A moving account of moving abroad

Canadian journalist wants to 'humanize the migrant narrative'

When, as a girl, Ye Pei's thoughts turned to her mother, vivid images of Venice, with its canals and gondolas, floated through her mind.

Her mother had emigrated from China to the Italian city in 2006, and Ye fantasized about a woman who had made a shining success of her life in this new world rushing to embrace her daughter when they reunited.

But when that day eventually arrived in 2011, her mother's much-less romantic life was revealed to her. She did not live in Venice, but worked on a farm far from the city. Ye started working in a bar in Solesino, a small town southwest of Venice, where a mean-spirited aunt was her only connection.

That might well have been the end of the story, with a dispirited Ye returning to China. But rather than doing that, she decided to toil away in Italy so she could get enough money together to give her family a better future.

Ye's tale of determination is recounted in Meet Me in Venice: A Chinese Immigrant's Journey from the Far East to the Faraway West, by Canadian journalist Suzanne Ma. It is an engrossing read for anyone looking for insight into the Chinese diaspora around the world.

Ma, now 31, was born to immigrant parents in Toronto. Her father is from Taiwan and her mother is from Hong Kong.

She became interested in the issue of immigration in 2007 while studying Chinese at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where she met many overseas-born Chinese classmates, including her future husband, Marc Kuo.

Kuo was born in the Netherlands, and his family had migrated from Qingtian, a small county in Zhejiang province that has a 300-year history of emigration. A report by the county in March says the number of Qingtianese living abroad exceeds 270,000 - more than half the county's current population.

After Ma completed her studies at Tsinghua, she studied journalism at Columbia University in New York and read many nonfiction works on China. Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang, which follows the lives of young Chinese women as they migrate from their villages to China's factory cities, inspired her to write her own book, she says.

"I decided that following a migrant on her overseas migration would be a worthy endeavor."

When Ma graduated from Columbia in 2009, she worked as a reporter for the Associated Press in New York and also worked for DNAinfo.com. She often wrote about Chinese newcomers. Her interest in Chinese culture and the Chinese diaspora grew.

To research Meet Me in Venice, she went to Qingtian in 2010 and stayed for nearly a year. In that time, she grew close to three or four people and decided to follow all of them abroad, the aim being to eventually narrow her focus to one or two of them.

Ma met Ye in a high school. Many students' parents had gone overseas. Ye had not seen her mother for five years and looked forward to the day when she would meet her again in her dream city.

But it was not until Ma and Ye met again in Solesino six months later that Ma decided that Ye would be the principal subject of her book.

"She had just started working at the bar, and her hands had grown so swollen, they were pink and raw," Ma says of their meeting in the winter of 2011.

"I was extremely concerned, but she shook it off and told me not to worry. She said she was just not used to the manual labor and she would get better soon. This kind of strength and resolve really struck me, especially since Ye was only 17 years old at the time."

Over the next three years, Ma traveled to Italy several times to visit Ye and to talk to other Chinese immigrants to learn about their lives in Italy.

In the book, readers follow Ye to many cities and towns across Italy.

"I hope this book will allow people to have an intimate and rare glimpse into the lives of Chinese immigrants," Ma says.

"My aim is to humanize the migrant narrative so people who hail from different corners of the world can find common ground and realize the importance of empathy."

Ma says that since the book was published in February, immigrants in many countries have contacted her, saying how much they identify with the tale she recounts.

"Ultimately, people go abroad in search of a better life. It is a good thing because it allows them to expand their worldview and to step out of their comfort zone. We can all learn a lot from immigrants. It takes courage and ingenuity to pick up and move somewhere new and come up with creative ways to survive and provide for yourself and your family."

An Italian translation of the book will be published in October, and Ma hopes a Chinese translation will follow so she can send a copy to Ye.

Peter Hessler, author of three acclaimed books on China, says in a book-jacket blurb that Meet Me in Venice is "a fascinating and human portrait of what life is like for young Chinese migrants in Europe. This is a book for anybody who knows what it's like to leave home".

xingyi@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily Africa Weekly 07/31/2015 page28)