A Chinese Restaurant in Venice: One Wenzhou Woman's Troubles, and Other Things

These days, few Chinese business owners still plan to open another Chinese restaurant on the island of Venice.

Less than 800 meters from the Rialto Bridge, Venice's landmark, there is a Chinese restaurant called Tianjin Restaurant.

Nobody comes to Venice and misses the Rialto Bridge. Some 4,000 boats pass beneath it every day, and more than half of all photographs of the canal are taken here. So it takes no ranking list and no app rating for people to find that Tianjin Restaurant down the alley — anyone giving directions will say, "It's got a big lantern out front, you can't miss it."

Under Venetian ordinance the alley is private property, which is why the restaurant is allowed to set out tables and chairs there. In summer, vines climb the wall and reach out over the tables. This year the heat brought the leaves down early; otherwise they would have stayed green until the end of October.

The owner, Wu Chunhua, has a wide mouth, close-set teeth and a quick tongue, and likes to wait tables herself. The restaurant once employed a Filipino waiter — nothing wrong with him, but he was let go in the end. Wu Chunhua prefers to do it herself. That is hardly unusual: "the woman waits tables, the man works the kitchen" is the standard arrangement at a Chinese restaurant.

She has a work uniform of sorts: hair set in fine waves and gathered over one shoulder, a silk red qipao down to her ankles, and a brisk, decisive way of moving through the room. Her husband comes out of the kitchen now and then — tall, and not one for talking.

At its peak the island of Venice had 12 Chinese restaurants; the number eventually settled at five. Over all these years, only three have stayed much the same. One that was bigger than Tianjin Restaurant, Hangzhou Lou, had two floors and has since closed. A few others are better known than Tianjin Restaurant — they sit closer to the center, a few minutes' walk from the station and impossible to miss.

Venice's high season starts at Easter in April (more than 125,000 visitors in a single day), peaks in July and August, and tails off by the end of October. The whole winter depends on Christmas and the February carnival. "There aren't many tourists in winter, but they spend more per meal." Some visitors from nearby countries come every other year, others every year. Statistics generally show that most visitors to the island come from nearby European countries, Germany above all.

Wu Chunhua sees it in finer detail than the statistics do.

"When this place first opened, most of the customers were Japanese. Lots of people from Hong Kong and Taiwan too. After those three economies went bad, we had fewer customers. Then one year — I forget which — suddenly, in the summer, there were a lot of Korean students. We'd open the door in the morning and the place would fill up. Koreans are straightforward, they don't ask you for a discount. They eat less, sure — one dish and one bowl of rice, or four students ordering one dish and four bowls of rice. But they don't waste food. One year we hosted Chinese officials from the consulate in Milan and the front room was booked out. After they left, the Korean customers said, 'Laura, they only took a few bites of each dish and stopped — can we have it?' It's better now, that doesn't happen anymore."

Tianjin Restaurant opened in 1992. In the first days of business Wu Chunhua put a sofa out in the alley so customers in line could sit while they waited for a table. Most Chinese restaurants had that kind of luck early on, even though what they served was mostly simple food — kung pao chicken, almond chicken, yu-xiang shredded pork, tomato and egg soup, dumplings and wontons. Local residents and foreign tourists alike found it new and good value. But over the years customers have seen more and grown harder to please.

Now, of course, Wu Chunhua wishes more Chinese tourists would come — walk themselves tired and think of a bite of Chinese food. But they are certainly fussier about taste, "and they like a bargain," she says. This year Chinese visitors seem especially tight on money. To stimulate the economy, Italy has opened up more cut-price tour packages from China.

"It used to be normal for a Chinese tour group in Venice to spend 10 euros a head on a meal. Now, with the promotional tours, the visitors who come don't care about the quality of the food or the room, they just want to shop, and we can barely get them to 5 or 6 euros." There is also "not willing to pay the seating fee" and "just wanting to come in and use the bathroom." Wu Chunhua can list every one of these. But on the review apps, the customers' complaints are just as long.

1

Wu Chunhua's family looks like locals. They would look more like locals with a boat of their own, but to them mooring a boat is like finding a parking space: the car is easy to buy, the space is the hard part.

