#### STUDI E SAGGI

– 161 –

#### FLORIENTALIA Asian Studies Series – University of Florence

*Scientific Committee*

Valentina Pedone, editor, *University of Florence* Sagiyama Ikuko, editor, *University of Florence* Ester Bianchi, *University of Perugia* Alessandra Brezzi, *University of Rome "La Sapienza"* Marco Del Bene, *University of Rome "La Sapienza"* Paolo De Troia, *University of Rome "La Sapienza"* Fujiwara Katsumi, *University of Tokyo* Guo Xi, *Jinan University* Hyodo Hiromi, *Gakushuin University Tokyo* Federico Masini, *University of Rome "La Sapienza"* Nagashima Hiroaki, *University of Tokyo* Chiara Romagnoli, *Roma Tre University* Bonaventura Ruperti, *University of Venice "Ca' Foscari"* Luca Stirpe, *University of Chieti-Pescara "Gabriele d'Annunzio"* Tada Kazuomi, *University of Tokyo* Massimiliano Tomasi, *Western Washington University* Xu Daming, *University of Macau* Yan Xiaopeng, *Wenzhou University* Zhang Xiong, *Peking University* Zhou Yongming, *University of Wisconsin-Madison*

#### *Published Titles*

Valentina Pedone, *A Journey to the West. Observations on the Chinese Migration to Italy* Edoardo Gerlini, *The Heian Court Poetry as World Literature. From the Point of View of Early Italian Poetry*

Ikuko Sagiyama, Valentina Pedone (edited by), *Perspectives on East Asia*

# Transcending Borders

Selected papers in East Asian studies

edited by Ikuko Sagiyama, Valentina Pedone

> firenze university press 2016

Transcending Borders : selected papers in East Asian studies / edited by Ikuko Sagiyama, Valentina Pedone. – Firenze : Firenze University Press, 2016. (Studi e saggi ; 161)

http://digital.casalini.it/9788864534039

ISBN 978-88-6453-402-2 (print) ISBN 978-88-6453-403-9 (online)

Graphic design: Alberto Pizarro Fernández, Pagina Maestra "Florientalia" logo designed by Yoshimura Masahito

#### *Peer Review Process*

All publications are submitted to an external refereeing process under the responsibility of the FUP Editorial Board and the Scientific Committees of the individual series. The works published in the FUP catalogue are evaluated and approved by the Editorial Board of the publishing house. For a more detailed description of the refereeing process we refer to the official documents published on the website and in the online catalogue of the FUP (www.fupress.com).

#### *Firenze University Press Editorial Board*

G. Nigro (Co-ordinator), M.T. Bartoli, M. Boddi, R. Casalbuoni, C. Ciappei, R. Del Punta, A. Dolfi, V. Fargion, S. Ferrone, M. Garzaniti, P. Guarnieri, A. Mariani, M. Marini, A. Novelli, M.C. Torricelli, M. Verga, A. Zorzi.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode).

**CC** 2016 Firenze University Press Università degli Studi di Firenze Firenze University Press Via Cittadella, 7, 50144 Firenze, Italy www.fupress.com/ *Printed in Italy*

### TABLE OF CONTENTS

(DE)CONSTRUCTING BORDERS: JAPANESE CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE AND TRANSLATION IN THE GLOBAL CONTEXT 133 *Caterina Mazza*

#### PREFACE

*Ikuko Sagiyama, Valentina Pedone*

Borders (what's up with that?) M.I.A.

This is the second collection of works by scholars in the fields of Chinese and Japanese Studies selected by the Florientalia editorial board. Unlike for the first volume, on this occasion, we decided to propose a topic that could serve as a *fil rouge* for all the papers included. We chose "transcending borders" as the theme and title of the volume, hinting at the concept of bridging boundaries, in any possible context and domain, metaphorical or concrete.

From the city of Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance and one of the symbols of Italian and European culture, we strive to draw a trajectory that reaches towards East Asia, serving as a two-way channel of communication. For this purpose, we gathered an international editorial board, reached out to international authors, and asked for the help of international referees.

In the history of Italy, the very first university courses in Chinese and Japanese were held right here in Florence, beginning in 1863. Unfortunately, a few decades later, an array of events caused the interruption of what seemed to be a promising future for the Florentine university's research in the field of East Asian Studies. Today, we humbly attempt to revive that season by creating a platform for the exchange of ideas and for research on the cultures of China and Japan. We aim to transcend the borders of space by connecting scholars in different fields and from different cultural backgrounds who are conducting research around the globe, as well as transcend the borders of time by breathing new life into the academic research on China and Japan that finds its roots in Florence at the end of the XIX century.

These days, it seems that many people are concerned with borders, confines, and walls more than ever. By proposing this theme, we want to reflect on the opportunities that are to be gained through the overcoming of borders, on what can be accomplished by calling into question old norms, on the implementations of less familiar norms, and on the renegotiation of individual limits and horizons.

This collection gathers seven articles on the theme of borders. The first four articles deal with Chinese presence in Italy today. Grazia Ting Deng and Al-

*Transcending Borders. Selected papers in East Asian studies*, edited by Valentina Pedone, Ikuko Sagiyama, ISBN 978-88-6453-403-9 (online), ISBN 978-88-6453-402-2 (print), CC BY 4.0, 2016 Firenze University Press

len Hai Xiao, two scholars who are interested in anthropology and geography, focus on Chinese entrepreneurs in Italy, on what motivates their mobility and on how these entrepreneurs create imaginative geographies of the cities where they reside. The article by Lan Tu, who is also a geographer, investigates the spatial division of labor among Chinese businesses in Prato, an industrial town near Florence, and the role played by the so-called "politics of visibility" within the social tensions between the Italians and the Chinese of Prato. Violetta Ravagnoli, a historian, adopts a glocal approach and conducts an interdisciplinary (historical, anthropological, sociological) analysis in order to describe the perceived ethnicity of Italians and Chinese residents in Rome. The article by Zhang Gaoheng, a scholar of Italian and Film Studies, offers insight on the persistent Orientalist discourse in Italy that has contributed to the false idea of the existence of the "Chinese mafia" and to the serial representation of such a criminal organization in Italian cultural texts.

The three articles in the field of Japanese Studies elaborate on the concept of borders in literary terms. In her article, Caterina Mazza applies the idea of untranslatability to the work of four contemporary Japanese authors: Murakami Haruki (b. 1949), Toh EnJoe (b. 1972), Tawada Yōko (b. 1960) and Mizumura Minae (b. 1951). Luca Milasi describes how the Japanese writer Kōda Rohan (1867-1947), an eminent novelist of Modern Japan, used references to Buddhism in his works in order to create an alternative way towards a reform of modern Japanese fictional literature that does not exclusively rely on the imitation of Western works. Mario Talamo presents the work of Jippensha Ikku (1765-1831), a Japanese writer of travel literature, who made roaming across the most remote districts of Japanese cities the core of his literary corpus

Our hope is that readers will appreciate the scholarly contributions to the field of East Asian Studies offered by the authors featured in this volume. We also hope that readers will welcome our suggestion to keep challenging the notion of borders, with the purpose of seeking new ways to increase mutual understanding and to expand the boundaries of one's own creativity.

CHINESE STUDIES

# ASPIRING TO MOTILITY: CHINESE PETTY ENTREPRENEURS IN ITALY

*Grazia Ting Deng* The Chinese University of Hong Kong *Allen Hai Xiao* University of Wisconsin – Madison

#### *Abstract*

This paper focuses on the daily mobility of Chinese petty entrepreneurs in Italy, aiming to understand the everyday dynamics of Chinese immigration in a host society. Drawing on the conception of *motility* (Kaufmann et al. 2004; Kaufmann 2011), the authors have elaborated on the specific kinds of access and inaccessibility, as well as the skills and aspirations that characterize Chinese petty entrepreneurs in the Italian context. Drawing from extensive ethnographic evidence, the authors then discuss why the Chinese petty entrepreneurs, who are generally from the Wenzhou area, are able to have such *motility*. The paper argues that ethnicity is sometimes just a discursive representation, but entrepreneurial subjectivities drive *motility* by deploying a system of capitals. In other words, the immigrants acquire mobility not because they are Wenzhouese, but because their subjectivity is embodied through Wenzhouese entrepreneurship. Furthermore, these Chinese immigrants create their own imaginative geographies of the cities they live in, which is crucial to understanding how Chinese capitalism is grounded in nuanced ways.

#### *Keywords*

Chinese migrants, ethnicity, motility, petty entrepreneurship.

#### 摘要

本文着眼于意大利华人小企业主的日常移动,旨在理解华人移民在客 居地的日常生活。借用"流动力"(motility)这一概念(Kaufmann et al. 2004, Kaufmann 2011),本文作者详细阐述了华人小企业主在意 大利社会的日常移动中的准入性和非准入性,及其特有的技能和对移 动性的渴望。基于广泛的民族志素材,本文作者探讨了主要来自温州 的华人小企业主如何获得流动力以实现日常移动。本文认为,族群性 有时仅仅是一种话语表征,而企业主的主体性则通过对一系列资本的 利用真正驾驭着流动力。也就是说,这些华人移民获得流动力并非因 为他们是温州人,而是因为他们的主体性通过温州商人的企业主精神 体现了出来。再者,这些华人移民在所居住的城市建构了自己的地理 学想象,这也是理解华人资本主义如何于细微之处落地扎根的关键。

#### 关键词

中国移民,族群性,移动性,小企业家精神。

*Transcending Borders. Selected papers in East Asian studies*, edited by Valentina Pedone, Ikuko Sagiyama, ISBN 978-88-6453-403-9 (online), ISBN 978-88-6453-402-2 (print), CC BY 4.0, 2016 Firenze University Press

#### *1. Introduction*

After immigrating to Italy in 2002, Enlei and his wife worked as factory workers in the Ancona area. In 2012, they moved to Bologna, where they bought and ran a coffee bar in a local neighborhood. From time to time, Enlei has to go to his accountant's office, which is located in the other half of the city. Instead of taking a shorter and more direct route, Enlei always passes the central railway station to avoid getting lost. "I don't know any alternative routes," he said, "I always take the routes that pass by the places I am familiar with. It is easier for me to navigate the city in this way." His narrative reflects a Chinese petty entrepreneur's conceptual geography of the city, which sets the stage for a deeper discussion of the Chinese diaspora in Italy and their daily mobility.

In recent decades, immigration studies have extensively discussed the ways in which and the reasons why immigrant minorities are ethnically networked (Hannerz 1974; Aldrich and Waldinger 1990; Zhou 1992; Waldinger 1993, 1995), socioeconomically embedded (Portes and Sensenbrenner 1993; Portes 1995; Kloosterman et al. 1999; Kloosterman and Rath 2001) and spatially assimilated (Allen and Turner 1996; Alba et al. 1999) in various contexts. In this spirit, a significant amount of literature on the Chinese diaspora and Chinese overseas has focused on large-scale mobility (migration) rather than daily mobility (e.g. Ong 1999; Ma and Cartier 2003; Wang 2009). Research on Chinese migrants' daily mobility, which is the focus of this paper, will shed light on everyday dynamics of Chinese immigration in host societies.

The conception of *motility* is useful in exploring daily mobility (Kaufmann et al. 2004; Kaufmann 2009). *Motility* places greater emphasis on economic and social integration. It helps articulate how and why Chinese migrants have (or do not have) the potential to be mobile in their host society. Thus, from a migrant perspective, this research topic is critical in teasing out the nuanced coping strategies against immobilities in host societies.

The Chinese migrants we focus on here are petty entrepreneurs, who are "individuals or households who employ a small number of workers but are themselves actively involved in the labor process" (Smart and Smart 2005, 3). These Chinese petty entrepreneurs in Italy mainly serve as subcontractors in the manufacturing and service industries, such as the restaurant business. They include both retailers and wholesalers. Our principal method of data collection was ethnographic fieldwork. The first author conducted fieldwork in Bologna and surrounding towns from May 2014 to July 2015 that comprised participant observation and open-ended interviews. The key informants include two families, two individual entrepreneurs, and two college students from Chinese immigrant families. In-depth interviews were also conducted with 50 Chinese migrants, including wage laborers and entrepreneurs. The informants range from 18 to 60 years old and encompass both first (33) and second generation (17) immigrants. Among the first-generation immigrants, seven have spent more than 20 years in Italy, 23 have lived in Italy for 10 to 20 years and the other three fewer than 10 years. The number of male and female informants was the same. The interviewees are from Fujian province (4), Zhejiang province (42)

and northeastern China (4). All the informants have given informed consent to disclose the content of both our interviews and interactions. We have changed their names to maintain anonymity.

