MEET ME IN VENICE: An Immigrant's Journey from the Far East to the Faraway West

A real life Girl in Translation with an Italian twist, Meet Me in Venice
explores the current flood of Chinese immigrants to the West through the
extraordinary story of Ye Pei, a Chinese teenager who sets off to Venice to
reunite with her mother, the woman who left her family for Italy when Ye
Pei was just a child.

When Ye Pei dreamed of Venice as a girl, she imagined a magical floating city of canals and gondola rides. And she imagined her mother, successful in her new life and eager to embrace the daughter she had never forgotten. But when Ye Pei arrives in Italy, she learns her mother works on a farm over a 150 miles from the city. Her only connection, a meanspirited Chinese auntie who her mother implores to help Ye Pei, puts Ye Pei to work as a barback in a small town café. Rather than giving up and returning to China, Ye Pei takes on a grueling schedule in the café, and resolves to save enough money to provide her family with a better future. Meet Me in Venice is the inspiring story of a sixteen year old girl's determined search for la dolce vita in a strange and foreign land. A groundbreaking work of journalism, Meet Me in Venice is the first book to provide a personal, intimate account of Chinese individuals in the act of migration. Recipient of Columbia University School of Journalism's Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship, Ma conducted years of research both in China and across Europe to better understand the complexity of the immigrant dream: why welleducated Chinese people choose to immigrate to nations where they endure hardship, suspicion, manual labor and separation from their loved ones. Today all eyes are on China and its explosive economic growth. With the rise of the Chinese middle class, Chinese communities around the world are growing in size and prosperity, a development many westerners find unsettling, and even threatening. Meet Me in Venice is essential reading for those eager to understand modern China and the enormous impact Chinese emigrants are making all around the world. Suzanne Ma's career in journalism has taken her from Ottawa to New York to Hong Kong and mainland China. Her stories have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Associated Press, and Salon, among others. Much of her work focuses on the Chinese immigrant experience. Born in Toronto, Canada, Suzanne Ma was raised by immigrant parents who forced her to attend Chinese school every Saturday morning. Those Chinese lessons paid off when Ma met her husband while studying abroad in Beijing. His family's hometown is also Ye Pei's, and the town's remarkable 300year history of emigration inspired this book.