By Fiona Ehlers
She has a few hours off and is sitting in an Italian friend's kitchen, drawing brassieres and strapless evening gowns on a sheet of paper -- the kinds of clothes she'll never be able to afford. She wears a loose-fitting jacket and pulls down the sleeves whenever she moves her arms. A charm bracelet dangles from her delicate wrist, hiding unsightly scars.
Like many others here in Prato, Meng, whose name translates as "Dream," grew up in Wenzhou. Because her older sister was already married and her younger sister was still in school, the mother decided that Meng would be sent to Prato to prospect for Italian gold. She hid in her grandparents' house, but that didn't help. Her mother had already paid for the airline ticket and had hired a trafficker. Three years ago Meng flew to Rome and then went to Prato, where the usual torture began: working 15 or 16-hour shifts in the factory, occasionally even 30 hours during the high season. "Gold?" Meng said to her mother in their first phone conversation, "there isn't any gold here!" Last summer, after two-thirds of the €15,000 she owed the traffickers had already been paid off, Meng had an accident that changed everything.
She says that she fainted in the factory and stumbled into a glass door. The broken glass sliced into her arms, forehead, temples and nose. The foreman was furious and had her sent to a hospital, where she spent the next two weeks. A short time later, an Italian found her on a bridge in the old section of Prato. When she told him that she wanted to jump off the bridge, he took her in for a few days and then enrolled her in an Italian language course. A few days later she was caught riding a bus without a ticket and, after being told that she now faced deportation, Meng went underground for a while. She has been working again for the past four months, this time in a different factory where her sewing duties aren't as intense and she is encouraged to draw models, as she does now in the Italian friend's kitchen.
After eating her meal, she goes into the hallway and sits in front of a mirror, but without looking at herself. She calls her mother in Wenzhou, as she does every Sunday, and tells her about the clear blue skies over Tuscany. She never complains about her life as a slave laborer, knowing full well that her family wouldn't understand. She's homesick and wants cosmetic surgery. But she lacks the €2,000 she still owes the trafficker, a ticket back to China and her mother's permission to return home.
The Italian who saved Meng works for the city of Prado. He prefers not to identify himself, and he says that all he can do for Meng is occasionally invite her to his apartment for a pasta meal. Meng shares a bunk bed with another illegal worker in the foreman's house on a nondescript street on the other side of the wall.
Bankrupt without the Chinese?
Prato's town hall isn't far from Chinatown. Girls like Meng walk past the building every day in giggling groups, carrying plastic bags, coming from their factories and walking home to their neighborhood. Marco Romagnoli, Prato's 56-year-old mayor, greets visitors in an office decorated with oil paintings of famous textile merchants. He was once a communist and is now a socialist. He talks about a game he played as a child. His older brother would stand in front of the wall while he stood on the other side. The brother would call out: "I am from Prato and you are an idiot from the countryside." It's a game that no longer works today, says Romagnoli, because local patriotism is no longer appropriate. "We can no longer afford the luxury of ignoring the Chinese. The world has stumbled into our house and we have to deal with it. But at what price? Don't ask me!"
The city, says Romagnoli, is paying for the negative aspects of its own growth. "There is no question that Old Europe is bankrolling the success of the Chinese." But Prato, he says, is certainly benefiting. The city would be bankrupt without the Chinese, who are buying houses, cars and fabric, creating new jobs and filling old jobs. And Prato's citizens are reaping their share of the profits, charging astronomical rents for dark, poorly ventilated and dilapidated factory buildings without toilets or doing a healthy business in forged documents.
"Economically they're a blessing," says Romagnoli, "but they are a catastrophe for the community." The Chinese live in their closed society, with four Chinese-language newspapers and their own TV programs. With the exception of the new business owners, hardly any of them speak Italian. The city pays for interpreters, hospitals, schools and even Chinese courses to encourage its Chinese population not to send its children back to China but to Italian schools instead. "They don't respect our rules. If we shut down a factory, they reopen it under a new name. Many don't pay taxes and are polluting the environment," says Romagnoli.
A few months ago the mayor met with the then opposition leader and current prime minister, Romano Prodi. Prodi's advice to Romagnoli was to find a visionary who could provide solutions to Prato's problems. He told him that after spending 15 years paying the social cost of supporting such a large immigrant population, Prato should find ways to turn its problems into profits. Attract Chinese tourists and export your "Made in Italy" products to China, Prodi told the mayor, and cooperate with the Chinese instead of working at loggerheads. "We're still looking," says the mayor with a wan smile.
On Sunday evenings the new generation of overseas Chinese dines at the Borsalino Restaurant, which has adapted to its new clientele by specializing in raw fish. Luigi and his business friends with their adopted Italian names, Marco and Gabriele, are sitting at a rotating table, spearing slimy oysters and crawfish with their chopsticks and downing bottles of ice-cold Barolo Beer. They are self-confident and in high spirits. They say that they are helping Prato grow, and they wonder why Europeans are lazy and yet insist on earning hefty salaries.
One of the men at the table is Xu Qiu Lin, 39, a Chinese textile manufacturer with an angular crew cut and a Buddha smile, a touch heavier than the others and not as boisterous. The Italians call him "Signore Giulini" and, in a reference to automaker Fiat's chairman, the "Montezemolo of the Orient." He is the only Chinese member of the city's chamber of commerce and, as far as the mayor is concerned, a model Chinese entrepreneur, because his workers are legal, he pays his taxes and he sends his staff, 10 Italians and 15 Chinese, home at 7 p.m.
Xu Qiu Lin's factory, between Chinatown and the city, is orderly and clean. Fashionably dressed, blonde Italian women serve espresso to guests, the walls are decorated with photos of Chinese politicians and Xu Qiu Lin shakes hands with his visitors under banners with words like "Forward." When Xu Qiu Lin came to Prato 16 years ago he worked as a leather cutter for Benetton. Today, after having recognized that there is no real future in cheap goods, he emphasizes quality. Competitive pressure has become too strong since trade barriers for textile imports were reduced and China began flooding the market. He produces high-quality, "Made in Italy" leather and down jackets. The price is right, and so is his label's international image. Xu Qiu Lin, a Chinese entrepreneur in Italy, has signed a fellow immigrant, from Argentina, as his label's spokesman: Gabriel Batistuta, a former star forward for Florence's Fiorentina Football Club.
Xu Qiu Lin will be successful. His annual sales have already reached 15 million. He stands in his office and looks out the window. His gleaming, black Porsche Cayenne, upholstered in pale leather, is parked in the courtyard below. Someone has spray-painted the words "Out with the Chinese" on a wall a few buildings down the street. Xu Qiu Lin flashes his Buddha smile.
He's already taken his business a step further. He recently opened a factory in Shanghai, where 300 workers produce clothing under Chinese conditions. Perhaps this is the third stage of globalization, this future that seems to be taking shape in the office of Xu Qiu Lin, the man the Italians call Signore Giulini: Now that the Chinese have infiltrated Europe, they're back to producing their goods inexpensively in China.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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