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Meet Me in Venice: A Chinese Immigrant’s Journey from the Far East to the Faraway West

by Suzanne Ma

If you are born in Qingtian, you are destined to leave,” goes a famous refrain about this isolated Chinese county 300 miles south of Shanghai. Migrants started fleeing Qingtian in the 17th century and never stopped, many enduring years of painful separation from spouses or young children in their quest to become rich elsewhere.

book01Curious as to why this should be, Canadian-born, U.S.-raised journalist Suzanne Ma, who is of Chinese ancestry and whose husband has roots in the area, moved to Qingtian in 2011 looking for answers. Over two years she also visited Chinese communities in six European countries, where she tracked the fortunes of Qingtian natives working exhausting, mundane jobs in factories and other businesses.

Ma’s main focus is teenaged Ye Pei. Along with her father and brother, Ye Pei travels to Italy to reunite with her mother, who left – putatively to take a job in Venice – when Ye Pei was a child. Romantic visions of gondolas and canals quickly evaporate when Ye Pei discovers that her mother long ago abandoned her job at a suburban sweatshop to work on a coastal mushroom farm. Ye Pei herself takes a job at a café run by the sour and prickly Ayi, but quits after a year. Brimming with entrepreneurial spark, her eventual goal is to open her own establishment.

The impact of this timely, often moving account is undercut somewhat by its awkward, middling length. At under 200 pages, it’s long for an essay (yet still includes some avoidable repetition) but short for a book; Ye Pei’s story ends just when we start to feel fully invested in it. Ma includes a few peripheral stories – like that of Carina Chen, who comes to Italy regularly to stock her fast-fashion shop in Spain – that are mildly diverting but don’t always add flesh to the bones of the book.

Despite its massive diaspora, Chinese culture is often impenetrable to outsiders, and what Ma does brilliantly is offer insight into the hearts and minds of Chinese migrants (or, at least, those of a certain stripe). Moreover, descriptions of the conflicts that can develop between the Chinese and their Italian hosts (after a century of population exodus, Italy is now experiencing the stresses of becoming a receiver society), and among the migrants themselves, strike a chord for being at once specific and universal.

 

Reviewer: Emily Donaldson

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

DETAILS

Price: $26.95

Page Count: 192 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 978-1-44223- 936-4

Released: Feb.

Issue Date: March 2015

Categories: Memoir & Biography