No,” she croaked, her voice barely audible between her sniffles. “I cry because I am so happy we are together again.”

  For Pei, the warmth and humidity of the chambers were a nice change from the loud and raucous bar scene. Italian pop songs played softly on the radio and Pei enjoyed humming along. She couldn’t make out all the words, but she understood amore and solitudina, the themes of love and loneliness resonating in her teenage heart. Pei felt she could relax at the mushroom farm. No one snuck up behind her to pinch her bottom, and she relished the reality that the little ivory heads before her did not drink, smoke, or curse. They waited obediently in their bed of soil, and Pei was never asked to make conversation with them. In Solesino, she took on the name Alessia. In Falconara, she became Lya. At the farm, everyone called her Pei, and at least for a short while, she felt like she was herself again.

  A family of mice had moved in with the Ye family, and when Pei, Mao, and their parents gathered in the kitchen for dinner, the pesky little things zipped across the floor and over the countertops. I gave a frightful scream whenever I saw them, but the rest of the family found the rodents more of a nuisance than anything else. “Fan si le,” Shen said, stomping his feet to send the tiny fur balls bolting behind the cabinets. How annoying! Pei was equally fearless, even when mice managed to sneak between the space under the door and into her bedroom. A number of times, I awoke to the sound of bags rustling and jumped out of bed, turned on the lights, and screamed, “Laoshu! Laoshu!” Mouse! Mouse! Pei, always
the heavy sleeper, simply groaned and pulled the blankets over her head. When I told Pei that the mouse had jumped into a paper bag where I kept my laundry, she swung her feet out of bed and took the bag to the kitchen where she opened the window and held the bag upside down. The mouse dropped from the second-floor window to the ground. Then she climbed back into bed and immediately fell asleep. Another time, we absentmindedly left a half-finished package of biscuits on the dresser table. In the middle of the night, I awoke to the unmistakable sound of crunching and reacted much in the same way as I had the night before. I threw off the covers in a panic, lunged at the light switch by the door, and screamed, “Laoshu! Laoshu!” Poor Pei had gone to sleep well before 10 p.m., trying to get as much rest as she could before her 5 a.m. wakeup call. She cracked her eyes open and saw the gray little mouse had buried its head in our box of biscuits. She reached for a pillow and threw it across the room toward the dresser. I screamed and the mouse looked up, its beady little eyes narrowed to slits. Then it leaped from the dresser onto the floor and scurried toward the door, squeezing under the gap back into the hallway. The worst was when the mice got into the bag of rice in the kitchen. Fen had to spend the evenings sifting through the grains by hand and picking out dark little lumps before she could wash the rice and set the timer to cook for the next morning.