#### *2. Chinese Petty Entrepreneurs in Italy*

A fairly rich literature has documented the historical dynamics of Chinese immigration to Italy and provided a panoramic overview of their presence over the Italian territories (e.g. Campani et al. 1994; Ceccagno 1998; 2003; Cologna 2003; Di Corpo 2008; Pedone 2013a; Dei Ottati and Cologna 2015). The first wave of Chinese immigration to Italy began in the 1920s. Some hundreds of Chinese emigrated from China through France and finally settled down in Milan, Bologna and Tuscany. They worked in the textile and leather industries, while some Chinese street peddlers hawked small commodities in the urban squares of Milan (Carchedi and Ferri 1998; Lan 2014). Right after World War II, hundreds of Chinese were recorded in Italian census registration, but these Chinese were only the prelude of a larger wave of Chinese immigration to Italy that began in the 1980s (Ceccagno 2003). After a long time of stagnation during the Mao era (1949–1976), Chinese migration to Italy experienced rapid growth in the following 30 years. According to the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT 2016a), more than 270,000 Chinese immigrants were living in Italy by 2015, constituting the fourth-largest immigrant community in Italy. However, this number does not include illicit immigrants and those who have obtained Italian citizenship.

In contrast to other European countries such as the U.K., France and the Netherlands, where recent Chinese migrants originate from a wide range of Chinese regions, in Italy the migrants' typically hail from a limited and concentrated number of places (Campani et al. 1994; Benton and Pieke 1998; Pedone 2013a). The first arrivals were Chinese from the rural areas of Wenzhou region in southeastern Zhejiang province, and they still make up the largest portion of the Chinese presence in Italy, dominating the Chinese ethnic economy in Italy. The arrival of the Fujianese since the late 1980s and the *Dongbei* people (Northeasterners) since the 1990s has diversified the Chinese population, but they are still eclipsed by the large number of Wenzhouese (Pieke et al. 2004). The Fujianese and Northeasterners have participated in the Wenzhouese ethnic economy, enriched the workforce and embraced the existing working patterns maintained by Wenzhouese entrepreneurs. Some of the Fujianese, after several years of effort, have also started up their own businesses, but they are still much weaker than Wenzhouese in terms of both population and economic volume. Few Northeasterners have become entrepreneurs, except for a limited number who opened restaurants in major cities with large Chinese populations.

A large number of Chinese immigrants, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, arrived in Italy through illicit ways. Due to the ambivalent attitude of Italian government toward illegal immigrants (Ceccagno 2003), Italy has become one of the most popular destinations in Europe for Chinese immigrants in the last three decades. The Italian government enacted a series of amnesties to legalize undocumented immigrants in 1986, 1990, 1995, 1998, 2002, and 2012 respectively (Caritas Migrantes 2005; Ceccagno and Rastrelli 2008; Lan 2014). A large number of Chinese came directly to Italy or through other European countries with the hope of becoming legal residents (Ceccagno 2003). Moreover, the Italian government rarely enforced repatriation of undocumented immigrants themselves, although companies hiring undocumented workers are heavily fined. A Chinese local market trader in Italy, who used to be an illicit immigrant, said: "What we really worried about was being caught in the workplace. But it was also troublesome to be checked by police on the streets." The underground nature of illicit immigration places a major restriction on everyday mobilities of Chinese immigrants in Italy.

The population of Chinese immigrants in Italy has distributed all over the Italian territory, though a much more intensive concentration is registered in the job markets of Northern and Central Italy (Ceccagno 2003; Lan 2014). Lombardy, Tuscany, Veneto and Emilia-Romagna are the top four regions with the largest number of Chinese immigrants (ISTAT 2016b). Like many other immigrant groups, industrial districts, where small-scale manufacturing businesses are largely concentrated, and large cities, where there is a significant demand for workers in the labor-intensive service industry and small-scale businesses, have become the primary destinations of Chinese settlement (Ambrosini 2001; Ambrosini and Zucchetti 2002; Colombo and Sciortino 2004; Barberis 2008; 2011).

Chinese immigrants in Italy, most of whom are Wenzhouese, typically engage in four business fields: (1) manufacturing subcontracting, which has attracted the largest proportion of the Chinese population, even though manufacturing production has been badly hit by the global economic crisis since 2008; (2) the restaurant business, including Chinese, Japanese and Thai restaurants, as well as the Italian-style coffee bars that have spread all over the country since the 1980s; (3) import and export, such as garment/leather retailing or wholesaling, represented by a fewer number of firms concentrated mainly in the large urban centers of settlement, such as Milan and Rome (Pedone 2008; 2013b; Ceccagno 2007); (4) small service industries with targeted clientele, which include local tobacco shops, barber shops, supermarkets and massage parlors that serve mainly Italians, as well as travel agencies, translation agencies and ethnic food stores primarily frequented by Chinese immigrants.

However, these four fields did not emerge concurrently. Chinese migrant entrepreneurship diversified from manufacturing to services over the last three decades (Cologna 2005; Ceccagno 2003). Manufacturing and food services were their initial focus and had a boom in the 1980s. Since the second half of the 1990s, they have gradually stepped out from their historically concentrated "refuge" sectors (Cologna 2006a) to retail and wholesale. In the new millennium, more and more Chinese entrepreneurs have moved into neighborhoodscale small businesses catering to the general public (Dei Ottati and Cologna 2015; Cologna 2006b).

Chinese immigrants in Italy can be roughly categorized into wage labors, self-employed petty entrepreneurs and capitalists as shown in the following pyramid:

The diagram not only demonstrates the socioeconomic structure of Chinese immigrants in Italy, but also represents the possibilities of upward economic and social mobility in the Chinese community.

The petty entrepreneurs in the middle stratum are the subject of this paper, and most of them are unskilled and poorly educated migrant workers from rural Wenzhou. Embracing the desire of economic achievement, they moved to Italy in search of better fortunes. They typically view their destination as a workplace rather than a permanent home and thus tend to adhere to a rigorous work ethic, believing that hard work can lead to greater personal wealth.

Many Wenzhouese fulfill their entrepreneurial aspirations after a period of migration. They have therefore graduated from wage labor to become petty entrepreneurs, while a small number have reached the top of the pyramid. They often correlate their level of success to the timing of their arrival in Italy. The general belief is that the early arrivals in the 1980s benefited from the favorable economic environment then to accumulate a significant amount of economic capital, whereas the latecomers faced increasing competition and correspondingly limited prospects of socioeconomic movement.

Generally speaking, Chinese immigrants in Italy have demonstrated a much stronger tendency toward entrepreneurship than other immigrant groups. Fondazione Leone Moressa (2016) reported that Chinese migrant entrepreneurs, the majority of which are petty entrepreneurs, account for 10 percent of migrant entrepreneurs in Italy, even though Chinese migrants make up only 5.4 percent of the immigration population in Italy. The number of Chinese migrant entrepreneurs has also jumped 32 percent from 2010 to 2015.

Chinese migrant entrepreneurship has drawn a great deal of scholarly attention. Many studies have elaborated on specific geographic locations where Chinese migrant entrepreneurship is embedded with local economies and societies, such as Prato (Colombi et al. 2003; Johanson et al. 2009; Baldassar 2015), Milano (Farina et al. 1997; Cologna 2003; 2008; Hatziprokopiou and Montagna 2012), Torino (Berzano et al 2010, Camera di Commercio – FIERI 2011), Rome (Berti et al. 2008), Carpi (Bigarelli 2011; Barberis and Dei Ottati 2012), etc. Scholars have debated whether Chinese entrepreneurship should be attributed to ethnicity (Barberis 2011; Cologna 2005; Blanchard and Castagnone 2015) or structural opportunities (Ceccagno 2014; 2016; Lombardi et al. 2015). Various aspects of entrepreneurship have been discussed, such as its generational transitions and dynamics (Cologna 2006a; Cologna et al. 2010) as well as its informality and illegality (Ceccagno and Rastrelli 2008; CNEL 2011).

This paper, instead, focuses on everyday mobility of Chinese petty entrepreneurs. It offers a new perspective in understanding how Chinese subjects accumulate the capitals for spatial mobility in everyday life to achieve entrepreneurial aspirations and social mobility. Scholars have studied the social mobility of Chinese immigrants from the perspective of economic and social integration (Berti et al. 2013; Berti and Valzania 2015). The two types of mobility are in fact interrelated, as Kaufmann et al. articulated with his proposed concept of *motility* as "the link between spatial and social mobility" (Kaufmann et al. 2004, 749). It was defined as "the capacity of entities (e.g. goods, information or persons) to be mobile in social and geographic space, or as the way in which entities access and appropriate the capacity for socio-spatial mobility according to their circumstances" (Kaufmann et al. 2004, 750). Our discussion on the daily mobility of Chinese migrant entrepreneurs is based on this framework of *motility*, which encompasses three interdependent aspects: *access* to mobility, *competence* to use access and *appropriation* of resources (Kaufmann et al. 2004, 750).

#### *3. Access and Inaccessibility*

According to Kaufmann (2011, 41), access naturally has a physical component, such as the different types of public transportation. Access is also a primary lens through which scholars have studied marginal groups in Western societies (Rifkin 2000; Kloosterman and Rath 2003; Parks 2004). This paper is not an exception but can still serve as a contrast to existing literature.

Most Wenzhouese migrants enjoy little accessibility in their early days of settlement. Their everyday mobility is subject to both the physical layout of urban settlement and sociocultural arrangement of civic life in the host society. As marginalized ethnic minorities, their powerlessness is manifested economically, socially and culturally. Below, we will elaborate on how obstacles to daily mobility in Italy correspond to the immigrants' inability to achieve *motility*.

First of all, access to public transportation requires rich local knowledge and language competence. Admittedly, Italian public transportation systems are open to everyone, including illicit immigrants. The coverage of railway and bus systems extends beyond the city limits to the suburbs and neighboring cities. But the Wenzhouese are hindered by their lack of familiarity with the urban layout and public transportation maps.

In a middle-sized city like Bologna, many bus routes run infrequently, especially during weekends and holidays. Many of them also lack auto-announce systems. Regular delays are compounded by casual suspensions and frequent strikes.

The Chinese migrants are further hampered by their language incompetence. In their early days after arrival, they can't speak Italian at all. They can't read road signs and bus schedules or ask for directions or understand public announcements. Even after years of assimilation, many immigrants can't read or write in Italian, only being able to manage basic conversation.

Many Chinese immigrants complain about their difficulties navigating public transportation systems. Ping, a woman in her late 30s only five months into her move to Bologna, who was living with her husband's family, said:

I only know how to take a bus from our coffee bar to downtown. Other places? I don't know how to take a bus there. It is too complicated. But I can pick up my son from school, because it is close to our coffee bar. I can walk there. If I want to go to a new place, I have to take a taxi with my husband or my mother-in-law.

Like Ping, many of the Chinese immigrants stick to one or two familiar routes and regular destinations. They prefer to limit their daily activities to walking range. When it comes to longer trips, they have to seek help from friends and relatives who enjoy greater physical mobility.

Second, although new computer software such as Google Maps and specific mobile phone applications can facilitate free movement in unfamiliar places, they are beyond the grasp of many first-generation Chinese immigrants, who are often unskilled and poorly educated middle-aged workers or even older. Ping once said:

Life in Italy is more difficult for us. We didn't go to school a lot, so it's hard for us to learn and use these high technologies. We can only remember all the roads and directions in our heads. We can't easily go to a place where we have never been alone.

Third, daily mobility is also regulated by time use (Kaufmann 2011, 42). It is widely acknowledged that the more free time a person has, the more likely the person can be mobile in everyday life. However, among Chinese migrant workers and petty entrepreneurs in Italy, long workdays are the norm.

Due to long working hours, the migrant workers are often stranded in their working places. They are usually instructed by their Chinese employers to work for 10 to 12 hours every day with only one day off each week. They are often too tired after work, so they usually go back to sleep in their dorms, which are usually supplied by their employers. Only on their day off might they hang out with friends, but even then many would rather stay in to sleep, watch TV or play cards.

The self-employed Chinese migrant entrepreneurs are equally diligent. It is common to see these entrepreneurs work and live together with their employees and spend 10 to 12 hours every day in their workshops, restaurants or shops. For the sake of convenience, they often prefer living in a place close to their workplace. For example, coffee bar owners tend to rent an apartment upstairs from their coffee bars, while workshop owners often live and work in the same location.

Apart from a stringent work ethic, Chinese immigrants also tend to be quite frugal. Enlei and his wife used to work as massage therapists at the beach during summers in their early years. "It was hard time for us," his wife said,

The beach was quite far away from the place where we were living, but we never spent one euro taking buses. We knew it only cost one euro, but we weren't willing to spend it. It would cost two euros per day per person, which means 60 euros per month per person. And then 120 euros would vanish if we both took the bus. It was quite a big amount for us at that time. So every day, we had to walk for one hour to get there, and then another hour to get back.

Enlei's wife's comments show how consumption behavior affects daily mobility. Like many other Chinese migrants in Italy, they had to pay off a considerable amount of debt, which they accrued borrowing from friends and relatives to pay for their underground immigration journeys. At the same time, they also minimized other living expenses so most of their savings can go toward their entrepreneurial aspirations.

Fourth, the illicit migrants are restricted by their lack of Italian citizenship. Citizens can enjoy various discounts for public transportation, such as annual tickets. The Chinese migrants even have to be cautious when walking in public to avoid document checks by Italian police.

