What Does It Mean to Be “Made” Somewhere?

In Italy, I learned to stop searching for an authentic, fixed self, or an automatic kinship with the Chinese diasporic community—especially in a globalized world.

In my childhood neighborhood of Evergreen, San Jose, many of the street names are Italian. I lived on Cortona, my second-grade best friend Yoonshin on Michelangelo, and one of my high school best friends, Katelyn, on Villa Contessa. My crush, Vincent, who confessed in eleventh grade that he liked the other Julie, Julie Trinh, lived on Carracci; a collection of others, their faces now blurred and impressionistic, lived on Falerno, Capriana, and Palentino.

According to the local paper, The Mercury News, these streets were named for Italian immigrant orchardists who came to San Jose in the early 1900s. Back then, the city had a population of 29,300. Now, it’s a suburban sprawl of a million and the most expensive place to live in the United States. As kids in the 2000s, we played in empty lots that seemed to transform into houses overnight. I didn’t know any Italians; my school was predominantly Asian, then Latinx. Only when I went to a mostly white college did I realize mine was a niche American experience: for the most popular clubs to be the Vietnamese, Filipino, and desi student associations; for the biggest events of the year to be their annual shows of original skits, choreography, and MCs beta testing jokes before posting them to their YouTube channels.

Before I looked up the origins of the Italian street names, I assumed they were a developer’s ploy, a way of using European aesthetics to convey luxury to the upwardly mobile, Asian immigrant tech workers buying houses in the area. My parents and their peers had a taste for Europe, or rather, their interpretation of it: knockoff Chanel bought from Asian black markets, Ferrero Rocher chocolates exchanged at Lunar New Year, and the Euro Delights Bakery in San Jose’s Lion Plaza, which sold buns and pandan jelly alongside extravagant, airy sponge cakes. But their tastes weren’t simply products of preference; in fact, they resulted from histories of exploitation and colonialism that had made Chinese labor cheap and Vietnamese cuisine vaguely French. Taking the longer view of these histories, we were newcomers to the places we called home. This was a foreign idea to me as a child, when I naively felt like San Jose was the center of the world. Questions about why we were here and who had come before us felt to me like they weren’t truly questions. They ended in periods, unsplittable atoms.

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In October 2019, I moved to Prato, Italy, a city of 200,000 that began experiencing an influx of Chinese migration in the 1990s. Now, its population is around one-sixth Chinese, amounting to the most concentrated Chinese community in Europe. I was there for what was supposed to be a nine-month fellowship—ultimately cut short by the pandemic—to research and write about the community. Growing up in San Jose was also a process of growing away from it; my upbringing, which had once felt universal, began to feel particular to the individuals and settings that shaped it. As a result, I became interested in more diffuse collectives. What about a Chinese Italian community would feel uniquely Italian? What common experiences or solidarities could I find between San Jose and Prato, or across diasporic communities more generally?

Like techy San Jose, the capital of Silicon Valley, Prato is a largely suburban city built around an industry. Its textile business initially drew Chinese migrants as factory workers. Chinese people subsequently began opening their own factories, making fast-fashion garments stitched with “Made in Italy” labels. These labels are lucrative, because they suggest that the faux-leather jacket sold wholesale for five euros is not in fact faux, but handmade by Italian artisans, after it was skinned from an Italian cow descended from an Italian cow descended from an Italian cow.

What common experiences or solidarities could I find across diasporic communities?

Well before Chinese people came to Prato, this old-world narrative evoked by the “Made in Italy” label has belied a reality of cheap, migrant, and often illegal labor. Workers migrated from the poorer Italian South, and arduous working conditions earned Prato the nickname the “Hong Kong of Italy” from Le Monde in 1980. Despite these preexisting problems, Chinese involvement in the fashion industry has incited both economic and racist resentment from Prato’s Italian population, despite academic consensus that it has actually revitalized Prato’s dormant industrial economy. In a New Yorker article by D. T. Max about the Chinese community in Prato, an Italian woman says that her husband lost his job because of the Chinese, who “copy . . . imitate. They don’t do anything original. They’re like monkeys.” Perhaps because of these stereotypes, applying the “Made in Italy” label to low-cost, fast-fashion garments appears inauthentic to Italians, even as the clothing is literally made there.

While downtown Prato, the historical center, is planned around Italian cities’ signature piazzas, Chinatown—a collection of grocery stores, restaurants, bubble tea cafés, and parking lots—lies outside the medieval city walls, along two traffic-congested streets. If not for the dual-language mercato/超市 signs, you might forget you’re in Italy. But nor does Prato’s Chinatown feel “Chinese” in the way of other cities’ Chinatowns, ones that double as enclaves and tourist attractions. Instead, it is absent from Tripadvisor and looks like an Asian strip mall from San Jose, which is to say it looks like an Asian strip mall anywhere.

