Meet Me in Venice

February 16, 2015
Chinese Canadian journalist Ma tackles the hot subject of immigration with her sensitive portrayal of a young woman who makes her way to northern Italy from Qingtian, a barren mountain town in the Zhejiang Province of China. According to the author, many Qiantianese are "drawn to Italy's textile and manufacturing industries" centered in Prato, "home to the highest percentage of Chinese in Europe," where they are the linchpin of factories owned and run by fellow Chinese émigrés. With 300,000 registered Chinese, they now rank as the fourth largest immigrant group in Italy. Ma connects with Ye Pei in 2011 when she's a 16-year-old high school student in China and follows her to the Italian town of Solesino where she endures long hours working at a bar resolving to earn money for her parents to retire. Ma reconstructs Pei's move to Italy, recounting the bumps of culture shock such as the struggle of mastering a new language with a different writing system. The author, who grew up in Chinese household but identifies as a Western, includes her own personal grappling with identity and cultural heritage. However she is most compelling when recounting Ye Pei's story of self-sacrifice is the strength that she derives from the nuclear family as it reunites in a new country. That said, the reader will never view the "Made in Italy" label in the same way again. Photos.

December 15, 2014
A Chinese teenager's saga immigrating from Eastern China to Italy. Funded by the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship and intrigued by migrant behavior (particularly the Europe-bound emigration patterns of her husband's birthplace of Qingtian), journalist Ma's fieldwork charts the course of a Chinese immigrant's journey from Qingtian to Venice. Drawn to "characters who seem a little out of place," Toronto-born Ma relocated to Qingtian in 2011 and was captivated by fast-talking teen Ye Pei's story. When Ma first began their informational interviews, Pei's mother had been in Italy for half a decade already, and the girl was determined to join her. Culled from interviews and diary entries, the author vividly reconstructs Pei's life beginning with her long days laboring with limited Italian vocabulary in northeastern Solesino, two hours away from Venice's picturesque canals, where she'd originally dreamed of settling abroad. As she expands her research with profiles of other hardworking immigrants and a particularly atmospheric tour of France, searching for a Qingtian connection, Ma depicts the determined immigrant experience from both a historical perspective and from effective firsthand accounts. She documents widespread xenophobia from the influx of Far East immigrants to Europe and reaches back to Pei's Chinese childhood to the day her mother left for Europe and joined a migration that's been a behavioral staple in China for centuries. Once reunited with her mother and beginning employment on a mushroom farm with the rest of her family, Pei admitted to harboring impressive ambitions far beyond farmwork, taking night classes to "learn about workplace safety, food safety, and hygiene." A sensitive writer, Ma expertly channels the yearning and base desires of her subjects through intimate conversation and cultural analysis in a narrative full of genuine compassion and appreciation. A genial, informative chronicle of the hopes and dreams of a Chinese immigrant.

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Starred review from February 15, 2015
For hundreds of years, Qingtian's biggest export has been people, journalist Ma writes in her sharp-eyed look at Chinese immigration. Ma focuses her examination on the aforementioned county of Qingtian and the plight of one particular immigrant, Ye Pei, whose family left Qingtian to make their fortune in Italy. Though it is Pei's father, Shen, who decides to move the Ye family to Italy, his wife Fen's visa comes through first. Fen is promised work in Venice, but the job evaporates when she arrives, so she finds work at a factory in Padua. It takes five years and a change of job before her family can join her. At 17, Pei is reluctant to leave her boyfriend in Qingtian but also excited by the prospect of the canals of Venice. Though the farm her mother works on and the Solesino coffee bar where Pei eventually secures work are far from the glamorous Venetian life she imagined, her optimism about making a better life in Italy remains undiminished. Based on years of communication and interviews with Pei, her family, and other Chinese immigrants, Ma's unique study is essential reading for anyone seeking insight into Chinese immigration and the mind-set of those who seek better fortunes abroad.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)