She deals with them all the time, so Wu Chunhua knows every shopkeeper nearby. A few months ago the merchants along the canal by the Rialto Bridge decided to hold a run of joint meetings, to discuss having the government and the shops share the cost of putting the tables, chairs and awnings set out along the water into a single color, and of setting rules for where they could stand.

A meeting like that is best held somewhere roomy enough to sit down and talk it through. Wu Chunhua suggested the restaurant — outside high season the round table in the back room is usually empty.

This "round-table meeting" at Tianjin Restaurant seemed to matter. Wu Chunhua also heard the shopkeepers say that quite a few Chinese business owners wanted to rent the storefronts along the street by the Rialto Bridge, but the landlords appeared to have reached an understanding and were refusing to rent to Chinese tenants, worried they would "disrupt the market" — these shops, restaurants and souvenir stores alike, had all but standardized their prices. And they knew that Chinese business owners would not think twice about cutting prices to draw a crowd, particularly since Chinese business owners know Yiwu, where most of the souvenirs come from, better than anyone.

Chinese tourists, like Chinese business owners, love the Rialto Bridge. On its northeast side, the DFS duty-free store that opened in 2016 is now an important stop for some Chinese tour groups; three hours inside is no trouble for them. The T Square outside DFS is, on weekend nights, the most important gathering place for young people in Venice — loud enough to hear from two hundred meters away. In the daytime, some Chinese tourists like to sit in the square and eat something quick before moving on. Local rules take that second habit as damage to the character of Venice, and the #EnjoyRespectVenice campaign has banned sitting on the ground or picnicking in the square.

Some Chinese people living in Venice resent these bans. Wu Chunhua is not angry about them. She thinks that sometimes it is Chinese tourists who take the rules too lightly. "Just like those customers who leave a bad review without a second thought."

But a Fujianese business owner who runs an Italian restaurant near the Rialto Bridge thinks it is the Venetians who take the rules lightly. "These locals really get to me. The government says tables can't stick out too far into the street, but they come along and drag the tables out anyway, saying while they do it, 'It's fine, I'm Venetian'... Come on, I'm the one who pays the fine."

2

Wu Chunhua was born in Wenzhou, Zhejiang. By the 1970s three or four people in her family were already doing business in Italy. In the 1980s going abroad was not easy; it usually took a letter of introduction from overseas. That was no problem for Wu Chunhua. Once her mind was made up, she quit her job as a pharmacist at a state work unit and came.

In Rome, her older sister and brother-in-law's family had already found their footing, helped along by older overseas Chinese from Qingtian. In 1983 Wu Chunhua's first job was waiting tables at a Chinese restaurant in Rome. In those years the waitresses at Rome's Chinese restaurants usually wore a knee-length qipao, or else the blouse and skirt of a Republican-era schoolgirl. At three in the afternoon they could change into their own clothes and take nearly two hours off. Wu Chunhua learned Italian in Rome, and unlike many who go abroad to work she learned it from a proper textbook, with phonetics and grammar, taking dictation from local television dramas rather than picking up the sound of a few stock phrases. So she could read the local papers and follow what local people cared about.

Chinese restaurants in Rome kept multiplying in those years, and the competition was fierce: "Your pot stickers are 5, so mine are 4.8, then 4.5." The wave of emigration in the 1990s brought a great many new arrivals, and by the time Wu Chunhua was planning a restaurant of her own, as she remembers it, Rome already had more than 300 Chinese restaurants.

She decided to head north. She and her husband looked all over for the right storefront and settled on two candidates: one in Venice, one in Padua, a city nearby. Wu Chunhua nearly moved to Padua. There she would have worked mainly on local customers, pushing hard for regulars, and with her stubborn streak she might have done well enough. But in 2008 she would have been hit hard by SARS, along with a great many Chinese restaurants in Italy's small towns. Locals feared Chinese restaurants were a health risk, and the local papers pressed the point. On the island of Venice, with its heavy tourist traffic, the damage was far smaller.

Wu Chunhua preferred Venice anyway; she had come on weekends and seen the unbroken stream of tourists herself. Venice had another advantage over Rome — it is compact. Its area is less than a third of Rome's, and the main island is about a sixtieth of that again.