Their undocumented classification also limits their job opportunities because employers who hire undocumented workers are subject to severe fines. Most of them end up only working for Chinese entrepreneurs, who are willing to risk hiring undocumented immigrants in exchange for a cheaper payroll.

Lastly, the migrants' mobility is limited by their inability to obtain driver's licenses. Some of the migrants may be able to drive, but their illicit status means they cannot apply for driver's licenses. Their language incompetence also prevents them from doing well in written testing.

In sum, as new arrivals and ethnic minorities, Chinese immigrants have to face many constraints on their daily mobility, including the lack of language competence and local knowledge, the inability to mobilize technology and long working hours, as well as their underground identity, which prevents them from obtaining government benefits and permits. They seem to be extremely immobile and powerless in the first stages of their settlement. However, they developed strategies to cope with these weaknesses. These coping strategies, which are presented below, enable them to expand their mobility in the host society.

#### *4. Skills and Knowledge*

Inaccessibility to daily mobility does not mean that Chinese immigrants are totally excluded from physical movements. The immigrants' agency has been continually negotiating with broader structures of mobility networks. And the process of immigration is consistent with accumulation of *capitals*. Indebted to Bourdieu (1986), we use plural here because they accumulate not only economic capital, but also social and cultural capitals. They strategically utilize the system of ethnic economy and social networks to cope with the difficulties they face and intentionally accumulate these capitals that enable them to gradually acquire *motility*.

#### *4.1 Room and Board: Accumulation of Economic Capital*

It is an unwritten rule that Chinese employers have the obligation to provide their employees with free room and board. Workers are often found living and eating with their boss's family in the same workshop or residence (Ceccagno 2007; 2015). In other businesses where the living space is separated from the workplace, Chinese employers usually arrange for living places nearby. More often than not, this is the employer's home. According to Ceccagno (2014, 1116), "[s]leeping arrangement is a mode of reconfiguring space where the obliteration of workers' personal and family life and everyday *motility* leads to profit maximization."

Free room and board is welcomed by the Chinese migrant workers because they can then focus on accumulating economic capital. It is also a useful strategy to deal with inaccessibility to daily mobility. First, the newly arrived immigrants can quickly settle down without having to worry about the unfamiliar social and cultural environment of the host society. Second, it is commonly considered by Chinese migrant workers to be more time-efficient. They do not have to waste time looking for accommodation. They can minimize travel time to work and they do not worry about meals. As many informants emphasized: "We came here to earn money, not to enjoy life. It is more convenient if we have a job that comes with meals and living arrangement."

Free room and board is also complemented by a temporary lodging system, or *dapu* in Chinese (Cologna 2007). Some Chinese entrepreneurs offer beds and meals to transient workers at a cheap price. These places are welcomed by migrants who are looking for business opportunities in a new location and laborers who are working for employment in the service sectors where room and board are not available.

From the Chinese immigrants' perspective, the sacrifice of daily mobility is worthwhile in exchange for the broader spatial mobility of job-hunting without territorial constraints. "We go wherever there is a job" is the common rule Chinese migrants follow. They frequently switch jobs in the Chinese economy scattered over the Italian territories. A *dapu* and free room and board system facilitates their long-term spatial mobility. The Chinese immigrants strategically manipulate the residential regime of the Chinese ethnic economy to realize the accumulation of economic capital. It is their subjective choice to confront the lack of *motility* and reduce the negative impact of inaccessibility to daily mobility.

#### *4.2 Relatives and Friends: Accumulation of Social Capital*

Kinship and township networks are a strong form of social capital that eases the transition of Chinese migrants and improves their everyday mobility. They work with fellow Chinese nationals and live in Chinese communities. The realm of their daily activities is mainly concentrated in areas where the Chinese congregate. In the two streets dubbed *Zhongguo Jie* (Chinese Streets) by Bologna's Chinese immigrants, the range of businesses covers all aspects of everyday life, from food and clothing to household supplies to translation services. Many Chinese immigrants regularly visit these two streets.

The assistance from their relatives and friends enables them to enlarge their area of mobility in everyday life. Many of them already have made some contacts before they depart from their hometowns. Their social network is not only a source of information about their destination but also an essential facilitator of daily mobility.

The relatives and friends who emigrated earlier often play the role of guide and experienced consultant. For instance, Fen and her husband moved to Bologna because her sister's family had already settled down there and started their own family business. Fen recalled how her sister's family helped them adjust:

At the beginning, we did not know where to go. It was always my sister's family that helps us out. Our homes were very close to each other. I always followed my sister to buy food and sundries for family use. We also went to lay in a stock of merchandise together, because we did not have a car at that time.

Fen and her husband quickly found their bearings with help from her sister's family. She followed her sister's footsteps to acquire daily physical mobility for family and business needs. She and her husband chose to live close to her sister and enter her line of local market business. In this way, their social networks facilitated their physical movement in everyday life and further contributed to their economic and social mobility.

Moreover, children born or raised in Italy can further boost the daily mobility of their parents who have limited language ability, local knowledge and technological skills. Such intergenerational knowledge is crucial social capital for the Chinese migrant entrepreneurs in dealing with unexpected happenings in daily mobility, such as going to hospitals or new places. In these cases, children often play the role of guide and language interpreter.

# *4.3 Italian Language and the Driver's License: Accumulation of Cultural Capital*

In addition to the accumulation of economic and social capitals, many Wenzhouese immigrants also make the effort to acquire cultural capital to enhance everyday mobility. There are two key types of cultural capital they strive for: language competence and a driver's license.

Language competence has a comprehensive impact on every aspect of daily life, including daily mobility. "*Mei you yu yan, cun bu nan xing*" is a common saying among Chinese immigrants in Italy, which literally means "Without language, you cannot even move one inch." This expression reflects the importance of Italian language in daily mobility. We wrote earlier on how limited Italian affects the migrant's ability to access public transportation.

The driver's license is another form cultural capital that affects immigrants' everyday mobility. Once they obtain legal residency, taking the driving test becomes the top priority of Wenzhouese entrepreneurs. As many of them told us: "Driving by ourselves is a more convenient way for us to move around."

It is worth noting that a driver's license is not synonymous to driving skills. As a form of institutionalized cultural capital, a driver's license embodies two qualities: driving skills and institutional permission. Compared to local Italians, it is not necessarily harder for the Chinese migrants to learn how to drive. But it is more difficult for them to institutionalize that skill set because of the language barrier. Language incompetence is a major stumbling block to passing the driving test. Many Chinese immigrants have difficulty understanding the examiner during both the oral exam and the road test.

A garment workshop owner explained how she learned Italian and obtained her driver's license:

I learned Italian by myself. I learned it by interacting with Italians. I never learned it at school. In my whole life, I only went to one school. That was driving school. Twice! I could not understand the questions, so I learned by rote all the exam questions in advance. Then I guessed what they asked in the exam.

Her narrative demonstrated the interrelation between the two types of cultural capital and her strong desire to acquire both. Language competence is a determinant factor for acquiring a driver's license, and the license in turn can partly compensate for inaccessibility to daily mobility due to language incompetence.

In summary, the seemingly powerless Chinese immigrants have their own strategies to overcome inaccessibility to daily mobility. They strategically accumulate all kinds of capital by taking jobs that offer room and board, by asking for assistance from their social and kinship networks and learning Italian and acquiring a driver's license. In this way, they have gradually compiled skills and knowledge, in other words, the *motility* to access to daily mobility. But the cultivation of these abilities cannot be accomplished without strong aspiration to everyday mobility.

#### *5. Desires and Aspirations*

According to Kaufmann (2011), the acquisition of *motility* is built on individual aspirations. In this case, the Wenzhouese migrant entrepreneurs' efforts to learn Italian and obtain driver's licenses derive from their desire to acquire *motility* and transform it into daily mobility. And this desire is further driven by their aspirations to achieve socioeconomic mobility.

The Wenzhouese migrants tend to be more entrepreneurial than migrants from other Chinese regions. A Wenzhouese restaurant owner, who has lived in Italy for more than 20 years, discussed his understanding of differences between Wenzhouese and northeastern Chinese immigrants:

We Wenzhouese are different from those Northeasterners. They work for others, hoping to earn some quick money here and then go back to China as soon as possible. We Wenzhouese come here with family. We stay here to launch our own businesses. We like working for ourselves. We also want to go back to China, but not now. We will go back when we are old.

In contrast to his narrative, a Northeastern migrant worker said:

We Northeasterners usually do not want to stay in Italy for long.  So we do not have a strong desire to learn Italian. It is too difficult. In this regard, we have to admire the Wenzhouese. Take my boss as an example. He only completed primary school in China and he never went to school in Italy. But his Italian is pretty good. They just learned the language by rote memorization.

 This Northeastern worker did not go back to China after a couple of years as he had planned. He ended up working in several workshops and restaurants opened by Wenzhouese migrants for more than 10 years. But during the same period, he witnessed many of his coworkers from Wenzhouese leave to start their own businesses.

The narratives of these two Chinese immigrants reflect very different attitudes toward the acquisition of *motility*. The Wenzhouese migrants who have strong entrepreneurial aspirations only consider being employed as a transitory stage in their long-term migration trajectory. It is a strategy for them to accumulate not only economic but also social and cultural capitals to achieve their entrepreneurial ambitions. Once they accumulate these various capitals, they quit and become entrepreneurs. In contrast, many Northeasterners are content with their jobs that come with room and board and tend to stay in them for a long time. In this sense, they sacrificed daily mobility for the accumulation of economic capital.

The Wenzhouese petty entrepreneurs in Italy also share similar long-term business plans and life trajectories. Fumin, the owner of a coffee bar in Bologna, is a typical case. He arrived in Italy in 1994 and worked for three years illegally. Most of his savings went toward repaying the amount he borrowed to gain illicit passage to Italy. He took advantage of the 1998 amnesty to obtain legal residency. Then he acquired a driver's license and rented a stand in a local market. At the same time, his wife and three children reunited with him in Bologna in 1998 by emigrating legally. He bought a coffee bar and started his own establishment in 2010. Fumin said:

In the first two years, I switched jobs many times. All the bosses offered meals and beds. I gradually got used to the Italian environment. Then I started looking for chances to work for myself. There is more *freedom* when you work for yourself. I saw people selling trinkets with baskets under their arms. I followed them and learned to do the same thing. At the beginning I did not have a residency permit, so I had to do it secretly. When I got my residency permit, I started having some savings little by little. Soon I bought my own stand in a market.

Fumin's words expressed his subjectivity to become a self-employed entrepreneur. Many Wenzhouese emphasized the "freedom" entrepreneurs enjoy compared to wageworkers. In spite of sharing the same working and living space with their employees, the employers possess more agency to mobilize their time and space. As Fumin said,

Working for ourselves is more flexible. Time is more flexible. Family members can easily adjust their schedules and change shifts, so they can go anywhere they want without being trapped at work.

According to Fumin and many other Chinese immigrants, entrepreneurs have more access to spatial mobility. And this spatial mobility is also a representation of social mobility. Obtaining a driver's license and buying a car ensures the realization of both spatial and social mobility. Fumin's narrative confirmed this point:

Without a car, how can we run a business? It is not convenient at all. So, no matter how difficult the driving test is, we have to pass it.

In addition, car ownership also has symbolic value. Buying a car is a display of conspicuous consumption, which is also common among returned Wenzhouese migrants in China (Li 1999a). A car represents the attainment of a kind of European dream and the fulfillment of entrepreneurial aspirations.

#### *6. Motility, Ethnicity, and Entrepreneurial Subjectivity*

Chinese petty entrepreneurs in Italy have demonstrated a system of *motility*, the capacity to be mobile in social and geographic space and the ability to access and appropriate that capacity (Kaufmann et al. 2004). In this framework, we have elaborated on the specific kinds of inaccessibility, skills and aspirations that define Chinese petty entrepreneurs in the Italian context of (im)mobilities. The detailed analysis leads us to another question: why do the *Chinese petty entrepreneurs* in particular are able to have such *motility*?

To better answer the question, first of all, we will explain the relationship between ethnicity and *motility*. As we have noted, these Chinese migrants are primarily from the same region in China – Wenzhou. Scholars have outlined the characteristics of emigration from Wenzhou (Kuhn 2011, 48–51) and they are even generalized as an exportable "Wenzhou model" (Tomba 1999, 280–294). The success of Wenzhou emigration to Europe is attributed to structural factors in post-Mao China. The Wenzhou region, along with some other areas of Fujian province, were economically impoverished, but faced less administrative interference from the central government in their day-to-day life compared with other places (Liu 1992; Thunø and Pieke 2005). Therefore, these areas developed private economies much earlier than other parts of China, which is an important reason for large-scale emigration (Xiang 2003). In addition, nonstructural factors, such as Christianity (Cao 2010; 2013), might also play out in Wenzhou people's migrant lives. These analyses can explain how and why Wenzhouese migrate but cannot fully articulate why Wenzhouese are able to gain *motility* despite many constraints in the host society. Thus, we suggest that the Wenzhouese ethnicity be considered in relation to *motility*.

