How modern-day Chinese migrants are making a new life in Italy

When Suzanne Ma embarked on a one-year Putonghua course at Tsinghua University in 2007, it piqued her interest about the diverse paths the Chinese diaspora had taken. The Canadian writer was fascinated to find many overseas-born Chinese like herself in the class, from North America as well as European nations such as France and Sweden. What struck her most at the time, however, was that the biggest contingent came from the Netherlands.

"There were about a dozen Chinese Dutch who came together and I had a stupid conversation with one of them and said that I didn't know there were so many Chinese in Holland as it's such a small country compared to Canada or the United States," Ma recalls. "I grew up knowing about the Chinese building the railways in Canada and the US, but didn't know much about the Chinese in Europe."

Ma, 31, not only struck up a friendship with that classmate, Marc Kuo, he eventually became her husband. Her curiosity also led her on a journey that has yielded a book, Meet Me in Venice. Although the title and dreamy cover art might suggest a novel, the book is about modern-day migrants from China trying to carve better lives for themselves in Italy.

As she and Kuo grew close, Ma was keen to find out more about how the Chinese wound up in the Netherlands. However, all he knew was that his own family came from Qingtian city in Zhejiang province, near Wenzhou, a city known for the resourcefulness and business acumen of its people.

Qingtian people, Ma later learned, were a similarly enterprising lot: its traders began travelling across Siberia to sell soapstone carvings in Europe about 300 years ago. Soapstone figurines became fashionable collectibles after a peddler presented a soapstone dragon to the Dutch queen, who admired the carving; and as word got back to Qingtian about demand for such items, more traders headed for the Netherlands.

Ma didn't embark on her book project, however, until a few years later after she completed a masters in journalism at Columbia University. One of the top students in her year, she won a fellowship that enabled her to travel and spend a month developing stories. That encouraged her to follow the examples of writers such as Leslie Chang ( Factory Girls) and Peter Hessler, who documented a changing China by following the lives of individuals over a period.