by Suzanne Ma
There was a good reason why Fen told Pei not to talk too much when she was at the farm. Their fellow workers, especially the Chinese women, had long ears that stretched to every corner of the farm, clinging onto every little thing that was said and not said. There was gossip about a skirt that was too short, a face that wore too much makeup, or the newest worker who was too friendly with the foreigners. In the lunchroom the racial cliques were obvious, but not so apparent to an outsider was how fragmented the Chinese themselves were. There were three factions: those from Zhejiang province felt a certain allegiance to one another; migrants from China’s northern provinces, who had only recently begun migrating to Italy, preferred speaking pristine Mandarin to each other; and the Fujianese, who came from southern China, stuck together. Pei preferred socializing with the foreigners. There were many young workers on the farm who were in their early twenties, but Pei was the youngest at eighteen. There was Fatima from Turkey, a pretty blonde named Marita from Albania, and Afrona and Mendim from Macedonia. Pei called Marita amore and Afrona her sorella, her “sister.” They spoke in halting Italian to one another, and because less was said, they made an effort to make each word count. Pei felt most of those words were sincere. As winter approached, the sun fell quickly from the sky as she climbed the steep hill toward home. Many of her Chinese co-workers had cars, but they rolled by without stopping, the cool wind slapping Pei’s cheeks red. When Mendim or Afrona drove past, they often offered her a ride.
I didn’t fully understand the importance of Pei getting her driver’s license until I visited her that winter. I realized that while you could see the farm from their home, the commute to and from work was a bit of an ordeal, especially if you spent the entire day on your feet picking mushrooms. Getting to the grocery store, which was a half-hour bike ride away, was a half-day affair. It could only be done on weekends and only if you had the guts to traverse that death-defying hill on bike and then have the strength to make the uphill trek back home. The family rarely had the chance to visit the Chinese supermarkets, which were usually located well inside the city centers and closer to the train stations. Without a car, Pei and her family were tied to their jobs and to that house with the peeling yellow paint. They could not actively look for work elsewhere, nor could they scout for new places to live.
To get her driver’s license, Pei had to first pass a theory exam consisting of ten main subjects, each one with three true or false questions, for a total of thirty questions. Four wrong answers was an automatic fail. If she failed the exam twice in a row, she would have to register again and pay another $110 fee. After dinner every night, Pei opened up her laptop and went through practice exams for hours with her frayed Chinese-Italian dictionary by her side, but sometimes Pei couldn’t understand the questions. The wording was tricky, sometimes nuanced. A couple times a week, she took the afternoon off to attend a class in the nearby city of Riccione. Skipping out meant she wouldn’t be paid for the hours she missed at the farm, but she was grateful her bosses allowed her to do it. In a Chinese factory, coming and going as she pleased would have been difficult. Pei took forty minutes to ride into the city, leaning forward on her handle bars and pedaling hard. Her secondhand bicycle wheels were bent out of shape, so she inched along dusty industrial roads as trucks and cars rumbled by, breathing in dirt, before she finally arrived at the school sweaty and short of breath. If she was early she sat down in front of one of the free computers to scroll through practice questions before the teacher, a tall Italian man with graying hair, came in to signal the beginning of class.
“Buongiorno,” he said, promptly dimming the lights. A projector flickered on and illuminated a white screen above his head. A circle outlined in red appeared. Inside the circle, the number 50. “For anyone in Italy, this is the maximum speed that one has to respect, not just Italians, but everyone,” the teacher said. “Massimo. What does that mean? It means maximum. The maximum speed in a city is 50, but in a bigger city the speed limit can go up to a maximum of 70. But you must always follow the sign postings.” The slide changed. The red and white circle remained, but inside, the number changed to 110. “Outside of the city it’s 90 for the first three years,” the teacher continued. “However, having driven with a license for more than three years, I can go 110 on the main highway. However, you have to drive at . . . ?
There was a pause. Collectively, the class murmured: “100.”
“No,” the teacher said, “90.”
“90,” the students repeated.