Indebted to the cognitive perspective towards ethnicity (Brubaker 2004), we argue that Wenzhouese ethnicity is not constructed as preexisting groupness – although it is expressed in commonalities like dialect (Kuhn 2008, 41) and consumption behavior (Li 1999b, 191–194) – but rather socially formed, reinforced and reshaped in the process of accumulating various capitals. As we have elaborated, on one hand, Wenzhouese migrants utilize their social connections with fellow Wenzhouese, usually relatives and friends, to navigate in the city. On the other hand, the ever-increasing mobility enables them to develop a more cohesive ethnic community. As for mobilizing social capital, the accumulation of all the capitals enhances the mobility of their fellow Wenzhouese and simultaneously facilitates the categorization of ethnicity.

Thus, *motility* has ethnic difference, and that difference is based on the processual categorization of ethnicity. No ethnic group naturally possesses more *motility* than the others. Wenzhouese used to have little access to mobility, but they endeavored to accumulate capitals that can make them mobile. In the process, they were temporarily subject to mobility-restrained jobs before launching their own businesses. Furthermore, they tried to learn Italian in order to pass the driving test. Once they pass, their accumulated capital allowed them to buy their own cars and move freely around the city.

Second, entrepreneurship also affects *motility*. In the Italian migrant economies, entrepreneurs have more capacity to be mobile than workers. According to Ceccagno (2014), Chinese migrant workers are usually living and eating with their Chinese employer's family in the same workshop. The accommodation arrangement highly restrains workers' agency, although they enjoy limited short-term territorial mobility within the Industrial Districts. In contrast, migrant entrepreneurs have more freedom to move around in the city. Due to a higher purchasing power, they can access not only general mobilities but also specific automobility (Urry 2004)

The comparison between migrant entrepreneurs and migrant workers above shows that entrepreneurship provides a system of capitals in which *motility* can be exchanged with other types of capital. Kaufmann et al. (2004) proposed to consider *motility* as a form of capital and that different forms of movement may be interchangeable. In this case, Wenzhouese migrants first sacrificed their mobility for economic capital. After completing early accumulation, they use some of their economic capital to purchase mobility. Thus, entrepreneurship enables Chinese migrants to mobilize *motility*.

It should also be emphasized that these Chinese migrants are petty entrepreneurs. Their socioeconomic status restricts free movement in the city. Suppose they are entrepreneurs with a higher education background and larger investments, then their mobility is more likely to be even more developed.  This exchange of capitals can also be found among petty entrepreneurs in the developing world (Haugen 2012; Lan and Xiao 2014).

Third, in addition to ethnicity and entrepreneurship, the deeper driver to *motility* lies in subjectivities that are rooted in their life histories and everyday practices. Subjectivity "provides the ground for subjects to think through their circumstances and to feel through their contradictions, and in doing so, to inwardly endure experiences that would otherwise be outwardly unbearable" (Biehl et al. 2007, 14). In the case of *motility*, the subjectivity of Chinese petty entrepreneurs provides them with the consciousness of inaccessibility and emboldens them to obtain accessibility. The subjectivity comes through ethnicity and entrepreneurship in some ways.

Ethnicity is one of embodiments of subjectivity, because the experiential basis of subjectivity is consistent with the processual formation of ethnicity. Wenzhouese ethnicity has embodied distinct subjectivity. Two narratives from Wenzhouese and Northeasterners demonstrate the discursive representation of agencies, one to make a fortune and one to earn money. Two divergent agencies decide everyday ethnicities (Brubaker 2006) and different ways of living in the host society. In other words, without the internalization and the externalization of Wenzhouese ethnicity vis-à-vis Wenzhou people themselves, other migrant groups and the Italian host society, *motility* could not be achieved in such strong aspirational ways.

Entrepreneurship is another embodiment of subjectivity. Entrepreneurship not only provides a bundle of capitals for *motility*, but is also fused with motivations to mobilize those capitals. The motivation and aspiration result from the experiential subjectivities, which those Wenzhou migrants obtain over the time. Wenzhouese subjectivity centers on the individuality of Chinese societal transformation (See Yan 2009) and the practice of entrepreneurship in diaspora (See Pieke and Mallee eds. 1999, Part II). In this vein, *motility* is more likely gained by Wenzhouese petty entrepreneurs than others.

#### *7. Conclusion*

On one hand, this case study of Chinese petty entrepreneurs in Italy has contributed to the understanding of mobility studies by emphasizing ethnicity and subjectivity. We argue that ethnicity is sometimes just a discursive representation, but entrepreneurial subjectivities drive *motility* by deploying a system of capitals. In other words, the Chinese migrants acquire mobility not because they are Wenzhouese, but because subjectivity is embodied through Wenzhouese entrepreneurship. This argument is rooted in a larger theoretical shift from structure to agency in current mobility studies.

Nevertheless, the socioeconomic status of the subject still matters. Many pieces of evidence in this paper have shown how the subjectivity of petty entrepreneurs is subject to structural constraints. In the meantime, the subjects develop coping strategies against the constraints. The dialectic relationship always exists, but we call for further study of the subjectivity of mobilities.

On the other hand, the study of *motility* in this paper, which differs from general mobility studies, has contributed to the understanding of Chinese immigration to host societies. We argue that beyond the immigrant patterns of either exclusion or inclusion, Chinese immigrants create their own imaginative geographies of the cities. Their daily mobilities are part of residents' everyday lives. Thus, their imaginative geographies need to be considered in urban planning and immigrant governance in Italy.

Furthermore, this study of *motility* also contributes to the understanding of Chinese capitalism in the global arena. Some terminology of Chinese goingout practices tends to homogenize the Chinese actors. For instance, *mobility*, a term that conceptualizes movements of (Chinese) migrants, focuses on how the actors are/become mobile, instead of exploring *who* is/becomes mobile. In contrast, indebted to the conceptualization of *motility*, this paper takes the mobile actors' identities and social status into serious consideration. It helps clarify to what extent Chinese capitalism reaches the ground, how Chinese migrants cope with local lives, and how Chinese practices are kept, altered and mixed with local institutions.

#### *References*

Ceccagno, Antonella. 1998. *Cinesi d'Italia*. Roma: Manifestolibri.

# POLITICS OF VISIBILITY IN THE CHINESE COMMUNITY IN PRATO, ITALY

# *Lan Tu* University of New Hampshire

#### *Abstract*

This paper takes a spatial perspective to study the polarization within the Chinese community in Prato, Italy. It shows that the power asymmetry between lead firms and subcontractors within the Chinese apparel industry has led to a spatial division of labor, in which different kinds of the firms specialize in different kinds of work and occupy different parts of the city. Moreover, the spatial division of labor triggered a series of political struggles relating to the urban structure which dates back to the postwar years of Prato's textile industrial district. While naturalized in the 1950s and 1960s, the urban structure was problematized in the 2000s by a particular process of discursive reconstruction. The chapter argues that these political struggles over urban structure, or the "politics of visibility", have become the center of the social tensions between Chinese and Italian communities in Prato.

#### *Keywords*

Apparel industry, Chinese migration, spatial division of labor, urban structure, Prato.

#### 摘要

本章通过空间视角来研究普拉托华人社区内部的阶层分化。华人服装产 业中领导企业和分包商之间的权利不平等已经在普拉托形成了一种劳动 空间分异,即不同类型的企业积聚在城市的不同部分。并且,这种空间 分异导致了一系列关于城市结构的政治斗争。普拉托城市结构的形成可 以追溯到二战后纺织工业大发展的时期。尽管该城市结构在五六十年代 被人们习以为常,从2000年开始,当地一系列的话语重构将其变成了政 治问题。笔者认为这些关于城市结构的政治斗争,即"能见度政治", 已经成为普拉托华人与当地人之间社会矛盾的焦点。

### 关键词 服装产业中国移民,劳动空间分异,城市结构,普拉托。

#### *1. Introduction*

The Chinese community in Prato, Italy has been the center of many academic (Smyth and French 2009) and public discussions (Donadio 2010; Pieraccini 2010). Existing researches have covered a wide range of issues, such as the em-

*Transcending Borders. Selected papers in East Asian studies*, edited by Valentina Pedone, Ikuko Sagiyama, ISBN 978-88-6453-403-9 (online), ISBN 978-88-6453-402-2 (print), CC BY 4.0, 2016 Firenze University Press

beddedness of the Chinese industry in the local economy (Barberis 2009; Ceccagno 2009; Ceccagno 2012; Dei Ottati 2009), the transnational entrepreneurship of the Chinese immigrants (Dei Ottati 2014; Lan and Zhu 2014; Lombardi and Sforzi 2016), the local governance of the Chinese community (Barbu, Dunford, and Liu 2013), the racial segregation of Prato (Bressan and Tosi Cambini 2009; Bressan and Tosi Cambini 2011), and child care and gender dynamics within the Chinese family businesses (Ceccagno 2007; Krause 2015). However, despite a few exceptions (Ceccagno 2012; Berti, Pedone, and Valzania 2013; Lan 2015), the socioeconomic polarization within the Chinese community by and large remains unexplored.

In this chapter, drawing upon the literature of global value chains and urban geography, I take a spatial perspective to study the polarization within the Chinese community in Prato. In particular, I focus on the spatial division of labor in Prato, involving a subcontracting practice in which lead firms outsource less profitable and informal labor to stitching workshops. By so doing, the more powerful lead firms can openly claim their legitimacy in the more visible part of the city, while the stitching workshops with substandard working conditions have to hide themselves in the most invisible and dilapidated corners. Furthermore, I argue that this spatial division of labor is not entirely new in Prato, as it triggered a series of political struggles that have been ongoing since the 1950s, before the Chinese arrived *en masse*. Although naturalized in the 1950s and 1960s, the substandard working conditions alongside the flexible use of urban space were discursively problematized in the 2000s, becoming the center of the social tensions between Chinese and Italian communities. Therefore, the "politics of visibility" refer to the political struggles that have been involved in the naturalization and later problematization of the particular spatial division of labor in Prato.

This chapter is based on my field research in Italy and China between 2011 and 2013, during which I conducted 80 semi-structured interviews with 57 interviewees including entrepreneurs, workers, government officials, and social activists. In particular, I interviewed 9 Chinese apparel manufacturers, many of whom were interviewed more than once over the course of three years. These interviews included one dyer-washer (in Chinese *Ranxi Gongsi*, literally the dyer-washer firms), one thread maker (*Fengrenxian Gongsi*), two stitching workshops (*Buyi Gongchang*, firms specialized in stitching), and five cutter-designers (*Caijian Gongsi*, which are also the lead firms of the production teams in Prato). In addition to the interviews, between November and December 2013, I conducted a onemonth participant observation by staying in a Chinese stitching workshop in Prato.

Even though the sample size is small, it is still representative for two reasons. First, the sample covers all 4 types of firms in the industry and includes both more established firms older than 10 years and the firms younger than 5 years. By triangulating information among different actors in the industry, I was able to minimize the potential errors and sampling bias. Second, Chinese businesses have generated strong distrusts against non-Chinese researchers in Prato due to the recent investigations by Italian plainclothes police and journalists. In fact, many scholars have voiced the difficulties of studying Chinese firms in Italy due to these sentiments (Barberis 2009). Conducted by co-ethnic researchers, this research managed to reduce the distrusts from the subjects and thus increase the credibility of the information.

The rest of the chapter is divided into five parts. Section 2 briefly reviews the previous studies about the Chinese community in Prato, in particular its apparel production networks, processes of polarization, and urban structure. Section 3 introduces the economic rationalities based on which lead firms outsource less profitable and informal labor to stitching workshops, resulting in a specific spatial division of labor within the apparel sector. Section 4 investigates the historical roots of the spatial division of labor in Prato and the ways in which the historical heritage was discursively problematized in the 2000s. In Section 5, I focus on an ethnography about the dragon parades for the Chinese New Year which exemplify the politics of visibility in Prato. The last section concludes the chapter.

#### *2. Apparel Production Networks, Polarization, and Urban Structure*

The case of Prato has been interesting in mainly three ways. First, as a province, Prato hosts the second largest Chinese community in Italy, after only Milan but ahead of Florence and Rome, based on the data from ISTAT (the Italian National Institute of Statistics, http://dati.istat.it/). Also according to ISTAT, on January 1st, 2015, there were 37,507 Chinese nationals holding residence permits in the province of Prato. Given Prato's total population of 252,987 on the same date, the ratio of Chinese over the total was about 14.8%, the highest across the country. Second, the Chinese apparel industry in Prato has been one of the largest in Italy by the number of firms. Based on the data from Prato Chamber of Commerce (http://www.po.camcom.it/servizi/datistud/index.php), by the first half of 2015, the number of manufacturing firms owned by Chinese nationals reached 4,019, making Prato the center of apparel production networks not only in Italy but also across Europe. Finally, Prato has traditionally been a textile town since the end of World War II, meaning textile, as opposed to apparel, has always been the primary industry.<sup>1</sup> In the past, scholars cited Prato as the prototype for the Italian industrial districts, which in the 1960s and 1970s outcompeted some of

<sup>1</sup> Often conflated in English, in this specific context, textile industry refers to the production of fabrics whereas apparel industry refers to the production of garments.

the mass production plants in Europe and in the US (Becattini 1979; Piore and Sabel 1986). Mostly consisting of small and medium-sized enterprises, Prato has been famous for its endogenous innovation, sharing of tacit knowledge, and mutual financial supports (Becattini 2001).

