Using the few words of English she has learned, Fu Lihua explains she has found happiness in her new life. 'We make good work here in Romania,' she said, her face lighting up in a smile.
Ms Fu, 32, is one of a small army of Chinese workers arriving in Bacau, a small town in northeast Romania.
The poor Eastern European backwater shares nothing of the glitz of Shanghai or Beijing. Yet for Ms Fu and the other members of the all-female Chinese workforce, it offers one thing which makes their apparently miserable life bearable: they are paid many times the rate they would get at home. For Ms Fu that salary equates to almost 1,600 lei (HK$450) each week.
The women, none of whom speaks a word of Romanian, earn their wages sewing fake Real Madrid and Arsenal football shirts that are sold in Western Europe.
Across Romania and other Eastern European countries like Poland and Latvia, they are typical of the rising Chinese workforce chasing a new life in Europe that involves better pay and, in some cases, the guarantee of legal status.
It is impossible to ascertain accurately the number of Chinese people in Eastern Europe because, in many cases, they arrived illegally or have not registered with authorities.
'Chinese migration to Eastern Europe has proven to be one of the predictive trends in Europe as a whole,' said Pal Nyiri, who researched the phenomenon for the International Organisation for Migration. 'A new flow of entrepreneurial migrants, who often had no connection to the historical chains of migration to Western Europe, found it possible and profitable to work and settle on the European periphery.'