The phenomenon called Paris syndrome describes the disappointment of travelers who visit the French capital and find that it fails to meet their expectations. It is primarily associated with tourists from Japan and other Asian countries, where media tends to romanticize Europe as an opulent wonderland, a geographical Ferrero Rocher. When I arrived in Prato, I experienced a sort of dual Paris syndrome: I was disappointed by its inability to represent the Platonic ideals of either Italianness or Chineseness. I wasn’t looking for occidental luxury, but I had hoped to find something uniquely Italian or European in its Chinatown—or at least something unique, full stop. Instead, Prato appeared generic, even discount, like an Olive Garden or Panda Express. And while I sought a Chinese diasporic community that I could recognize, or even place myself in, the landscape evoked commerce over kinship. Aesthetic references to China or Asia, our (if an “our” existed) ostensible homeland, felt like marketing ploys akin to the “Made in Italy” labels. One of the few pricier restaurants, the ones Italians are likelier to attend, had fake terracotta warriors at the door. My favorite dessert place, Taro Garden, stole its logo and menu from the international Taiwanese chain Taro Spirit. When I uneasily described these details to my dad, an immigrant entrepreneur himself, he said without irony, even with pride, “Yes, Chinese people are good at capitalism.”

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Although Italian strangers treated me like a member of the local Chinese community, calling me “cinese” as I walked by, I still stuck out. When I first came to Prato, my chief social connections were in Chinese and made through Chinese institutions. I anchored myself at a Chinese language school, among recent immigrants from China, where I taught English and learned Italian. Superficially, I was like them in that I relied on the Chinese language and community to navigate my new environment—but, at the same time, I had the English language and my American citizenship. And, unlike them, leisure time.

As a result, my friends were mostly Italian yoga moms and Chinese high schoolers. With the former, I drank Aperol spritzes at outdoor bars; the latter, bubble tea in Chinatown basement cafés, where teens played cards and billiards with cigarettes dangling from their mouths and knockoff Balenciaga on their feet. Other than the smoke that lingered over the pool tables, Chinatown was a transitory place. Most customers and delivery people stopped into restaurants for the ubiquitous four-euro “quick meal”/快餐 combo of three sides and a bowl of rice, leaving within minutes to go back to work in the factory district, Macrolotto 1.

Macrolotto 1 is dominated by Chinese fast-fashion factories, which operate seven days a week, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. I often biked through the quiet streets to meet my friend Sisi at her warehouse job, chatting as she stapled tags into dresses. Other times, I’d go there just to wander. Sometimes, people asked if I was lost. The only other pedestrians were workers stepping out for meals, browsing the few roadside vegetable sellers and food trucks. But the factory doors were always open, revealing colorful, kinetic scenes. In the front warehouse were racks and racks of seasonal clothing; in the back cutting room, humans and machines sliced sheets of textiles into silhouettes. Hearing the deliberate rip of cloth made it impossible to deny that the “Made in Italy” labels were deserved, that these garments were made, in the most visceral sense of the word, there.

Outside the factories were red lanterns, the occasional sleeping dog. When I needed a break from biking, I went to a restaurant. Unlike the ones in Chinatown, restaurants in Macrolotto 1 were generally large and ostentatious, designed for entertaining clients over extravagant meals. My favorite establishments (and the ones with free Wi-Fi) were housed in Food City—a food court above a casino, accessible by red-carpeted stairs crowned by bowing statues. The statues’ wide grins and squinted eyes recalled the work of Chinese neorealist sculptor Chen Wenling, but they were also available for purchase on made-in-china.com as “Modern Glossy Bowing Man Sculpture Red Fiberglass Greeting Sculptures.” The difference between high and commercial art, “authentic” and knockoff, is partly a matter of where we perceive its origins to be.

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Sometimes, living in the industrial, suburban city of Prato, I felt like I had regressed to my high school self. My days had little structure; I chatted with my American friends on the internet and I wrote a lot in my diary. In hindsight, I was depressed. Despite the grandeur, I saw little beauty in my surroundings: I lived in the historical center, but its medieval and Renaissance architecture felt off-putting and artificial. To me, the flourishes decorating the cosmetics and lingerie stores of many Italian centros-turned-tourist attractions evoked Las Vegas and Disneyland, even though these American versions were gaudy commercial replicas. Or maybe I just felt like a grubby pigeon, a Chinese American mismatch against the scenery.

I felt most at home outside of the city, on hikes, away from any community to which I didn’t belong. Prato is located by a river, at the bottom of a set of hills that begins as villas and wineries and narrows into a trail as you climb higher. But on my hikes, I’d never feel far from society—or from industry. I’d always hear power lines humming, cars honking, trains roaring, a man with an electrolarynx rasping, “You’re brave to be walking here alone.” At the top, looking at the red-shingled roofs through the smog, I’d think about San Jose and how everything, everywhere, looked the same.