Existing research also points out the fact that there has been little synergy between Prato's apparel industry, which has been mostly run by the Chinese, and its textile industry, which has been mostly run by the Italians (Dei Ottati 2009; Ceccagno 2015; Lan 2015). While the Chinese apparel industry has been growing steadily since the 1990s, the local textile industry has been declining during the same period of time. These scholars also rightly pointed out that the contrast between the apparel and textile industries has been the fundamental reason for the social tensions between the Chinese and Italian communities. Hereafter, unless specified otherwise, I use the Industry to refer to the Chinese apparel industry in Prato.

Many research interests have focused on explaining the reasons for the success of the Industry, including its specific upgrading strategy (Toccafondi 2009), malfunction of the regulations (Dei Ottati 2009), and undocumented workers (Pieraccini 2010). More recently, a number of scholars realized that no single factor caused the rise of the Industry. For example, Dei Ottati (2014) pointed out that the Chinese *pronto moda* or fast fashion has "a transnational extension" thanks to globalization and modern technology. Lan and Zhu (2014) showed that the Industry has so far focused on the low-end fast fashion markets in Italy and other European countries. In particular, they showed that the success of the Industry was conditioned on both a group of Chinese production teams in Prato and a network of ethnic Chinese traders across Europe. Ceccagno (2015) and Lan (2015) showed that the success of the Industry was historically contingent upon the transformation of fashion production networks at the global scale, the changing immigration regulations, and the local governance (or rather the lack thereof) in Prato. In this chapter, I do not intend to propose another explanation for the success of the Industry, for it has been nicely investigated in these recent works. Instead, I focus on the polarization within the Chinese community.

Indeed, the research on the polarization within the Chinese community is not entirely new, as many have discerned an apparent paradox in Prato. On the one hand, scholars pointed out the degradation of working conditions in the Industry (Ceccagno 2007; Bressan and Tosi Cambini 2011; Lan 2015). They showed that many Chinese workers lived in the dilapidated part of the city. On the other hand, the same scholars repetitively confirmed the success of the Industry compared to the declining textile industry in Prato (Lan and Zhu 2014; Ceccagno 2015). In particular, its prosperity has led to an extravaganza of new fancy buildings and luxury cars, all of which are very much envied by the local people (Pieraccini 2010). In particular, Berti, Pedone, and Valzania (2013) observed the rising inequality within the Chinese community between a handful of successful business owners in the apparel industry and the majority of the community in terms of their consumption behaviors in retail markets. They argued that this internal polarization within the Chinese community could have important consequences for them to integrate into the Italian society, as different social classes integrate in different dimensions and at different rates. Drawing on these works, this chapter takes a spatial perspective to study the polarization within the Chinese community. In particular, it studies the relationship between the polarization and the spatial division of labor in the Chinese apparel sector, which in turn is conditioned on a specific urban structure in Prato.

There have been fewer researches focusing on the urban structure in Prato. Using the theories of urban sociology, Bressan and Tosi Cambini (2009; 2011) observed that the Chinese immigrants in Prato concentrated in a "zone of transition" with a degrading living environment and chaotic social governance. In particular, they argued that the current urban segregation between Italian and Chinese communities in Prato has its roots in the longer history of Prato's urban structure. Building upon their work, this chapter takes one step further to investigate the ways in which Prato's urban structure affected the spatial division of labor in the Industry. Apparently, the immigrants who enjoyed the wealth of the Industry are not the same immigrants who suffer from the substandard working conditions. Geographically speaking, the wealthier business owners and most of the workers do not live in the same part of the city.

#### *3. Power Asymmetry and the Spatial Division of Labor*

Power asymmetry between lead firms and subcontractors is one of the most common characteristics in buyer-driven value chains, for which apparel sector is the best example (Gereffi, Humphrey, and Sturgeon 2005). According to the global value chains literature, a buyer-driven chain means that in a particular sector, buyers have more power and thus capture more value than the manufacturers (Gereffi 1999). In particular, buyers usually outsource less profitable manufacturing phases to the manufacturers, a practice that has been common across the world. Scholars have found that the increasingly flexible demand for consumer goods has contributed to the widespread offshoring from western buyers/retailers to Third-World manufacturers (Gereffi 1994, 105; Gereffi 1999, 45). As a consequence, economic insecurity and informal labor has also been transferred to the Third World. More specifically, since the western retailers constantly chase the cheapest labor across the world, local manufacturers in the developing countries have to squeeze their labor costs as much as possible to meet the requirements. Meanwhile, since the demand now fluctuates and diversifies more than any time before, the manufacturers have to rely on a more flexible workforce that they can easily manipulate and dispose of whenever necessary. This global trend has led to downgrading working conditions in some countries of the Third World (Hughes 2001; Barrientos et al. 2012; Barrientos 2013).

Figure 1: Two Typical Production Teams of the Chinese Apparel Industry in Prato, Each Led by a Cutter-Designer (Lan and Zhu 2014, 163). Note that although dyerwasher and thread-makers are graphically in the center, they are not the organizers of the apparel production.

The relationship between cutter-designers and stitching workshops is thus a local realization of this power asymmetry between retailers and manufacturers in global value chains. In the Industry, each production team is led by one cutter-designer and several stitching workshops (see Figure 1). The cutter-designers usually specialize in designing models and cutting fabrics, both requiring higher capital input, more skills and generating more profits.<sup>2</sup> All of the stitching phase is outsourced to stitching workshops in a captive way – that is, stitching workshops are typically grouped in a team led by one cutter-designer and are usually not allowed to work outside the team even during spare season (Lan and Zhu 2014). My interviews show that five out of five cutter-designers had most of their workshops in the team for over three years (author's interviews on various dates in 11/2013). Through the ways in which contracts are

<sup>2</sup> Although this chapter is not intent on studying the sourcing strategy of the cutterdesigners, many of the fabrics were indeed sourced from China. For a detailed analysis of the upstream sourcing strategy, please read Lan and Zhu (2014).

made, this following workshop owner explained the power asymmetry between cutter-designers and workshops:

"For bigger ones [cutter-designers], workshop [owners] need to go to the company in person when the contracts alongside parts of cloths are released. If one doesn't go, one doesn't get the contract. Although the relationship between these bigger cutter-designer and workshops is generally stable…one workshop basically only works for one cutter-designer no matter how small the contract is, due to intensive competition here in Prato. The workshop is still replaceable for the cutter-designer… All in all, more power is in cutter-designers in this particular value chain."

(Workshop owner, 1/18/2012, in Prato).

Figure 2. A Cutter-Designer in *Macrolotto 1* (taken by author on 11/2/2013).

The asymmetry in the apparel value chain has also resulted in a particular spatial division of labor. While more profits are captured by cutter-designers, the risks of using irregular labor are outsourced to the stitching workshops. On the one hand, these cutter-designers are not typically labor-intensive but have to be open to the public. They usually maintain a smaller workforce which requires higher technical skills, and so labor abuse is much less tolerated. Workers in cutter-designers either rent their own apartments or live in separate dorms

#### 34 *LAN TU*

provided by the employer, and their working conditions are usually clean and spacious. Moreover, as the place where external buyers stop by and make orders, the appearance of the cutter-designers (at least part of it) is designed to be appealing to the public. Most of the cutter-designers are located in the better renovated areas of *Macrolotto 1 and 2* to the south the medieval wall, which are also closer to the state highways. All these made cutter-designers the "public face" of the Industry (see Figure 2).

On the other hand, stitching workshops specialize in low-skilled labor-intensive stitching work. There are two factors making this phase of production particularly less favorable to cutter-designers. First, very often the stitching work has to be done overnight during the peak season to meet the flexible orders all over Europe. Extra-long working hours on sewing machines have become the epitome of the stitching workers' lives as reported in the local public media (Pieraccini 2010). Moreover, many workshops choose to stay in the loosely partitioned warehouses and dilapidated factory buildings, where workers and the owner's whole family work, eat, and sleep in the same building. Many scholars have pointed out that living and working in the same place has enhanced flexibility and saved costs for the Industry (Ceccagno 2007; Ceccagno 2015; Lan 2015). To save even more costs, the building is normally overcrowded, lacking standard hygiene facilities, and has no A/C in the summer and no furnace in the winter. All these violate the local zoning policy, the *edilizia obbligatoria* (mandatory of the use of the buildings), and national labor laws. If found out, the company will be fined and closed (LR Toscana n. 1/2005). Second, stitching workshops are where undocumented workers usually concentrate. Because they require little language or technical skills, the stitching workshops are the ideal place for new immigrants.3

"There will be less and less stitching workshops of course. Most of the final firms are legal, whereas stitching workshops have all sorts of problems. I am indeed worried about these workshops, because they are the people who make our business successful. We have no solution for this problem yet."

(Owner of a cutter-designer, 3/23/2012, in Prato).

The above quote shows that owners of the cutter-designers have certainly been aware of the power asymmetry but have no solution for it, resulting in a particular spatial division of labor in the apparel sector. Both the substandard

<sup>3</sup> Ceccagno and Rastrelli (2008, 91) show that after the 2002 amnesty, the ratio of Chinese undocumented workers in Prato declined to 11% of the working population in the Industry. My interviews confirm that after the 2012 amnesty, the percentage of undocumented workers was further reduced to less than 10%.

working conditions and presence of undocumented workers force the stitching workshops to operate in secret. Unlike the cutter-designers who are located in the relatively new industrial areas to the south of the city, usually the stitching workshops are located in *Macrolotto 0* to the west of the medieval city wall. They occupy the more dilapidated corners built in the 1950s and 1960s for Italian textile firms, which have also been known for its substandard working conditions as we discuss below (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. A building shared by multiple stitching workshops in *Macrolotto 0* (taken by author on 11/9/2013).

This spatial division of labor is not unique in Prato. As Begg et al. (2005) show, garage factories are widespread in Bulgaria and the manufacturing in these factories is always "hidden" from the public. A similar situation can also be observed in immigrants' apparel workshops in the American cities (Waldinger 1984; Kwong 1999). However, in none of these places does this particular spatial division of labor reach such a large scale and become the central problem in local society. What is distinct in the Industry is not only the polarization between cutter-designers and stitching workshops, but also the particular ways in which a politics of visibility emerged.

#### *4. Historical Roots and Discursive Reconstruction*

It has always been a question why given this many irregularities, the local government in Prato did not completely regularize the Industry, despite their many efforts in the past decade. In 2007, the then central left government started investigating the Chinese firms due to the public pressures (Goldsmith 2007). After the 2009 election of a right-wing coalition, the number of investigation cases substantially rose (Lan 2015). However, none of these efforts completely regularized the Industry. In this chapter, I do not intend to explicate all the complex mechanisms behind the law enforcement in Prato. Instead, I will focus on a process of discursive construction in which the political struggles over urban structure in Prato, or the "politics of visibility" were first naturalized in the 1950s and then problematized in the 2000s. I argue that the importance of this discursive reconstruction is still overlooked in existing research about Prato.

As many scholars have pointed out, one of the reasons why the local government decided not to duly enforce the regulations is the fact that in history, Prato's textile firms were working more or less the same way (Becattini 2001; Ceccagno 2015; Lan 2015). The root of the politics of visibility in Prato dates back to the heyday of the textile industrial district in the 1950s and 1960s, when the urban structure had already become the field for political struggles between the municipal government and local textile industry. There have been three proposals for town planning in Prato since then, ranging from the Nello Baroni Plan in 1954, the Leonardo Savioli Plan in 1955, and the Plinio Marconi Plan in 1961, all turning out unsuccessful (Becattini 2001; Bressan and Tosi Cambini 2011).

The first idea of urban planning, the Nello Baroni Plan emerged in 1954 right after the economic takeoff of the industrial district, and immediately provoked vast rejections from textile producers. The main worry of the producers was that the rigid zoning regulations would impede the nascent industrialization and discourage the burgeoning entrepreneurship in the town. Strong oppositions drove the government to propose the Leonardo Savioli Plan in 1955 which largely removed the regulations and allowed more flexibility for individual textile companies. The Savioli plan "aimed to restore to Prato 'in a broad concept the human scale which, though still alive in the Middle Ages, is now completely lacking (…) in the chaotic post-war building boom' (as Savioli's report puts it) – and aims to make the most of the particular polycentric structure of the settlements in the quarters comprising the territory of the Commune" (Becattini 2001, 73) (originally in (Giovannini and Innocenti 1996, 286)). However, after a four-year debate between the municipality and the textile industry, the Savioli Plan was turned down in 1960 by "the pressure applied by the craftsmen and industrialists who regarded it as an excessive limitation of the potential development of the industrial areas" (Becattini 2001, 73; originally in Mori 1986, 826).