An Italian restaurant was up for transfer. Wu Chunhua took it over and hired a Chinese renovation crew to turn it into an old-school Chinese restaurant. Crews like that are not hard to find in Italy; they move between provinces and cities serving Chinese business owners wherever they are, so they know the standard look by heart: dark, classical wood paneling, an inner and an outer room divided by a round moon-gate opening, and built-in alcoves for the odd antique here and there. Wu Chunhua hung red lanterns at the entrance, which made the place easy to pick out.

A customer who came to Tianjin Restaurant in the 1990s remembers that alongside the lanterns there was also a poster for Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern, which won the Silver Lion at the 1991 Venice Film Festival.

Wu Chunhua remembers a day in 1992 when an older overseas Chinese man from Qingtian passed the mouth of the alley. He stopped, looked into the courtyard, and said to her: "Boss lady, run a shop here and you'll see every kind of person there is."

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Last year a Chinese business owner on the island sent her son to school in Padua, because the schools there were "more like the schools back home." She was afraid her son would turn out like the local young people in Venice, "hopelessly listless, always getting caught doing drugs in the bathroom."

But Wu Chunhua rather likes the local young people. She says they are cheerful and direct, less worried about face, and under less pressure. After 10 p.m. on Saturdays, once most of the customers have gone, she almost always has a standing table of young locals who come to eat together every week. One of them, back from his summer holiday, kissed the back of her hand: "We haven't seen each other in months."

For the main island of Venice, one of the biggest changes of recent years is that fewer and fewer locals live on it — down from 140,000 in the 1960s to 54,000 today. People who keep shops on the island have not chosen to make their homes here either. Many live in Mestre, an "ordinary city" ten minutes away by car, where living costs less — 1 million yuan buys an apartment of more than 100 square meters — and where there is none of the recurring high water or the damp that lasts all year. Once the shops on the island close at 8:30 p.m., they can drive home.

Wu Chunhua's family has always lived on the island and plans to go on doing so. Before 2003 they rented two different places there, and then she and her husband bought a home of their own. Her husband says it is an ordinary home; the wealthy Chinese businessman in the papers who bought a detached old house with a garden, "now that's real money." Their home is a 15-minute walk from the restaurant and, like the homes near St. Mark's Square, sits in Venice's first zone, where prices run 5,000 to 10,000 euros a square meter.

But Wu Chunhua points out another advantage of the houses near the Rialto Bridge: the ground is higher. That counts for a lot in Venice. Every October the high water comes, and in the low-lying parts of the city you need rain boots on a clear day. St. Mark's Square is the worst of it — more than once a gondola has been rowed right into the square. Set against that, the area around the Rialto Bridge does well; even this October's highest water in 52 years passed there without trouble.

Seven years ago the family bought a second house in the same area, which Wu Chunhua plans to give her son as a wedding home. "Young people today have no way of buying a home on their own."

4

Her son's wedding was held this October. Preparing for it, Wu Chunhua found she had forgotten how a traditional Chinese wedding invitation is supposed to be written. In her first ten years in Venice, because she and her husband had gone into debt to buy the storefront, they never took a holiday and did not go back to China once. When they finally did, Wenzhou had put up a lot of high-rises. "Can you imagine it? Come typhoon season, all you hear from those buildings is the windows banging away. It's frightening. The buildings in Venice have stood all this time, and they're so solid..."

Since then Wu Chunhua has spent a month a year in China. "But I don't dare eat the seafood back home." Back in Venice, she keeps up with the country through whatever domestic television drama is popular. Her favorites of the past couple of years are In the Name of the People and Story of Yanxi Palace.

Her son was born the year Tianjin Restaurant opened. He grew up in Venice, understands spoken Chinese, and does not know many characters. The summer before his last year of high school he took a holiday job at the island's only Gucci store, work that came easily to him; he did not go to university, and after finishing school became a full-time employee there. "Go to the Gucci store and you'll see him, he's good-looking. It's just that since he got engaged he's put on a bit of weight."

Where to hold the wedding was, for a while, a hard question. Padua, the city near Venice, has a fairly large Chinese banquet restaurant called Shanghai Lou, and Chinese people around Venice often pick it for a big dinner. Padua also has a good number of Chinese-run wedding companies, which handle "setting up the tables at the hotel so it looks the same as it would in China." Like the renovation crews of earlier years, they too will travel to work.

