The West is a test for overseas Chinese

Ye Pei's long journey from Zhejiang province to Italy is recounted in a new book, Meet Me in Venice. [Photo provided by Suzanne Ma]

Kuo was born in the Netherlands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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