A completely new proposal, the Plinio Marconi Plan, was commissioned in 1961 and finally approved in 1964. However, the actual implementation of the plan was postponed to 1972 as the struggle between textile producers and the municipal government carried on. In the final plan, the municipal government agreed to make a major compromise by allowing virtually no control over the textile industry. "In order to respond to the fictitious needs of 'inflated' forecasts, an expert remarked, the territory returned to being an uncontrolled blot spreading across the landscape" (Becattini 2001, 75; originally in Mariotti 1988). It was estimated that "by 1995 Prato would have 350,000 inhabitants and 100,000 workers in the textile industry(!)" (Becattini 2001, 75). As of 2015, the province of Prato had 252,987 inhabitants according to ISTAT, and the employment of the textile industry peaked at 61,097 in 1981 but dramatically fell from then on (Dei Ottati 1996, 36). The Plinio Marconi Plan was, as a result, too optimistic. In the regional Florence Inter-Commune Plan in 1965, the Florence government soberly examined the textile industry in all neighboring provinces and deemed the prosperity "a purely temporary phenomenon" (Becattini 2001, 76). The Florence government turned out to be correct as the Plinio Marconi Plan ended up being a plan without real effect.

One of the major disagreements between the Prato municipality and the textile industry was the ways in which firms used their buildings. At that moment, the flexible production by Italian textile firms was similar to the current ways of the Chinese apparel firms. In fact, it was the Italian family firms who built the kind of buildings in which the owner's family could work and live in the same place. These buildings combine the factory, normally the ground floor and backyard, with the living space on the second and third floors. They not only saved potential costs for renting separate factory floors but also allowed for the convenience of overtime work which was the norm between the 1950s and 1970s (Becattini 2001, 143; Bressan and Tosi Cambini 2011). Moreover, most of the roads in the *Macrolott*o *0* (the area where Chinese stitching workshops now concentrate) were built by individual family firms with little collective coordination. Sometimes, firms would intentionally build dead-ends to hide themselves away from the outsiders and maintained their production's invisibility (Bressan and Tosi Cambini 2011, 212). Other problems included insufficient sewage system and accumulating garbage (Becattini 2001, 76). All these irregularities were naturalized in Prato's town plan.

Such an urban structure turned out to be ideal for the Industry when the Italian textile gradually declined. These new family firms, now Chinese, nicely fit into the buildings abandoned by the Italians particularly in *Macrolotto 0* and further exploit the buildings in more abusive ways. Alongside the Chinese takeover, the politics of visibility also changed. Due to the tensions between Chinese and Italian businesses, a historically naturalized urban structure is now problematized partially through discursive reconstruction.

In this chapter, I select a specific case study in which the politics of visibility is discursively reworked in Prato. It is the "Livable Factory" project by a local employer's association, PF (name anonymized). PF is an association of local entrepreneurs which has existed since the 1980s. Among other efforts that it has made to cooperate with the Chinese companies and ameliorate the local hostility against the Chinese, PF proposed an experimental project called the *fabbrica abitata* (livable factory) to help correct the building misuses in the Chinese stitching workshops without incurring too much costs for the owners. The whole idea was to create an architectural model based on which empty factories and warehouses could be lawfully redesigned into buildings integrating both living and productive functions.

"We definitely think the law must be respected, but we have to find out a right way of legalizing together. Because we think that cooperation provides big opportunities for the local economy. By saying this, we are not only pointing to the interests of Italians. In fact, we do think that by improving the current condition, it would be good for Chinese themselves to have a better life and better working conditions."

(Member of the PF, 2/15/2012, in Prato).

PF was certainly aware that the project had to be articulated with the broader discourse toward Chinese immigration in Prato. In its promotional video, the motive of the project is presented as "Can a symbol of degradation become a righteous project?" ("*Un simbolo del degrado può diventare un progetto virtuoso?*") The legal way of using the factory space is depicted as "the western model" (Figure 4), whereas the fusion of living and productive spaces in the Industry is depicted as "the eastern model" (Figure 5).

The "western" mode of production is thus associated with images of wellplanned cities, whereas the "eastern" way is associated with all sorts of irregular labor in the Industry that Pratese people have been quite familiar with through the local media. By so doing, a regime of truth about the correct/preferable mode of production is reconstructed. The irregularities of the Industry become an essence of the eastern culture which can be pinned down to particular (underdeveloped) parts of the world. It needs to be modernized and appropriated in the urban structure of Prato, even though the urban structure itself has in fact been far from the "ideal" since the 1950s.

By no means have I intended to criticize the efforts that PF and many other Italian organizations have made to ameliorate the social tensions in Prato.

Figure 4. The "Western Mode of Production" depicted by PF (author's screenshot of the promotional video on 1/5/2014).

Figure 5. The "Eastern Mode of Production" depicted by PF (author's screenshot of the promotional video on 1/5/2014).

Neither have I intended to paint the working conditions of the stitching workshops in bright colors. Indeed, misuses of the factory buildings have been the main cause of numerous tragic fires throughout the history of textile and apparel industry, from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City in 1911 to the fire in a Chinese stitching workshop leaving 7 workers dead on December 2nd, 2013. In this chapter, my purpose is to demystify the discursive ways in which the urban structure is first naturalized and then problematized in different historical contexts. I argue that without this historical dimension, we cannot fully understand the tensions over urban space in Prato. In what follows, I show that the whole politics of visibility is most conspicuous in the dragon parades for the Chinese New Year, in which economic, political, and cultural struggles intertwined.

#### *5. Dragon Parade as Struggles over Space*

Since the late 2000s, there have been regular dragon parades every year for celebrating the Chinese New Year in Prato. Seen as the ceremonial representation of the Chinese immigration in Prato, the form of the dragon parade evolved alongside the fluctuating relationship between the Chinese and Italian communities. Issues have been generally about which part of the city the parade can go and to what extent the local institutions should get involved. Thus, the dragon parade ritually demarcates the Chinese community into a part of seeable and a part of unseeable. The dragon parade is, thus, an excellent site to study the politics of visibility in Prato.

Although the dragon parade is an important tradition in China and all over the Chinese Diasporas, the dragon parade in Prato is slightly different from those in other places. In Prato, the dragons leading the parade are supposed to march from one business to another and symbolically distribute good luck to the business owners (see Figure 6). In return, the owners have to pay the dragons with real money in red packets to show gratitude. My research shows that in 2010, the gratitude from each company went as high as 500 euros (Interview second generation Chinese, 2/28/2012). Usually, the dragon parades in Prato were organized by the local Buddhist Society, one of the four Chinese associations and the only one without specific hometown affiliation. The money was thus collected for charity purposes. This particular tradition of dragon parade is said to be rooted in the more entrepreneurial Zhejiang and Fujian provinces in China, where the majority of the Chinese immigrants in Prato come from. Therefore, in Prato, the dragon parade does not only work as an exotic symbol to celebrate multiculturalism for locals, but also plays a very practical, philanthropic role within the Chinese community.

The parade went without any problem until 2007 when criticisms against the Chinese community finally burst out for the misuses of the buildings, the lack of transparency of the Chinese businesses, and in general the low degree of social integration of the Chinese immigrants (Di Castro and Vicziany 2009, 180). Discontents accumulated to the point that in 2007, the municipality banned the dragon parade, with the alleged purpose to encourage social integration (Di Castro and Vicziany 2009, 181). With no political voice in the municipality, the Chinese community had to compromise and cancelled the public parade that year. As an alternative, the parade was moved into the Pecci Museum and symbolically performed for 30 minutes. The ban not only physically erased the ceremonial presence of the Chinese community in Prato, but also jeopardized its practical functions within that community. It is because of this very concrete function in the community that the Chinese community wanted the dragons back.

Intermediated successfully by a local activist group DP (name anonymized), the parade was brought back the next year in 2008 with a number of substantial changes. First, it physically changed the route of the parade in the following years. Through the ban and related political debates, how to manage the visibility of the Chinese community became a central issue for the municipality, the Chinese, as well as the Italian communities. For the municipal government, the Chinese presence has to be controlled to a "manageable" degree that is tolerable to its electorate. Therefore, the Buddhist Society agreed to limit the parade mostly outside the wall of the symbolic medieval city. For the Chinese community, the ban has made the stitching workshops manage their visibility more carefully. For example, in the 2012 parade, dragons visited only the more established cutter-designers and restaurants which were supposed to be the "public face" for the Chinese community, whereas all the stitching workshops were carefully avoided on the way. For the Italian community, the parade was intended to be the only chance every year to look into Chinese businesses. Many Italians followed the dragons into the businesses to see the inside that was sometimes closed to them. To cater to their curiosity, the Chinese businesses would arrange a table of various Chinese snacks and fruits for the visitors (see Figure 6).

"We also want to make sure the parade happens because we think the dragon parade is the only place and time that the Chinese community becomes visible and transparent to Italians. You know, during the parade, people could walk into the shops, into the *pronto moda* and actually see the inside."

(Activist in DP, 2/13/2012, in Prato).

Moreover, since the initial motive for the ban was to urge the social integration of the Chinese community, organizers of the parade (usually the owners of cutter-designers) modified the content of the parade in the following years to show their willingness to integrate. Multiple Italian elements have been gradually integrated into the parade, including the *Sbandieratori* (a group of players dressing in medieval costume and playing flags, a typical Italian holiday tradition). Finally, in 2012, both of the two dragons were played by Italians (see Figure 6). Bearing the hope of integration, the dragon parade in fact has become a central field for the politics of visibility in Prato, embodying the contingent articulation of economic, political, and cultural struggles in and surrounding the Industry.

Figure 6. A dragon played by Italians in the 2012 Chinese New Year (picture taken by author on 1/22/2012).

#### *Conclusion*

In this chapter, I investigate the politics of visibility in Prato with three main findings. First, I show that the politics of visibility are based on a specific spatial division of labor, which in turn is caused by the power asymmetry between lead firms and subcontractors within the Chinese apparel industry. In particular, lead firms outsource the less profitable phase of stitching to the subcontractors, alongside all sorts of irregular labor. Second, I review the history of Prato's urban planning and show that the politics of visibility have existed in Prato before the Chinese arrived. The working conditions and the ways in which Italian firms managed their visibility in the 1950s and 1960s are in fact very similar to the Chinese apparel firms in the 2000s. However, even though the politics of visibility were successfully naturalized for the Italian textile industry, it has become a problem for the social tensions between the Chinese and Italian communities. Finally, using the example of Chinese New Year dragon parades, I examine how all the economic, political, and cultural encounters intertwined around the politics of visibility in Prato.

Drawing upon the literature of economic and urban geographies, this chapter also contributes a specific spatial perspective to the literature of transnational Chinese migration. Even though many of the phenomena in Prato such as substandard working conditions and the politics of visibility exist in other parts of the world, the ways in which these phenomena have been articulated are fairly distinct. In few other places, the politics of visibility have been embedded in the local history of industrialization, de-industrialization (of the textile sector) and re-industrialization (of the apparel sector). Likewise, in few other places, they have become the center of tensions between local and immigrant communities. Moreover, the chapter demystifies the discursive processes in which the Chinese community in Prato is problematized in recent years. It is suggested that perhaps a rethinking of the underlining discourse is necessary for future attempts to regularize the working conditions in Prato.

#### *References*

Pieraccini, Silvia. 2010. *L'assedio cinese*. 2nd ed. Milan: Gruppo 24 Ore.

Piore, Michael, and Charles Sabel. 1986. *The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity*. Basic Books.

# TOWARD A GLOCAL ORAL HISTORY OF CHINESE MIGRATION TO ROME

# *Violetta Ravagnoli* Emmanuel College Boston

#### *Abstract*

This paper tries to show the benefits of a glocal perspective to discuss the history of Chinese migration to Rome. Traditional histories depict a past that is often perceived as immobile; however, it is constraining and inherently inexact to describe migration histories as static and predictable, as at the core of migration there are encounters, exchange, or lack thereof. This essay discusses consequences of encounters. I examine contradictions between images of Rome in ancient and contemporary records and I show how the perceptions Italians hold toward Chinese migrants have changed over time and how they are often based on partial and selective memories of the past. Perceptions can influence socio-cultural exchange and ethnicization. Hence, I argue for a much-needed interdisciplinary analysis of different sources and approaches (i.e., historical, sociological, anthropological). I examine two samples from my fieldwork among Chinese migrants. I try to clarify how selective memories of shared places, cultural exchange, and collective experiences influence the ethnicity (perceived, imagined or essentialized) of both Italians and Chinese migrants. In this way, I want to stress the significance of individual agency in shaping collective processes and historical change. In sum, the application of a glocal approach to migration studies allows the historian to navigate the tensions between "here" and "there," and "us" versus "them." It ultimately contributes to crafting an exhaustive picture of the migration experience.

#### *Keywords*

Glocal history, ethnicization, Chinese migration, memory, identity.

