If you’re lucky, you’ll see the dragon swimming: ten bodies in black kimonos, the students, and one in red kimono, the teacher Qiuju Zhang aka “Margherita” swaying hypnotically like a monster emerging from the water to the notes a guzheng appears, a zither with two millennia and tradition transitions in the strings. If you’re not, you’ll still enjoy the sketch of lively neighborhood citizens sketching a yun shou on command, hands floating “like clouds” (well, almost…), a preliminary step for beginners. In the masterful version, or in the variant cacio e pepe, you will find yourself in the heart of Piazza Vittorio contemplating Tai Chi: a bit of dance and a bit of martial arts; and a testament to how fascinating China is and therefore (perhaps) dangerously contagious.
A hypothesis of spring blows early in the morning, here in Rome’s main square (which no Roman calls by a toponym “Vittorio Emanuele II”) and in the splendid gardens, named after the heroic policeman Nicola Calipari since 2006, again the center of gravity of esquiline. And also a metaphor for its melting pot: with the cedars of Lebanon mixed with the plane trees, the palm trees with the magnolias, just like in the Savoy district, planted on one of the seven hills of Rome, the last and penultimate mixture, coming and going and sometimes stopping , always swaying like tai chi clouds, but perhaps more akin to De André’s fantasies.
The migration of migrants
The expelled Neapolitans and Marches and Florentines, who landed in Termini after the war’s bombing raids, entangled themselves here, near the train station, with their nostalgic accents crammed into cardboard suitcases and then into huts that distorted the Umbertine dream, from which the quarter was born; and foreign migrants have taken their place since the 1980s, inheriting their degradation infiltrated by the Camorra: Eastern Europeans, Bengalis, Pakistanis, and then they, the Chinese, also equipped with suitcases, but this time full of money, bills, with which to carry themselves bought in off-market shops and inns, taverns, signs and entire streets replacing Jewish traders and forming a network since the 1990s that wraps the Esquiline in a cocoon, disturbing the old residents and turning the newspapers into columns in ” Roman Chinatown”. … one of the most complex transplants in the history of “us” and “them”, as old as Rome and her barbarians. We have to start from the cocoon, from the web, to get closer.
The words of silence
And use a keyword: guanxi, which means connectedness, relationship, do ut des and lasts forever. “If you don’t understand Guanxi, you don’t understand the Chinese,” warns Andrea Cotti, who studied them for years to actually invent his own fictional police officer, “The Chinese.” Of course, the Chinese say nothing about it. In the best sense, Guanxi is the engine of their economy: it’s teamwork. In the worst case, the glue of their mafia: they make clans. La Dia defines it as a “family solidarity band,” a support network useful for “raising the level of silence” by helping “to give the context a mafia-like connotation.” Major of the Carabinieri, Dino Cheng, formerly with the ROS as the first investigator of Chinese ethnicity (“although from Taiwan!”), offers me a curious parallel: “Hei Shou Dan means Black Hand Band”, he explains, same brand as ours Mafia in New York in the early 20th century. Misery and horror: In certain ways we all look the same, beyond pigmentation. Ancient investigations such as “New Era” reconstructed the path of would-be slaves: Russia, Jordan, Turkey, Greece, with Japanese and Korean passports, for which no EU visa is required (“yellow ones are all the same”), because back then they worked here for years in vain in some warehouse to pay off the debt to the traffickers. In the recent investigation of the Carabinieri, a penitent emerged, perhaps the first (a sign of… integration?) like He Jiang Dong, who sent about fifty Shaboo drug dealers and pimps to jail between Prato and the eastern suburbs of Rome: The Bosses, two very tough women, Ayng, known as ‘Aquila’, and Huang, known as ‘Lulù’, gave their compatriots numbers to sell to (Chinese) customers in a discotheque in Torrenova.
Seventeen thousand inhabitants
In short, human trafficking, triads, slavery. Sure, but not only. The Chinese esquiline is also inventiveness, solidarity, sacrifice. Strolling under its arcades, where the many clochards begin to fold the covers to drag themselves into the new day, between idioms and aromas, the first Chinese proof is ambivalence: without disturbing yin and yang, everything here is two Opposites. This applies to Guanxi. And it applies to miantzi, honor or, conversely, loss of face: it is the mechanism that circulates black money and guarantees debt (no one wants to lose face); the underground bank “which has always existed” moves because the Chinese, whether big robbers or little rascals, snub the transfer of money: so that from time to time the police confiscate a million or two euros in black on the Piazza Dante from some hotels on the Esquiline to China in coffee packets to be recycled and perhaps brought back here as a business. But it is the same mechanism that funded the generation that came from Wenzhou (Chinese version of our industrious Northeast), the first “heroes” who struggled to the point of exhaustion so that the second might have a chance: Pioneers. They say Mayor Rutelli’s flight to Beijing on January 10, 1999 paved the way for them and encouraged Chinese investment in the capital, almost a fad. Since then, however, much has changed for a community of seventeen thousand inhabitants here in the city, out of 300,000 throughout Italy. “The rich Chinese are leaving,” they say.
