Chinese struggle to feel at ease in their adopted homelands

When Father Fransec Espinar managed a few, faltering words of Putonghua, it was a watershed for the congregation of about 70 gathered before him in Barcelona's Sant Joan Baptista church. His basic Chinese was a key step in the Spanish community's two-year efforts to reach out to the growing numbers of mainland Chinese immigrants in northeastern Spain - mirroring a trend that is taking place across Europe. Father Espinar, a Spanish native, managed to deliver the whole mass in Putonghua. 'It took two years' work, but now the [mainland] Chinese are an essential part of our community. Even though they only just speak Spanish, I have learnt a few words of Mandarin. We have learnt to get over language barriers,' he said. But a look at the reception these new Chinese arrivals to Europe are getting reveals a complex and contradictory picture; it includes hostility, suspicion and on the other hand a welcoming approach in some corners of the continent. The example of the church in Barcelona is a positive one. In Spain, the Chinese community has become the fastest growing immigrant group, with a population of 100,000, according to figures for 2006 from the Spanish national statistics institute. Although more mainland Chinese are coming to countries such as Spain, it does not mean that - unlike the parishioners of Sant Joan Baptista - they have been absorbed into Spanish society. 'A fundamental problem for us is the language and adapting to the customs, which make it extraordinarily difficult for us to understand the life here,' said Song Hua Xu, president of the Chinese Association in Spain. 'We are trying to do something about this by paying for one college of 600 Chinese children to have Spanish lessons as well as some for adults.' The friction wrought by large Chinese communities finding a foothold in Europe became evident in April, when Italians staged rowdy demonstrations against the Chinese community in Milan. The protest was supposedly sparked by metal pushcarts used for generations by Chinese clothing businesses to ferry huge quantities of materials. Beneath complaints about the risks to children and old people, was a simmering clash of cultures that had been building for months. But some say it has become easier in the past five years for mainland Chinese to move to Milan and other parts of Europe, and the immigrant communities have grown. In Milan, the official Chinese population, who are mostly from Wenzhou (), is 13,000, but the real figure could be double that, say officials. Arturo Lanzani, an expert in urban planning at the Milan Politecnico, said: 'These people on the street are second-generation Chinese who are totally integrated and speak Italian. They have an awareness that they haven't abandoned a poor country. They are proud. They are cosmopolitan Chinese with a strong double identity.' Milan is not an isolated case. Ironically, the same thing happened in Barcelona weeks later, when local businesses picketed the Chinese district, complaining that they were stealing their trade. Instead of confronting the Spaniards, the Chinese closed down for a day. In Britain, Sarah Yeh is the founder of the website dimsum.com for British Chinese - the second generation sons and daughters of immigrants to the country she calls home. Yeh, 33, whose first language is English but who also speaks Cantonese, has some distant family ties with Hong Kong, which her parents left more than 30 years ago. She said that in Britain there was prejudice against the 'illegal immigrant' Chinese, such as the 58 stowaways who suffocated to death in the back of a lorry in Dover in 2000 and the 19 cockle-pickers who drowned in Morecambe Bay, Lancashire, in 2004. 'China was also blamed for the foot and mouth crisis in Britain and we are seen in stereotypical ways as people who run takeaways,' she said. 'But people of my generation have left the typical family business and do different things. We set up the website to give people a positive image of themselves.' Yeh fears there will be a backlash against the younger generation of Chinese people who were born in their adoptive countries and have moved away from the traditional image of the family-run firm. 'There will always be a backlash. It is happening here already with Eastern Europeans because they are not from the same background. It may happen with us because of the higher profile of China now.' A report in 2005 called Racial Attacks on Chinese People, by the monitoring group Min Quan, detailed attacks on Chinese people in Britain, from racial harassment to assaults. One man named Mi Gao Huang Chen was killed in Wigan, Lancashire. The case did not make the headlines and his partner was charged with assault for defending herself against his attackers. Min Quan organiser Jabez Lam said the group was examining 25 attacks on 250,000 Chinese in Britain. Dr Pierre Piquart, an expert on China at the University of Paris VIII, said part of the problem was that Europeans would like to impose their own model of western democratic life on China and its diaspora. 'Europeans are divided; the dynamic of the European Chinese is appealing, but at the same time there is a form of jealousy from Europeans. Chinese people work hard, but they do not show off their money with flash cars. They respect the rules of the communities they live in.' Dr Piquart said that in European countries where there were large Chinese immigrant populations, such as France, Britain, Holland, Spain and Italy, they were respected, despite what he called 'small jealousies'. In Spain, Lei Lei and Sergio Guitierrez are perhaps an example of the most obvious way Chinese mainland immigrants have integrated: marry the locals. Sergio was the boy next door, a neighbour of Lei Lei's family, who arrived in Barcelona 19 years ago from Guizhou province . The couple got to know each family's traditions, so when they married there was no great culture shock. Sergio has always been fascinated by China and spent two years there as a language student. But marrying a Spaniard still meant breaking a cultural barrier for Lei Lei. 'My parents, like many Chinese parents, did not want me to go out with a Spaniard. Friends had had bad experiences. But when I said we were going to get married, there was no problem,' she said. Like Sarah Yeh in Britain, Lei Lei did not go into the family restaurant business, but obtained a masters degree from the Esade, one of Europe's best business schools. Yet, she said there were still many barriers to overcome for mainland immigrants to become Europeans. She said: 'I think it will be many years before the immigrants fully integrate here.'