#### 摘要

本文将试图揭示从全球本土化角度去研究罗马华人移民史的好处。传统 历史所描绘 的是那些通常被视为静态的过去; 然而,将移民史看作是静 态的和可预测的则有其 局限性和内在的不精确性,因为移民其核心是人 的经历以及人与人之间交流,或是 二者的缺失。本文主要探讨人的经历 在这一过程中的作用。本文通过对古罗马与当 代罗马进行文献对比来揭 示意大利人对华人移民的印象是如何随着时间推移而变化 的,以及他们如 何经常通过部分的选择性的记忆来对华人移民进行认知。不同的认 知可 以影响社会文化交流以及族群的形成,因此我们认为非常有必要根据不同 的信 息来源和手段(包括历史学、社会学以及人类学)进行跨学科分析。 本文通过实地 调查研究了两个华人移民样本。我们试图弄清楚这几方面 因素对意大利人和华人移 民族群的影响(包括感知的、想象中的以及实际

*Transcending Borders. Selected papers in East Asian studies*, edited by Valentina Pedone, Ikuko Sagiyama, ISBN 978-88-6453-403-9 (online), ISBN 978-88-6453-402-2 (print), CC BY 4.0, 2016 Firenze University Press

的),即选择性的公共场所记忆、 文化交流以及集体经历。我们旨在强调 个体在塑造集体机制和历史变迁过程中的重 要作用。总之,从全球本土化 角度研究移民史历史学家得以研究从 "这里"到"那 里"以及从"我 们"到"他们"的应力。这最终将有助于构建出一幅完整的移民史图景。

关键词 全球本地历史, 族群的形成, 华人移民, 记忆, 特性。

#### *Introduction*

This essay is an excerpt of a broader research on the history of Chinese migration to Rome, Italy, and to a particular neighborhood of Rome – the Esquiline. Because of the paucity of historical data regarding the Chinese presence in Rome, it was difficult to write a traditional history on the subject. Also, Chinese migration to Rome is a relatively recent phenomenon; therefore, I could not rely only on archival records. To best capture the complex history of Chinese migration to Italy, I decided to follow the journeys of individual migrants. Thus, oral histories became the major source of information for the project, paired with the analysis of local gazetteers, newspapers, archival records and statistical data, both in Italy and China. I analyzed individual stories through the transnational lenses that they are captured by and ultimately read them in the global context they progress in.

For this research, I followed a *glocal* approach; that is, I examined the lives of ethnic Chinese in both their global and local environments and, inspired by studies on transnationalism, I moved beyond the limits imposed by national borders and followed overseas Chinese in their multi-hopping migration routes. Across their journeys, migrants become anchored to more than one locality; they interact with individuals from both sending and hosting communities, and endure because of the networks they create.<sup>1</sup>

This *glocal* oral history of Chinese migration is grounded on interdisciplinarity (i.e., history and ethnography); in this article, I try to show the potential benefits of a *glocal* perspective to discuss the history of a migrant group. In the first section on methodology, I introduce the notions of *ethnicity* and *memory*, which I picked to frame my research and examine oral sources. In the second section, I briefly introduce the timeframe and the spatial boundaries of the phenomenon of Chinese migration to Rome. Traditional histories depict a past that is often perceived as immobile; however, it is constraining and inherently

<sup>1</sup> Benton and Pieke 1998; Kirby et al. 2006, 80; McKeown 2001.

inexact to describe migration histories as static and predictable as at the core of migration there are encounters, exchange, or lack thereof. The encounters are of great interest for this research. Therefore, in Section 3 I discuss consequences of encounters. I examine contradictions between images of the area in ancient and contemporary records and I show how the perceptions Italians hold toward Chinese migrants in the Esquiline changed over time and are often based on partial and selective memories of the past. Perceptions can influence socio-cultural exchange and ethnicization. Hence, I argue for a much-needed interdisciplinary analysis of different sources and approaches (i.e., historical, sociological, anthropological). In section four, I examine two samples from my fieldwork among Chinese migrants. I try to clarify how selective memories of shared places, cultural exchange, and collective experiences influence the *ethnicity* (perceived, imagined or essentialized) of both Italians and Chinese migrants. In this way, I want to stress the significance of individual agency in shaping collective processes and historical change. In the last section, I give a short account of the application of a *glocal* approach to migration studies. This perspective allows the historian to navigate the tensions between "here" and "there" and "us" versus "them." It ultimately contributes to crafting an exhaustive picture of the migration experience.

#### *1. Methodology*

Drawing from social theory, this research uses two key concepts: *ethnicity* (as a function of the formation of identity) and *memory*. These are fairly broad notions employed in different ways by diverse disciplines. For instance, in political science, ethnic identity can be treated in association with nationalism; in migration studies, identity can be incorporated in essentialized ethnic differences; in social studies, identity can be treated in terms of class, race, or citizenship distinctions.<sup>2</sup> As a historian, I wish to find a clarifying synthesis by letting the main actors of my research speak for themselves, mostly by digging into their memories. I argue for an interdisciplinary approach and contend that these concepts are strictly related and co-dependent in studies such as this one where history merges into social development with the help of ethnographic investigations.3 Below, I explain how I came to pick *ethnicity* and *memory* as the two variables that could best serve the purpose of describing the history of

<sup>2</sup> For example Allen 1995; Skeldon 1995; Louie 2000; Lee 2010; Harrell 2001.

<sup>3</sup> Between 2011 and 2014, I conducted sixty informal interviews (thirty with Chinese informants both in Italy and in Mainland China and thirty with Italian dwellers that

the Chinese ethnic group in Rome. Afterwards, I present a few samples from the pool of interviews I conducted to illustrate the main findings of this project. That is, a *glocal* approach allows for a study that goes beyond models and patterns of migration and empowers the scholar to craft a bottom up history of Chinese migrations to Rome, giving voice and agency to the migrants - the principal actors of the migration experience.

#### *1a. Ethnicity*

To discuss the history of Chinese migrants in Rome in terms of *ethnicity* and consequential *ethnicization* is pivotal to this study only if analyzed through *glocal* lenses. I intend the process of *ethnicization* as encapsulating the interactions that migrants entertain at the local level, both in Italy and in China. However, only when placing such relations and exchanges within a global frame are we able to produce a comprehensive historical view of Chinese migration to Italy. What exactly do I mean by *ethnicity*? Why do I consider the process of *ethnicization* significant for this study? I discuss *ethnicity* as a result of the following conversation I witnessed during an informal interview with one of my informants. One fall evening I was sitting in a Chinese restaurant in Rome chatting with the owner – a man in his early fifties, in very distinct attire. The man, to whom I will refer as Mr. Zhu,<sup>4</sup> was wearing a pair of leather Prada shoes, nicely ironed pants, a shirt, and a classic Merino wool pullover. Mr. Zhu stood up several times to greet and say good-byes to customers, while describing to me his life in Rome with a confident aristocratic composure. The clients seemed accustomed to the place and satisfied with the food, hospitality, and price. The restaurant was finely decorated in engraved and lacquered light-colored wood.

The owner offered me a generous meal while he told me his story; he did so without touching a single bit of food or drink. Suddenly, two men in their late sixties entered the restaurant conversing animatedly. At that exact moment, I was chomping on my Chinese dumplings. The owner relieved me from the embarrassment of being watched while eating alone and stood up to salute them. I was so grateful I greeted them as well and became an involuntarily part of the lively conversation the men entertained with Mr. Zhu.  And the other one asked worriedly: "Is that rumor real? Is

had direct or indirect relations with ethnic Chinese in Rome (e.g., neighbors, business competitors).

<sup>4</sup> Throughout this research I will keep the identity of my interviewees anonymous. For clarity, I will give a fictional name to each one of the participants to this study.

there a Chinese buyer for "La Magica" [the Magical Team], the A.S. Roma,<sup>5</sup> our true and only faith and love?" Mr. Zhu stood there smiling deferentially without engaging in what, after all was a unidirectional conversation. I could not refrain from thinking how inconsiderate and disrespectful such a conversation would have sounded in a public place in the U.S. Nevertheless, I also realized that I would probably not have perceived it as inappropriate, had I not been living in the United States for more than a decade.

This ethnicized conversation, shaped around the defining paradigm of "us" versus "them," is common ground in discussions about migration and migrants in Italy. As I set to investigate the history of the Chinese ethnic group in Rome, I realized that *ethnicity,* and the relative building of an identity, was a controversial as well as a significant concept for my topic. Therefore, my historical inquiry required a deeper understanding of the notion of *ethnicity,* which I borrowed from the social sciences, to exhaustively discuss the formation and development of the Chinese ethnic group in Rome. Hence, by following Cozen et al.'s definition of *ethnicity* as a "cultural construction accomplished over historical time," I decided to pay attention to the formation of Chinese *ethnicity* in Rome to ultimately analyze the development of the presence of this ethnic group in the Eternal City.

Cozen et al. argue that "In inventing its ethnicity, the group sought to determine the terms, modes, and outcomes of its accommodation to 'others'... and ...to define the group in terms of what it was not." At the same time, though, "ethnicization was not necessarily characterized by an easily negotiated unanimity about the identity of the immigrant group."<sup>6</sup> Therefore, it is hard to generalize about the process of ethnic formation. I overcame the predicament of explaining ethnic differences as the absolute truth by exploring instead the different facets of specific localities and individual relationships and by travelling back and forth from the sending location to the host country as a migrant usually does in the span of a lifetime. That is, I used a *glocal* approach to migration, followed migrants around the globe, and recorded their stories.<sup>7</sup>

<sup>5</sup> A.S. Roma is the soccer team of the city of Rome. One of the popular narratives about A.S. Roma fans is that they place the team at the same level or often above religious faith.

<sup>6</sup> Cozen et al. 1999.

7 I have recorded different migrants' lives mostly orally, but I have also consulted the History of Overseas Qingtianese [青田华侨历史 Qingtian Huaqiao Lishi] published in Hangzhou by the Zhejiang People's Publishing House in 2011.

#### *1b. Memory*

Pierre Nora states that history has conquered memory, and that memory and history are linked to identity. Memories of the past are critical to substantiating people's identities, even if history is contingent and can be verifiable through evidence while memory cannot. In the late 1980s, Pierre Nora also explained that memory had gone through a process of democratization; that is, it had entered the modern frenzy of recording-every-possible-event, which became even more real and tangible in the last few years with mass circulation of high tech gadgets and recording devices. The latter attitude toward memory recordings made private, as well as public and collective memory, traceable and collectible. This democratization made "memory sites" - *lieux de memoire,*<sup>8</sup> and the recording of less official and less extraordinary events, important primary sources and useful materials to explore common mindsets and popular ideas. Hence, Nora states that memory has been transformed by history; he actually uses the term "seized" by history almost to become the same thing. Originally history and memory were not synonyms; one meant "reconstruction" and the other one "life."9 However, "the passage from memory to history has required every social group to redefine identity through the revitalization of its own history. The task of remembering makes everyone his own historian.10 … "There is a differentiated network to which all of these separate identities belong, an unconscious organization of collective memory that it is our responsibility to bring to consciousness."11 A key ambition of this research is to bring to consciousness the organization of individual memories of Italians and Chinese as they meet in Rome where they also bring personal knowledge of their past. The sum of such memories gives shape to collective memories, imagined or concrete with actual consequences and in perpetual evolution. In sections 3 and 4, I will bring evidence about how specific collective memories become fundamental in the encounter of two or more cultures in one place.

#### *2. Time and Space Frame*

The time frame for this research spans from the early 1900s until today. In reality, the presence of Chinese people in Europe goes back centuries, but the

<sup>8 &</sup>quot;[…] lieux de memoire have no referent in reality; or, rather, they are their own referent: pure, exclusively self-referential signs." Nora 1989, 19.

<sup>9</sup> Ibid., 20.

<sup>10</sup> Ibid., 21.

<sup>11</sup> Ibid., 23.

twentieth century is when more consistent migration waves from China actually started. The first wave of Chinese immigrants arrived in Europe in the inter-war period. Those who reached Italy during this first wave had first gone to France, where they worked in factories in lieu of Frenchmen who had been killed in the First World War. In Italy, they were employed in textile production. During the 1920s and early 1930s, the Chinese established themselves in the biggest Italian cities, including Milan, Rome, and Turin, and soon became small entrepreneurs, including peddlers of ties.12 Their overall number was not great, nor were they conspicuous. Between the two wars, probably just a few hundred resided in Milan and Rome, and many of them later went back to China, so that they could spend their final years and be buried in their home villages.13

A second wave of migration to Europe occurred after World War II, when many Chinese from the rural areas of Hong Kong or from the politically troubled areas of Taiwan and Indochina escaped to Great Britain. There, the restaurant business was already saturated; hence, many moved to other northern European countries, such as the Netherlands, Germany, and France.14 The first Chinese restaurant in Rome, called "Shanghai," was opened in 1949, but it was mostly for immigrants' use.15 Only in the late seventies and early eighties did Chinese restaurants establish more stable businesses in Italian cities. In the past three decades the Chinese have enormously intensified their presence on Italian territory and have also increased the variety of businesses by which they pursue wealth.

The third wave of migration is the most relevant for Italy. Until 1975, the presence of Chinese immigrants in Italy was small (in 1975 only 1000).16 This third wave coincided with the reforms led by Deng Xiaoping starting in 1978. Deng's policies of "Reform and Opening" were aimed at providing prosperity for all Chinese citizens, although some were to get rich sooner and others later. For this reason, Deng promoted the formation of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) that adopted flexible economic policies (e.g., weak unions and low taxes) to increase economic development, favor import-export trade, and earn foreign currency. Besides these areas, there were also port cities that experienced relaxed economic rules. One of these was Wenzhou, in Zhejiang

<sup>12</sup> Di Corpo 2008, 12.