Lots of prejudice
Covid and now the war have turned the Silk Roads into winding alleys and brought mutual distrust to the surface again. “Your politicians are mad at us,” Hu Lanbo, author and editor of “China in Italy,” tells me: “There are so many prejudices, in recent years the cold war between America and China has been palpable, and you follow America.” This feeling is also confirmed to me by an outside source, Federico Masini, sinologist, professor at the Sapienza and soul of the Confucius Institute in Rome: “The climate compared to ten years ago has reversed when you she describes relations with the Chinese as easily as an agent of influence. But we create culture, we are not collaborators».
Few complaints
The wind that is blowing is also partly due to self-exclusion. “They settle everything among themselves. Almost one in two hundred complaints comes from a Chinese,” says Marco Sangiovanni, head of the police station in via Petrarca. The Chinese don’t cause trouble, but they don’t trust them, the language gap is a stigma; the first generation, arriving as adults, speaks an almost caricatured Italian. The gap is clearly visible between the stalls of the former medic barracks, where the once-quaint but degrading open-air market was relocated towards Piazza Vittorio in 2001. I am accompanied by Giacomo Rech, a colleague who loves China (“at first sight, at the age of twelve, he saw a book of poetry from the Tang Dynasty”), who created the “Green T” with his ex-wife, Jiang Yan, a restaurant manager. Chinese woman behind the pantheon. He comes once a week to pick Peking cabbage, Niu Pan turnips and tiger lily buds. Qin Jyn serves us at the counter, has been here for twenty-one years, she says and waves. Can’t explain more. But he has an impressive son, Ylang, 33, who has been with us since fifth grade and is now a consultant at Ktmg, a Singapore-based company. Slight Roman accent, Ylang giggles: «Discrimination? Naahh, I’ve never felt anything like this on my skin! I admit, studying helped me. And then, come on, there are a lot of racist Chinese too». Yudong, aka “Lorenzo”, 35, partner and sommelier at Dezhuang Hot Pot on Via San Vito, feels like he is a “citizen of the planet” having attended school and university here. He is a Protestant Christian, the worship hall is a stone’s throw away: “Our friends are Russian and Ukrainian friends. Take us and the Japanese: Well, the world is one family, we can’t live off history alone,” he meditates, voicing old grudges.
The ‘trench’ of Covid
But in the streets of the district that branches off from Piazza Vittorio, distances and clichés are clearly perceptible. Covid has really dug a ditch, not just a metaphorical one. If you look for the herb shop on Via Buonarroti, you will hardly understand that it is behind a chair that stands in the doorway as a barrier. Here, He Jun, 58, has only served customers at the door “since the pandemic”. He is a Chinese pharmacist for Chinese, but apparently denies that he sells medicines: “Only herbal teas!”. He has stills in the back room: “I can make you an herbal tea that will take the Covid out of you in five days,” he promises. He speaks bad Italian “because I speak very little to you”. An outsider, here since 1999. Bitter. The son “had problems” at school in the district, as soon as he grew up he left Italy. And he feels under pressure: “Nineteen checks in three months: police, finances, Nas, many huh?”.
generational leap
The streets of the Sunburst are a succession of shops seemingly without customers, with an almost silent Chinese saleswoman amidst shoes, panties, mannequins, shoddy knick-knacks, very real fakes. It is said that the only function of empty stores is recycling. In reality these are showrooms: the Chinese sell wholesale and here show samples of what they keep in the sheds on Via Dell’Omo or in the Fosso di Tor Tre Teste on the eastern outskirts, where dealers from Caserta, Naples, Cassino and where you can still find a few workers sleeping in the back (however, to discover twenty or thirty in huts of a few square meters you have to go to the Filipinos, who are now at the bottom of the social pyramid). Scattered like mushrooms in the sun’s rays are the massage centers, at least twenty on the Esquiline, all closed in theory, in practice unassailable or almost closed. In Via Marsala they freed three forty-year-old pro tempore slaves (here to pay the usual debts in China): they slept in the basement and all said they were working alone to relieve the madam. At the top of the chain there are some Italians who deal with advertising on sites: the integration often works better among rogues.
The return home
Luo Peixi (“Luciano”), owner of the Pacific Trade supermarket on Via Principe Eugenio, instead debunks the theory about the Chinese “who never die” (in the racist sense that the bodies are disposed of who knows how and the documents are used to new Chinese who are their equal). In reality, it is again about the “pioneers” and the foreignness to Italy. When an elderly Chinese feels they have finished their slave labor with us, they go back to China to die. “My father-in-law started this shop and has now gone home,” says Luo, imagining something different. “At 80? Maybe I’m here, maybe in America!†he laughs. The generational leap is very strong. Even the Chinese regime must have feared this when it sent its police officers here to check on its compatriots under the guise of cultural exchange. “They went straight and aimed at certain names and certain situations,” one investigator tells me. After Covid they seem to have evaporated. Good for them, they’d end up like Flaiano’s Martians. In the afternoon, the Calipari Gardens come alive with two or three practice games and finally the neighborhood kids come together, colorful but with a single idiom: “Come on, let’s get a ball!”. Ever since the Chinese began to strum the guzheng, Rome has adopted the children of the world: and, before Cives, made them its own children.