Letters to Strangers: To the Chinese-Italian store owner on Viale Bligny —

December 21, 2021: Milan, Italy

An everything store — for lack of a better word. In America, we’re so accustomed to 1-day shipping or popping into a Target to find any knickknack. In Italy, I've come to appreciate the quaintness of specialty shops, but they can be inconvenient and less affordable. There’s not quite a multi-branch, general merchandiser close by the Navigli area, where university students like me live. The exceptions are the independent everything stores run by immigrants, especially Chinese business owners like you. 

The one closest to me, KK, had quite literally anything you could ever need — suitcases, fake leaves, cowboy hats — I go there so often they probably recognize me by now. But this time, I wander into your shop further down Viale Bligny looking for string lights for my apartment’s mini Christmas tree. Miscellaneous objects lining the shelves blur together in their vastness, so I scan around for employees, likely your family members, ready to begin an interaction in Italian. You, a thin aging man with a slight bent in your back, take one glance at me, smile kindly, and ask, “Do you speak Chinese?”

I’m Chinese-American, yet I'm always shy to speak Chinese here, afraid some hesitation or tone in my speech would signal that I’m an outsider. I may be essentially unable to speak Italian too, but at least that’s something I’m not expected to be good at. 

But you see through me, so I stammer an affirmation and explain what I’m looking for. Within seconds, you bring the string lights to the checkout counter. Without asking, you silently open the container, unhook, and rip open a new pack of triple-A batteries to install them. Seeing as I completely forgot about batteries, I’m thankful you’re so proactive on my behalf. We don’t talk again but to say goodbye. As I walk out, I glance down at the receipt and notice you never charged me for the batteries. Over what is roughly a three euro difference, I am overcome with sentiment.

I was always fascinated by the Chinese enclave that had formed in Milan and endlessly interrogated my Chinese-Italian friends about their entrepreneurial backgrounds, their casual mastery of three languages, and the most authentic restaurants to patronize. Above all, they (and you) made me feel like I was home again, like there were people out there who were so different from me in some ways, but so indisputably familiar as Chinese people in the Western world. While I’m coddled by (endlessly grateful for) the Asian diaspora in the US, you exist here as a distinct minority group. You probably moved here later in life like most of the older Chinese population, a first-generation immigrant in the search of a better life. 

Your grandchildren are probably one of the only people of color in their classes. Your children may have trouble finding corporate jobs that will accept them, even if they received the education you didn’t. You’re facing racist comments, unwarranted looks, and the challenges of appearing like an outsider in Italy — all while running a fast-paced, demanding business that likely consumes your family’s lives. 

Maybe you simply forget to charge me. But maybe you look at me, you insist we speak Chinese, and you do me a small favor. You make me feel seen at an unknown, smaller price. I never got to thank you for it. 

Navigli Canals

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My inspiration for Letters to Strangers comes from the compilation of the same name by Colleen Kinder, who writes: 

“We spend so much of our lives in the company of people whose names we’ll never know, people we’ll never meet again. How rarely we honor them. How rarely we admit to ourselves the strange, unannounced ways they can lodge inside of us. 

These essays don’t say, I knew you. They say, I never really knew you. They confess their own partial gazes. They open up territories we didn’t know we had inside of us. They offer themselves as vessels for our least official ghosts.”

Memory is imperfect, romantic, and often a reflection of ourselves. Writing letters to strangers allows me to embrace this semi-reality.