<sup>13</sup> Spence 1996, 209.

<sup>14</sup> Li 1999.

province, which, together with adjacent small towns, had a long history of out migration and which produced the majority of Chinese people going to Italy.<sup>17</sup>

Therefore, since the early 1980s, Italy's largest cities experienced a growing Chinese presence. Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, migrants resorted to illegal means to get out of China and enter Europe. Some embarked from Hong Kong, arrived in port cities around Europe, mostly in the Netherlands, France or Great Britain, and then moved illegally within Europe. The European Union was still only an ideal then, and to cross borders many had to turn to the protection of middlemen. These middlemen, called in Chinese *shetou*<sup>18</sup> or snakehead in English, usually received substantial amounts of money to perform real acts of human smuggling: organizing migrants to sneak into the new country by crossing remote areas of the borders on foot.19

Most of the Chinese migrants who reached Italy entered some other European country first and only later arrived in Italy. The number of Chinese migrants increased after the Italian government approved several amnesties, aimed at legalizing the presence of illegal migrants in the Italian territory. The government also implemented other strategies, like family reunifications, designed to fight trafficking and people smuggling and create legitimate and smooth moving processes. The first amnesty to legalize the status of illegal immigrants already living in Italy was announced in 1986. After 1986, the Italian government promoted five more amnesties, specifically, in 1990, 1992, 1995, 1998, and 2002.20

The focus of this paper is on the third wave. As far as space frame, this research takes Rome as the starting point to discuss the tension between Chinese and Italian views of each other at the local level and beyond national borders. The situation of Rome is particularly interesting because for almost two decades (1990s–2000s) it has become a significant hub for Chinese businesses all over Europe. That is, imported and exported goods and merchandises reached Rome from the ports of Civitavecchia and Naples, and departed from Rome by train or truck to be distributed all over Italian and European cities.21 Then,

<sup>19</sup> One of my interviewees remembered how many Chinese people revered her father because he was one of the middlemen who had "helped" many migrants enter Italy through mountainous zones of the Alps at the border with France. Another interviewee stated that many other migrants left China through Siberia and entered Europe from one of the countries of Eastern Europe.

20 Ceccagno 2003, 189–190.

21 For a recent analysis of the recorded decline of Chinese business in Rome see Pedone 2013, 28–31.

<sup>17</sup> Santangelo 2006.

<sup>18</sup> 蛇头.

with this essay I moved away from Rome and analyzed migrants' lives across the spectrum of their *glocal* experiences.

#### *3. Selective Memories of the Esquiline*

In this section, I explain that historical events linked to the Esquiline reverberate in popular conceptions as well as ancient records toward "others." These memories, used selectively, influenced and still do influence Italians of the Esquiline. Hence, images can have a direct impact on the ethnicization of both "us" Italian and "others" Chinese.

During informal interviews and open-ended conversations with Italians whose lives were impacted by the presence of Chinese migrants in Rome, I was often reminded of the beauty and majesty of the neighborhood of the Esquiline, one of the areas of Rome commonly associated with the presence of Chinese migrants.22 Hence, I decided to explore the notion of spatial memory linked to the specific area of the Esquiline. I analyzed migrants' relations to their place of origin and I looked at memories engrained in the Esquiline. I argue that the post-unification history of Rome is still vividly recognizable in the assets and the organization of the city and the Esquiline in particular. Furthermore, the consequences of the establishment of Rome as the capital of Italy are crucial points to understand the development of Chinese commerce and ethnic activities in the Esquiline, and also to gauge the sentiments of Romans toward migrants in general, and Chinese in particular.

During my fieldwork in Rome, I have asked many people living, working, or passing by the Esquiline one simple question: if I say, "Esquiline," what comes to your mind? Among the people I interviewed, those aged fifty and above, replied that the Esquiline, and Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II as its fulcrum were once the commercial heart of the city. "Rome started and ended in Piazza Vittorio!" said the senior clerk of a historic shoe store located on the Piazza.

Memories of the past roles of the Esquiline and its long and complex history are echoed in many dialogues I have entertained with the Italian portion of my informants, which spanned from regretful: "It was a neighborhood of princes and aristocrats, look what it has become," to more analytical: "It is a commercial area, it has always been, with all the consequences of the marketplace." The identity of Roman dwellers relies, more or less conscientiously, on the specific past of the Esquiline. When they encounter the "other," who often

<sup>22</sup> Caritas Roma 2011.

does not know nor care about this past, the Romans instead build on it to delineate borders that should help differentiate "us" from "them."

Such images of past wealth and riches are linked to relatively recent literature or ancient history chosen *ad hoc* to reinforce the perceptions. After a close look at a few texts of the antiquity, we discover that the area was actually known as "Puticulus," with its semantic origin from the verb "putrere," which means, "to putrefy," as the writer Varro explains in his *De Lingua Latina.* In an ancient written text attributed to the Roman Procurator Festus, we read: "In the cemetery, where the dead bodies of the outcast were, outside the Esquiline Door."23

During the Republican period, Plautus (254 B.C. – 184 B.C.), in his *Curculio*, presents us with a negative image of immigrants from Greece, those who are ruining Rome and the Esquiline with their deplorable mores. Plautus writes: "And then those Grecians with their cloaks, who walk about with covered heads, who go loaded beneath their cloaks with books, and with baskets, they loiter together, and engage in gossiping among themselves, the gadabouts; you may always see them enjoying themselves in the hot liquor-shops."<sup>24</sup>

Plautus gives voice to popular criticisms and rage against the customs of foreigners and immigrants invading Rome, especially the Orientals (specifically, the Greeks). These remarks represent an interesting comparison with the contemporary perceptions of the Esquiline commonly held by Italians in the area. Opinions reported by Plautus in ancient Rome carry astonishing resemblance with current reactions and viewpoints about the Esquiline. I shall give example of how time seems to freeze in the heart of the Eternal City, which would probably not bear such title otherwise.

Fast forwarding through the records about the Esquiline we get to the early 1980s. Hundreds of articles have been published on the Esquiline and its voluntary or involuntary connections with immigration. Through a search in the archives of five of Italy's major newspapers, *La Repubblica*, *Il Corriere della Sera*, *Il Tempo*, *Il Messaggero*, *Il Giornale*, I have found 1248 articles related to Chinese people and the Esquiline. This result is the outcome of a search based on the keywords "Chinese" and "Esquiline." When adding the word "immigrant" and "immigration," the amount of results spikes to a very high number,

<sup>23</sup> "Puticulus, quo nunc cadavera projici solent, extra Portam Esquilinam" in Lumisden 1812, 193–194.

<sup>24 &</sup>quot;Tum isti Graeci palliati, capite operto qui ambulant, qui incedunt suffarcinati cum libris, cum sportulis, constant, conferunt sermones inter se drapetae, obstant, obsistunt, incedunt cum suis sententiis, quos semper videas bibentes esse in thermipolio" in Istituto Nazionale del Dramma Antico, Il Curculio di Plauto (Ministero del Turismo e Spettacolo Regione Sicilia).

but it includes more general views on immigration and also specific reactions to additional ethnic groups. Therefore, I prefer to limit the search to what is most closely related to this research. In this way, the result indicates a set of articles more focused on Chinese migration and makes further speculations not only simpler, but also more reliable.

According to my investigation, earlier articles (from the early 1980s) were illustrative of international relations and worldwide dynamics involving China, Italy, and Europe. In the 1990s, articles reflected an increasing acknowledgment of the ongoing changes in the Esquiline. From the 2000s, the recurrence of notions of decay and humiliation with respect to the Esquiline grew rapidly.<sup>25</sup>

In fact, toward the end of the 1970s, the Esquiline began hosting people from faraway lands; in particular, Piazza Vittorio, due to its proximity to the train station, became the destination of many migrants and other world travelers. During the 1990s, ethnic Chinese rented or bought many shops in the area, and populated the spaces around Piazza Vittorio. At the end of the 1990s, the image of the Esquiline was again associated with an idea that resembled the ancient definition of *puticulus*.

In the 2000s, a major change happened in Piazza Vittorio. The market, its symbol, was moved from the open air of the Piazza to the interior of two old military barracks abandoned for years and renovated for this purpose. This event was supposed to be the end of all the troubles of the Esquiline, commonly believed to have being caused by immigrants and predominantly by the Chinese conquest of the place. Natives were supposed to be appeased by the move, but that was not the case. The relocation of the market coincided with the peak arrival of migrants to Italy. Old problems were not solved, and a new scapegoat was found: migrants, immigrants, and extra communitarians became the number one enemy of the neighborhood's ancient alleged splendor.26 But how ancient? It was a *puticulus*, a place to putrefy, have we forgotten? According to one of my interviewees (the only one though), during the 1960s the area was not less noisome and decaying. It was in fact famous for pickpocketing and prostitution, at least the most disreputable streets of the area. We realize that there is truth in Nora's statement that, as a consequence of the democratization of memory, everybody is his own historian. In fact, as we saw with the Esquiline, memo-

<sup>25</sup> For more details on the topic refer to Ravagnoli 2011.

<sup>26</sup> "Extra-communitarian" is the name Italian common people originally used to refer to migrants from countries that are not part of the European Union. Nevertheless, in jargon "extra-communitarian" is now derogatorily used to refer to all the immigrants (even those from countries within the EU like Romania).

ries are the results of private or collective constructions, which human beings use to define and give meanings to one's very existence.

## *4. Vignettes of Chinese Selective Memories*

As follows I report on four out of thirty different oral histories of ethnic Chinese I interviewed during my fieldwork. I picked the stories of the following four people mostly because they are representative of different age groups. They show different personal reactions to migration and several ways to deal with new environments and territories. They present private and group emplacement commonalities, dissimilarities and strategies.<sup>27</sup>

While trying to trace development over time, or lack thereof, in the experiences of Chinese migrants in Rome, I highly valued the decisions of each of my interviewees to self-structure their own experience. They tell us how they try to make sense of the past and how they shape their current lives; hence, they set their narratives in the historical context. As Portelli states, "subjectivity is as much the business of history as are the more visible 'facts'."28 Migrants' stories are made of different memories, shaped by individual experiences, psychology, and the interaction of cultures. Hence, memories contribute to the creation of meaning and are not mere collections of data. Oral sources, such as those I discuss below, are significant to show not how to preserve the past, but to appreciate the very changes produced by memories.

#### *4a. Early Comers*

Few migrants arrived in Italy between the 1950s and early 1970s, and the springs of their mobility were overseas kin and family networks. However, the myth of the entrepreneurial spirit of the coastal people resurfaced after Mao's death and became a constant in stories about Zhejiangese migrants. The lore

27 For the nature of the research and the sensitivity of information about migrants' status in Italy, interviews were not recorded digitally or on tape. Some migrants I interviewed were not comfortable discussing or putting on record the methods and routes they utilized to enter Italy or other European countries. Some of them entered illegally and expressed fear or shame about it, so they would rather discuss their lives only after they established in Rome. Only through informal and open-ended conversations, during which I was allowed to take notes, migrants felt comfortable leading me through their migration journeys.

28 Portelli 2002, 67.

of achievable enrichment and wealth pushed many disadvantaged peasants to look for better opportunities and move.

As we shall see below in the stories of both early and recent migrants to Italy, the coping strategies with emplacement and distance vary from migrant to migrant, but all migrants endure and struggle with interstitial lives, especially in places like Rome, where local culture is actively embodied and boisterously flaunted.29

#### *The Changs*

I had the privilege of spending a whole afternoon in the welcoming home of a couple that had lived in Italy for 60 years. They managed to escape the small town of Qingtian through Hong Kong in the 50s, and they were able to do so because of family networks. Kinship networks have been the primary source of migration at least until the early 1990s. The couple arrived in Italy through different routes. I will call them Mr. and Mrs. Chang.

Mr. Chang arrived in Europe in 1958. He had fled China through Macao, right after the beginning of the Great Leap Forward. In Macao, he waited for eight long months before being able to embark on a boat to Europe. During the trip he visited many places in India and swore not to go back there anymore. After a long trip, he arrived in Belgium first, later moved to Holland, and then to France. Mr. Chang lived in France for two years. When he arrived, he was still a young boy and had not completed his education. He stated he did not understand anything about European people, languages, and cultures; however, he had no time to learn. He soon married a young girl from his same village who had established herself in Rome. Mr. Chang finally arrived in Rome and started working in a leather factory, opened years before by some of his wife's relatives. These relatives were part of the few hundreds of Chinese who had landed in Europe as labor force between the two world wars and had decided not to go back to China. Mrs. Chang's paternal aunt had arrived in Holland in 1912.

Mr. and Mrs. Chang have raised three sons in Italy, and, even if they say they would rather move to France at this point, they feel at home in Italy. Starting in the late 1990s, they tried to go to China once a year, but they both stated