“90, va bene,” the teacher repeated. “So how fast can I go on the highway?”
The teacher pointed to a student sitting in front of Pei.
“90?” the student guessed.
“No, no. You can go at 90,” he said, pointing at the student. “And me,” he pointed at himself, “110. OK?” A few students nodded, Pei took notes, and the teacher carried onto the next slide, whether they understood or not.
At the farm, Fen continued to coach Pei on her mushroom picking. “You need to position yourself properly so you can reach deep into the beds,” Fen said. “Look. Like this.” Pei watched her mother tilt her head and stick both arms over the manure mound so she could pluck even the farthest mushrooms from their loamy berth. “You can even grab a few mushrooms at a time in just one hand. This will speed things up,” she said, nabbing four heads at once.
“I can’t help it if I am slow,” Pei mumbled, rolling her eyes.
“Can’t help it?” Fen’s voice rose a decibel. “Of course you can! Just watch me.”
“I am watching!” Pei shot back, a little too loudly. Fen looked at her daughter, waved her hand with a sigh, and continued working in silence. Pei turned away and dug her hands into the mud in a huff. “When people who aren’t that close to you teach you, it’s no problem. It’s up to you whether you want to take their advice,” Pei said to me later. “But if it’s your own mother, and she gives me instructions with a certain tone of voice . . . ” she sighed. “The first time is OK, but by the second time or the third time she might raise her voice, and then I really can’t accept that. That is when I just have to say something back.” Pei was getting to know Fen for the very first time, not just as a mother but also as a co-worker. The bickering usually lasted only a few minutes and mostly they argued about nothing at all. They quarreled mostly when they were tired and tempers flared, and Pei realized it was a sign that she and her mother were growing closer. She wondered if things were better when they were strangers. “When we had distance between us, we kept things in,” she said. “Now we say what’s on our minds. We don’t hold anything back.”
While Pei was slow at picking mushrooms, she was quick to pick up Italian. The farm owners had made learning Italian mandatory for all immigrant workers, and Lia, the Italian teacher who helped Pei pass her residency exam, came by regularly to teach them. Classes were held in a second-floor classroom on the farm complete with a whiteboard, a map of Italy, and a projector Lia used to play Italian movies. Pei looked forward to class, skipping into the room with her Italian-language textbooks under her arm and giving the woman a big hug. “I’ve always felt close to Lia, because she is the one who helped me pass my residency test,” Pei said. “It’s because of her that I speak Italian the way I do.” Pei sat in the front row and opened up her books. The pages of her dictionary, which was held together by pieces of yellowing tape, were marked up with scribbles written in Chinese and Italian.
“What do you eat for breakfast?” Lia asked her students one weekday afternoon at the mushroom farm.
“Riso,” the students answered. Rice.
“And for lunch?”
“Riso,” the students answered again.
“And dinner?”
The students shifted in their seats. “Riso.”
“Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, always rice?” The class nodded.
“How much rice?” asked Mendim, who came from Macedonia and who
was the only non-Chinese worker in the class.
“Mezzo kilo,” Pei said. Half a kilo.
“Half a kilo . . . . in a day,” Lia confirmed. Pei nodded.
“Mamma Mia!” Mendim exclaimed.
“Never a cappuccino, a baked good?” Lia asked, taking off her reading glasses and placing them on the desk.
“Ah, but we eat rice when I hungry,” Pei said in halting Italian. “Need to eat rice.”
“Need?”
Pei tried her best to explain why Chinese workers at the farm “needed” to eat rice every day. Rice was filling, and it gave them enough energy to get through a long workday, Pei said. A croissant wasn’t enough fuel for the morning.
“But couldn’t you eat, I don’t know . . . a brioche, a panino with prosciutto?” Lia tried again.
“No, Chinese never,” Pei said. “In China, yes. In China, one drinks milk.”
“So why not in Italy?”
“Because need to work.”
“Ah, OK. I understand,” Lia said. “But for example, here in Italy, one goes to work at seven and eats mid-day. Italians eat a panino, a brioche, a cappuccino. An Italian has fruit juice for breakfast. Lots of things! Yogurt!”