The difference between “authentic” and knockoff is partly a matter of where we perceive its origins to be.

I met Li on a hike. It was rare to see another Chinese person in the hills; at first, we’d just stared at each other. But she had stabbed her finger with a sewing needle at her factory job, so she was on sick leave. It was so boring, she said. She had magenta hair (typical for Chinese aunties) and had been in Italy for a year. Before that, she had spent ten years in Paris, also working in clothing factories. When I told her I was American, she asked if I knew “Sa-mo-ya,” an island. She had worked there, too, the American Samoa.

When I asked if she knew of anywhere to eat, she took me to get some grocery-store croissants from her home, which was also the factory where she worked. Unlike the large factories of Macrolotto 1, this was a house at the bottom of the hills, a few miles away from the historical center and Chinatown. The house was nondescript except for the buzzing of sewing machines and the Gucci seat covers in the owner’s car outside. Inside the garage were five or six workers bent over sewing machines, surrounded by piles of cloth, spools of colorful thread, and bags of “Made in Italy” labels. The owner, too, worked the machines, but also patrolled.

The next time I saw Li she was back at work, and her magenta hair was dusted with white because they were sewing white dresses that day. I brought a bag of fruit for Lunar New Year and to thank her for the croissants, but getting her to accept them was a battle. It was near dinnertime, and again she invited me to eat. At a round table in the house’s back kitchen, everyone served themselves rice from a large rice cooker and ate stir-fried bean sprouts, tofu, chicken, and egg soup. Li and the others ate rapidly. I didn’t want to take too much of a meal I had essentially sprung myself on, but I also didn’t want to take so little I appeared impolite. Before I could decide, the others were already heading back to work.

“Stay!” Li exclaimed on her way out.

“Take your time,” others agreed.

“Eat more,” the owner said.

I hurried to finish my food and joined them back in the garage. The buzzing made it impossible to talk; I also didn’t want to distract them, wary of Li’s bandaged finger. When I got up to leave, Li commanded me to stay. She offered me a candy from a bag of pacifier-shaped gummies; I accepted one even though they seemed to highlight my childishness, my naive offering of fruit in exchange for her kindness. Then I took another, because it was tasty.

Looking at the sky, Li advised me to go home before it got dark.

“To get back, just go straight down the bike path, past the tunnel,” she said, as if I had been lost this entire time.

At the beginning of March, in my last week in Prato, Li texted me asking if I could buy her some masks, since I lived closer to the pharmacies in Chinatown.

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On January 29, 2020, my mom texted me: “In China there are >6k cases, 169 deaths. So far. Stay away from Chinatown.”

I brushed her off the way children brush off their immigrant mothers and frequented the area more. This was back when the righteous thing to do about Covid-19 was to go out more often, to bring your support and money to diasporic Chinese businesses. It was a way to push back against racist attitudes, like Italy’s right-wing party calling on the city council to cancel Lunar New Year’s celebrations because they “could attract numerous illegal immigrants.”

But my Chinese friends, with close ties to relatives suffering in China, began to refuse to go out at all. My Chinese school closed down, and more and more businesses did too—except for the factories, which were isolated anyway. The first case in Prato was an Italian woman traveling from northern Italy. Days afterward, my fellowship was terminated and I flew back to the United States.

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Before everyone was forced to leave, my fellowship gave us the option to stay if we chose. I thought of everything I had still to learn, the relationships I had yet to develop, and my longing to find a diasporic community across class and geography. But I realized that, during these times of uncertainty, I wanted to be home with my mom. I also felt a sort of guilt and helplessness about writing, that there was no point trying to describe things like pain, illness, and racism, which would continue to exist regardless of my analysis. Of course, in the face of peril, there is still beauty and collectivity to document and critiques to be made, but I couldn’t see what I had to add about this community that wasn’t mine.

I didn’t belong to the Chinese Italian community, and I belong to a global diasporic community in the basic sense that I, like one in five people in the world, am ethnically Chinese. But in Prato, I learned to stop searching for an authentic, fixed self, or an automatic kinship with those who might share my identity—especially in a globalized and capitalist world. Asian American suburbs feature European pastiche as Chinese migrants make “Made in Italy” garments; markers of identity are mixed and remixed in order to sell things, imagine a better future, and survive. And I am proud of the connections I made in Prato. Across power dynamics that implicated class and nationality, my friends and I did what we could.

Community, much like identity, is an abstract ideal. Appeals to the term can distract from the network of relationships that compose it, be they friendship and generosity, bootlegging and scamming, or various forms of exploitation. That none of these dynamics are guaranteed creates the opportunity for both resourcefulness and danger; we can be made anywhere, anytime, by anyone, by one another. When I think about my truncated experience in Prato, I feel a sense of incompleteness, but not because something is missing—rather, that there is so much to make out of what’s in between.