In her new book, Meet Me in Venice, Vancouver-based author Suzanne Ma examines the Chinese immigration experience through the eyes of a teenaged girl who travels to Italy in search of fortune, adventure and her mother.
Ma’s own journey started in 2007 when the writer left her reporting job at the Ottawa Citizen to improve her Mandarin in Beijing.
There, the Toronto-born woman encountered a plethora of second-generation Chinese students like herself. They hailed from the U.S., Australia, Britain, France, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands.
“We all came from different corners of the world but we all had a similar narrative. Our parents had sent us to Chinese school as children. We rebelled and didn’t pay attention or some didn’t even go, some refused to get out of bed on Saturday morning,” Ma said. “And then in our 20s, we regretted that.”
The “nosy journalist” quizzed one of her Dutch classmates about why so many Chinese people had migrated to his small country.
A few years later, after she was awarded the Pulitzer Travelling Fellowship as one of the top five students from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Ma set out to answer this question herself.
The journalist was inspired by Peter Hessler and Leslie Chang, who’ve written about China for the New Yorker and National Geographic, following people in real time, over years.
“The time and effort invested in that is a lot, but the reward is amazing,” Ma said.
She expected her research would take two or three years. But the first-time author spent closer to five on Meet Me in Venice.
Ma lived in Qingtian, near Wenzhou in China, the ancestral hometown of the Dutch student who became her husband, and learned the town has a 300-year history of migration.
That’s where she met Ye Pei, a teenaged girl who followed her mother, who’d left five years earlier, to Italy. Pei expected to reunite with her mother in Venice, only to learn she worked on a farm hours from the city. Ma visited Pei and Europe over the course of three years, documenting Pei’s struggles with work, her determination and devotion to her family and exploring why people immigrate to nations where they endure hardship, suspicion, manual labour and familial separation.
Ma says the main point of her book is to humanize the migrant experience.
“When you hear about refugees washing up in southern Italy, escaping Africa or the Middle East, they just become numbers and headlines and you forget that these are people, they’re daughters or mothers or sisters,” she said.”
Ma reveals that a garment that’s “made in Italy” may mean it designed by an Italian fashion house but constructed in a Chinese-run factory where migrants live and work. She visits Flanders Fields in France and learns Chinese labourers dug trenches there during the First World War. Ma reports children born to Chinese immigrants in Italy can only apply to become Italian citizens once they turn 18, despite being born and raised on Italian soil.
“Migrants are so misunderstood... The first thing that happens when there’s an economic crisis is that the newcomers are blamed for all the problems, so there’s very little empathy,” Ma said.
She believes reading about intolerance and problems elsewhere allows one to more freely reflect on the state of affairs in one’s backyard, where Chinese investors are routinely blamed for the high cost of housing.
Although her book focuses on the Chinese immigration experience in Italy, Ma says the story is a universal one.
“There are lessons to be learned. We see history repeating itself and the more voice and spotlight that we give to untold migrant stories, the more understanding there is in all societies,” she said.
Ma will visit Italy to launch the Italian version of her book in the fall.