“Ah yogurt molto mi piace,” Pei said. Ah yogurt, I like a lot.
“But not rice! You guys always have rice, even in the morning!” The students nodded. Lia, unconvinced, tried again. “How about yogurt, panini, croissant . . . or an apple?”
“Ma non va bene,” said a Chinese worker in the back row. No, it doesn’t work.
“Una banana?” Lia said.
“No,” the students repeated.
“If one has to work a long day, one might eat a panini with prosciutto, a glass of orange juice, or a banana and a croissant. A nice croissant. But not rice. Oh, Mamma Mia! Three times a day you eat rice!” Lia exclaimed. “I just have a coffee. A coffee! That’s it.”
When the Magnanis and the Simonis, the two families running the mushroom farm, began hiring more and more immigrant workers, they realized how difficult it was to communicate with their own employees. At first, they hired teachers and paid them out of pocket. Later, farm owners were able to continue their language program with the help of grants. Lia started teaching at the mushroom farm in 2008. Every employee was obliged to attend her classes, and they were split up into different levels according to language ability. Pei was put in the highest level. “The biggest problem for all of them, Pei included, is that they don’t use their Italian,” Lia told me minutes before the workers, many of them still wearing their green work uniforms, trailed into the classroom reeking of soil and sweat. “Most of them, once they reach the minimum level they need for the residency exam, stop studying. However, Pei and others, because they are young and also because of their personalities, are full of ambition and passion. They go beyond the minimum of what the state asks of them. But the others, they suffer through it because the farm owners have made learning Italian mandatory.”
Lia’s Italian lessons reminded me of the migrants I met in Teacher Xu’s classroom in Qingtian. Two years had passed since I last saw them in China. I tried keeping in touch with them as they arrived in Europe one by one. A handful of wives had been reunited with their husbands, and within a couple months, many announced their pregnancies by posting photos online as they caressed their rounded bellies. I was eager to see many of them again, but it seemed none of them were able to meet with me. They all gave plausible explanations: they were working long hours and had no time; they weren’t allowed to bring visitors into the factories where they hemmed clothes; and some said they didn’t know exactly where they lived and therefore couldn’t give me an address. Pei said the same thing to me when I first tried to track her down in Solesino. I had to push and prod to have her ask Ayi for the correct spelling of “Solesino” so I could look it up on the map.
Chen Junwei was one of the last migrants I knew who had finally made it to Italy. Chen was the man who was diligently learning Italian at Teacher Xu’s school, the man who was losing patience as he waited for more than a year for his visa to be approved, the man who had raised his son alone while he and his wife endured a decade of separation. Chen arrived in Italy around the time Pei started working at the farm, and when I sent a message to him saying I was coming to Italy, I wasn’t sure what kind of response I would receive, if any. A couple days later, I received a reply. “Teacher Ma,” he wrote, continuing to refer to me as he did when I was teaching at Teacher Xu’s school. “I would love to see you. But it is not convenient for you to come to where I am. It is very hard to get to.” Determined, I pressed him to give me an address. He said he didn’t know his address, but he knew the name of the town where he and his family now lived: Serra de’ Conti. I searched for it online and found very little information: “Serra de’ Conti is a comune (municipality) in the Province of Ancona in the Italian region of Marche, located about 40 km west of Ancona,” an article on Wikipedia read. A few Italian websites described a town encircled by a high, medieval wall. Within those walls, charming narrow streets brought visitors to the town’s central palazzi and past impressive towers and ancient monasteries. Google Maps told me it would take a little more than an hour to drive there from Pei’s home. I set out on a late Saturday morning. Pei climbed into the passenger seat with an armful of snacks and a stack of my maps. She insisted on coming with me in case I got lost. “At least I can ask for directions,” she said. She had finally realized that my English skills weren’t any use in these parts of Italy. In large cities like Rome and Venice, English is widely used to cater to tourists. But here in the Romagna