What Wu Chunhua knows best about Padua is chives; Tianjin Restaurant buys them from the countryside outside the city.

In the end she decided to hold the biggest ceremony she has ever arranged on the island of Venice itself. One of the most respectable hotels there for a wedding banquet is the Hilton Molino Stucky Venice, on the canal; a banquet there "costs double what it costs at the Shanghai restaurant," but is beyond argument "world class."

Wu Chunhua had reasons enough: "A person only marries once in a lifetime," and also, "Chinese people here want a bit of face too."

5

Wu Chunhua's latest worry is the bad reviews that keep turning up on the review apps.

"My friend called and said, look what they're writing about you online." As she said it, Tianjin Restaurant was playing music of the Harmony in the Family Brings Prosperity 《家和万事兴》 sort. She looked far from happy.

"They're plainly lying, saying 4 euros got them one wonton. It has to be because I charged them the seating fee. I know exactly who it was." Wu Chunhua picked one of the reviews and wrote back.

She has had troubles like this before, though she considers them all settled now.

At ten every morning, when she lays white cloths over the plastic tables and chairs in the courtyard, the sort you find at a street food stall, she no longer has to worry about the tenant on the second floor watering the plants at his window and soaking them. At first the water off the windowsill fell wherever it liked. "I'd look up and yell at him, and call the landlord. I said, water your plants however you like before ten, but once it's ten and my tables are set, you can't."

The landlord ducked it on the phone, saying "the servant is from Russia." That did not satisfy Wu Chunhua. "Venetians can be very high-handed. I don't let people push me around."

She also talked about how the alleys of Venice bend and narrow, sometimes to one person at a time. She once stood her ground in one. "He saw a Chinese face and said, this is a Venetian's path, you should back up. Why should I? I answered him in Italian: 'I'm Italian too. Besides, I'm already halfway through — and even if I were Chinese, I wouldn't give way to you.'"

Telling it, Wu Chunhua said that if the elderly local man had not picked the fight first, she would in fact have been happy to let him go first.

"My husband is always telling me not to argue with people. And I tell him, 'I don't let people push me around, I'm Italian. I'm in the right, I'm not afraid. Bring in a lawyer, whatever it takes, that's fine with me.'"

But her recent troubles have made one thing plain to her: what bothers her now is not what bothered her about Italians. Chinese customers may treat a Chinese restaurant differently from the way they treat an Italian one. "The minute they walk into a Chinese restaurant they act like they own the place."

Put the big label "Chinese" on something and certain arguments never end, and never get settled either. Some locals believe Chinese money comes from somewhere dubious — "they say it might be money laundering or drug money." Wu Chunhua points out that the only credible fact is this: Chinese shop owners have fiddled their books to dodge taxes they consider too high, so they are especially afraid of an audit, to the point that they will not report a theft to the police. When they need a large sum, "they'd rather take out a loan and keep the cash at home, and pay the loan back slowly."

These days, few Chinese business owners still plan to open another Chinese restaurant on the island of Venice. A Fujianese woman who runs an Italian restaurant looked uncomfortable when asked what she thought of Tianjin Restaurant, and finally said, "These days everyone probably prefers something newer."

Chinese business owners used to worry that a Western restaurant or a bar of theirs would not be accepted. Now they can simply take over a storefront and hire foreign chefs and staff, and no one need know who owns the place.

Wu Chunhua agrees. She and her husband never considered a business outside Chinese restaurants, but she now plans to bankroll her son in opening a bar. It costs a good deal more to do that now than it used to, and Wu Chunhua thinks the main reason is that Chinese people from Prato poured into Venice a few years ago with the money they had made in garment manufacturing, pushing the price of a bar from 300,000 or 400,000 euros to 500,000 or 600,000 — "and you still can't get a good spot."

Her son seems to have a head for business. He cannot read the Chinese on the review apps, but he seems to know what Chinese customers want. "My son said to me, if the other restaurants get good reviews just by handing out free dessert, we might as well hand out dessert too."

At the interviewee's request, Wu Chunhua is a pseudonym.

Cover image by Tara B, Damiano Baschiera on Unsplash