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Travels
Across Europe, in search of one Chinese community
I’m about to embark on a two-month research trip to Europe where I’ll be connecting with Qingtian emigrants and communities in six different countries. First stop: The Netherlands.
Italian town bans “ethnic” food
Some Italians are saying ‘no’ to kebabs, Chinese takeout and sushi as they “struggle to hold onto centuries-old culinary traditions in the face of globalisation and immigration.”
Please help support my book project!!
I’m going on a road trip. But it’s not just any road trip. I am setting off across Europe to meet Chinese migrants in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Hungary. But I need your help!!
Qingtian
Qingtian 青田 is mountainous county in Zhejiang 浙江 Province, 300 miles south of Shanghai. For more than 200 years, its people have sought to escape a life of wretched poverty. So they went out. Today, more than 200,000 people – amounting to half of Qingtian’s current population – live in more than 120 countries around the world.
It’s red. It’s juicy. Introducing the Yang-mei.
There’s a sort of obsession going about town. It’s June in Qingtian, on the south-east coast of China, and everyone is talking about yang-mei 杨梅: a round, sweet, dimpled fruit that ripens to a deep shade of brilliant red.
Driving in China (and why I’ll never do it)
Driving in China is like going on a suicide mission. Every day, I am at the mercy of audacious taxi drivers and reckless bus drivers. Some might call them valiant; I call them foolhardy. Most in China accept it as ‘normal.’ But the fact is these dare devils put our lives at risk every day.
A visit to a Wenzhou shoe factory
By the time we arrived at a quarter past 12, the factory had already produced nearly 900 pairs of shoes. On the third floor of the factory there were at least 60 people spread out across the assembly line that day, the rhythm and energy in the room focused on piecing together a white, knotted sling-back flat sandal. The Jade Bamboo shoe factory, one of thousands in the eastern coastal city of Wenzhou, produced women’s footwear for export all around the world, from Tanzania to Paris to the Ukraine.