countryside, most people spoke only Italian. We took the autostrada for as long as we could, then turned off at the coastal city of Senigalia and tried to follow the maps and the signs toward Serra de’ Conti. The landscape was more striking than Romagna, because the mountains were higher and the fortified towns built upon them more beautiful. We traversed narrow country roads that rose and fell as quickly and steeply as a roller coaster. Pei saw panoramic views of the region, but I hardly had the chance to look for fear of taking my eyes off the road. When we finally arrived nearly three hours later, we found a town that seemed completely void of people on a Sunday afternoon. A minute or so before anyone appeared, I could hear the pitter-patter of footsteps—someone was approaching. It was Chen’s eleven-year-old son who was the first to come bounding up a nearby staircase. Chen followed seconds later. He was wearing a puffy, down-filled navy jacket that dwarfed his small but sturdy frame, and he had the same tan, though it was lighter now since he spent most of his time indoors working at a shoe factory. His eyes still flickered with the charm and enthusiasm I remembered, and he smiled broadly, extending his hand toward me. “Teacher Ma!” he exclaimed. “How strange to see you here!” I was so happy to see him, I pushed his hand out of the way and, even though it was not the Chinese way, I gave him a hug. Images of Chen and his friends packed into that little classroom in Qingtian flooded my mind. I could hear their voices, struggling with those tongue-twisting words. “I am so happy to see you,” I said. Chen suggested we find a café inside the old city.
At the bar, Chen hung back shyly and waited for the barista to lift her head. Then he stammered: “Tre cappuccino.” He rarely interacted with Italians. He was always in the shoe factory and always surrounded by other Chinese workers. Remembering his enthusiasm for spaghetti, I asked if he had had the chance to sample any of the local cuisine. He shook his head. “No, not really. The coffee is much too strong here. I need milk to soften it,” he said. “I also can’t eat any prosciutto. Raw foods don’t agree with my stomach.” I agreed about the coffee but said it was a shame he couldn’t enjoy prosciutto. Just as we were sitting down, a Chinese woman walked into the café. She had a sweet, plump face and the sing-song voice of a young girl—not at all what I expected Chen’s wife to look like. We spent the rest of the day hanging out at a local park, catching up as their son playe
d on the swings, the slides, and the monkey bars. He called his mother lao ma, which literally means “old mother.” It can be considered an endearment, but to Chen’s wife it showed the disconnect between them. “I told him to call me Mama, but he refuses,” she said. “I think we have just been apart for so long, it is difficult for him to feel close to me.” Their son was aware of the family’s complicated history. Chen had spent many nights in China explaining why their family lived apart. Now that dialogue continued in the playful banter exchanged between father and son.
“Baba, where was I born?” the boy asked him a teasing tone.
“Guiana,” Chen said.
“And where were you?”
“I was in China with my other girlfriends.”
“How many girlfriends, Baba?” The two erupted in raucous laughter, and Chen’s wife watched from the park bench as Chen chased their son around the swing set. As the sun began to dip below the horizon, I insisted that Pei and I had to be getting home. But Chen was making it difficult. He apologized for not taking me out for dinner or inviting me back to his home for tea. He and his family stayed in a single room provided by their factory boss and bringing guests there was not a good idea, he said. I told him it wasn’t a problem and expressed how happy I was that we were able to meet in Italy. Chen remained conflicted. For months after our meeting, he left me messages apologizing again and again for what he considered his inhospitality. In China, when I had visited Chen in his home village, he had booked a room in one of the most beautiful farm-to-table restaurants in the area. He ordered the most expensive items on the menu: steamed river shrimps, a whole free-range chicken, and tianyu, Qingtian’s famous fish that were raised in the area’s flooded rice paddies. Chen had added several plates of vegetables, a special green tofu dish, and several bottles of beer, and then took me to the mountains where we plucked bright-red yangmei fruit from family-owned trees. In Italy, Chen felt he had lost face by not offering the same kind of hospitality. “Next time you visit me,” he promised, “things will be different.”