Double Handshake

I first met Roxana a month ago, on a stuffy Saturday afternoon at the Beijing Centro Cultural in Lima’s Lince district. Roxana stood out in the crowd of mostly teenagers and college students who were listening to two Peruvian students talk about their semester at Peking University. She and I got to talking – her Mandarin colored with a strong southern accent – and after an hour or more of listening to her stories, I joked that she had better get started writing her memoirs. She smiled and shook her head.

“If you don’t, then I’ll have to do it, but in English. In fact, I’ll invite you out for dinner and you can tell me your life story,” I said.

“It will take a lot longer than one day,” she replied.

Though Roxana was born in China’s southern Guangdong province, she traces her connection with Peru to her paternal grandfather. He moved to Lima as a young man, worked for a few years in a small shop in Chinatown and returned to China to raise his children there. “He wasn’t going to stay in Peru; he wanted them to have a Chinese education, speak Chinese.”

Roxana’s father had similar ideas, and family’s members didn’t stray far from home. In her late twenties, during the Cultural Revolution, Roxana worked as a middle school math teacher at the same school she had attended as a student fifteen years earlier. She found the work mindless, but there was nothing to be done about it. With China’s Reform and Opening policies taking hold in the late 1970s, Roxana, still unmarried in her 30s, started thinking about her grandfather and his time in Peru. In November 1981, she flew into Lima’s Jorge Chávez International Airport with her younger sister.

Roxana didn’t speak any Spanish, but through the city’s Chinatown network, she found work as a receptionist. And then, with a bit of the language under her belt, she got work at a Chinese newspaper office. Within three years, her Spanish language ability was good enough for her to help translate and edit a book written about Qi Gong, written by a martial arts instructor named Alex Li Chang, also from Guangdong, who had come to South America to teach and popularize Chinese martial arts. The book project went well: the book was published, and the two married in 1984.

Roxana and Alex had a son, and the couple had ten good years together. Alex often traveled around South America for martial arts competitions and demonstrations; Roxana, like her grandfather, found work a small shop in Chinatown and watched after their son. “I’m very lucky when it comes to business and work, but very unlucky when it comes to love.”

In 1994, while he was in Argentina, Alex went to the hospital with cerebral hemorrhaging, likely the culmination of years of head injuries. Roxana flew to Buenos Aires and found the situation was not as grave as she’d imagined. Alex flew back to Guangzhou for treatment and called her in Peru, telling her that he could barely recognize the city he’d left years ago. Roxana’s husband died in 1997.

She shows me his picture from the inside jacket of La Energia Vital y La Fuerza Interna – the book that brought them together. He’s thin with a flat-top, in a white gi, standing battle-ready. She slips the book back in its plastic sleeve and we both make intimations to leave the restaurant. She brightens and tells me that she’s started teaching Chinese to some Peruvian students on top of her six-day-a-week job at the shop. She’s tired after her twelve-hour shifts, of course, but she enjoys it. “It’s always good to be busy,” she says.

I nod and smile, thinking of the dozens of questions and clarifications I still have for her, but which we don’t have the time for now. We shake hands and walk outside. I head left, she right.

The always-admirable Danwei.org just published a good piece on the Chinese diaspora in Argentina, by guest writer Nancy Liu, a health researcher and NIH/Fogarty Scholar in Buenos Aires. Liu describes the scene in the city’s Barrio Chino (Chinatown) during the Olympics and goes on to write about the differences between the three waves of Chinese immigration to the country: The first arriving from Taiwan in the 1980s with dashed hopes of reaching the US, the second coming from Fujian province in the 1990s, and the third and most recent – educated, middle-class workers working two-year contracts for Chinese companies operating in Latin America.

While the first wave has largely acculturated after 20-some years in the Argentina, Liu notes that many arrivals from the second wave are still working to pay off their immigration debts. A few years ago, The New Yorker published a fantastic article by Patrick Radden Keefe on the underworld of human (largely Fujianese) trafficking to Chinatowns in the US in the 1990s. Both “Snakeheads” and Danwei’s “Chinese in Argentina” are well worth the time.